to answer in a long time.
“Ruthie, do you want to live?”
I nod, bug eyes still wide and empty. I’m surprised I still know how.
“Then, babe, you need to get out of bed and begin. You can lie there and hurt or you can live your life and hurt. You can love people and experience things and hurt at the same time.”
They decide to let me stay, to let me try to get better at home. I promise them that I’ll start making changes, weaning myself off the drugs, if they give me another chance. I don’t know if it’s remotely possible, but I commit to it and they don’t bring it up again. That night, I take my anxiety medicine and I sleep for the first time in twenty-one days. Dreams come: I’m six years old, dancing across the wide green lawn, smacking jade-colored beetles as I twirl, letting the sun be my stage light. My foot hits a dusty hill and the red ants come. They sink their teeth into me. There are dozens. I swat them away and I keep on dancing.
15 Operation Sunset
In life, sometimes we make lists of things. We make them so that we don’t forget, so that we know what it is we’re supposed to be doing. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I forget how many times a day to brush my teeth and when people eat lunch and what to do in the blocks of time stuck between meals. So I source the information of what a regular day entails from the life happening around me at Lile and Lib’s. Showers are in the morning, lunch occurs around noon, the cleaning up of books and toys falls in the evening. I write everything down in a list and I cling to it just like my mom clings to hers. I call it “Day”:
8:00 a.m. Get out of bed. Do NOT get back in until it’s dark outside.
8:05 a.m. Brush teeth.
8:10 a.m. Make bed.
8:15 a.m. Toast
It’s 8 a.m. I’m four minutes into weaning myself off the drugs and I have felt every second go by. The sun finds its way through the curtains and into the margins of my little Walgreens notebook, the kind that divides your life with flimsy plastic partitions. I pick it up from the bedside, stare at my schedule, and the warmth from outside waves at me through the window. It’s time to begin.
The rest of the house is awake. Rubbery kid shoes squeak on the floor and water rushes through the pipes. The door opens and closes, letting hot breaths of Louisiana air whoosh their way inside. Lile, Lib, and the wild little boys they made all know what to do with a chunk of morning, but I’m so nervous about surviving the time between tasks that I can hardly stomach the sound of them all living so expertly. To me, it all looks impossible, like acrobatics. Little Lile’s Tiger clock ticks at me while I walk to the bathroom and wait by the sink until exactly 8:05 a.m. I squish a blue bar of goo onto my toothbrush.
Libby is in the kitchen when I walk out. Lile has taken the older boys to school and Parks is singing a song to a giant tower of foam blocks, swinging his torso from side to side. As soon as he sees me he drops his gaze, mumbles to himself, and latches onto the edge of the couch.
He’s afraid of me.
Libby swats him playfully with an old, lumpy pillow and he giggles. It’s probably not easy having a crazy person live in your house, but Libby acts like she’s proud to have me wandering her halls in my sweatpants, thrilled to see me slowly coming back to life. I’m somehow never in her way as she flits around the room with the phone tucked between her shoulder and her chin, gossiping with her friend Sunny from BootyBarre class, preparing snacks for the boys, and mopping up a mess that was probably never even there. I’m another hand to hold in a house full of needy, sticky fingers, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She pours me juice and kisses my cheek, and when I tell her that I slept for five whole hours, she hugs me and tells me she’s taking me for lunch to celebrate. My teeth are covered in moss and I haven’t worn pants without a drawstring since I arrived, but still, she’s