My Absolute Darling

“Zaki thinks I should go,” Turtle tells Anna, and Anna laughs and then sets her bowl down exhaustedly and lies there as if unable to get up.

“I am so tired,” Anna says. Then she looks at Turtle. “You really want to go?”

“I want to try,” Turtle says.

“All right,” Anna says.

Turtle waits beside her in the small redwood kitchen, the two of them sitting on the floor, Anna with her wine, Turtle still with her bowl, and neither of them rises. They just wait, taking each other
in.

“Why not fight for it?” Turtle says.

“I just—” Anna begins delicately.

“I want to go,” Turtle says.

“Why?” Anna says. “You don’t have to do this. Turtle, you shouldn’t do this.”

“I don’t care. I want to try.”

“Jacob will be there,” Anna says warningly.

“I know.”

“Turtle,” Anna says, “you’ll get there.”

“Will I?”

“I think so,” Anna says.

“I could, though, right?” Turtle says. “I could go, and if it was too much, I could wait in the car.”

“I don’t think waiting in the car is a good idea, Turtle. I think if you go and it’s bad—I don’t think you’re going to want to wait in a dark car outside a party. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. That might be triggering.”

“I know,” Turtle says.

“Another day,” Anna says.

“Another day,” Turtle says, and nods.

Turtle says, “If I went to the dance, though, and I couldn’t do it, I could just get your keys and go wait in the car.”

Turtle says, “If I wanted to go to the dance, could I?”

Anna’s face quirks as if trying out a number of expressions and she says, “Yeah, I guess you could if you wanted to. But, Turtle—”

Turtle says, “I know.”

“The music—” Anna says.

“Yeah.”

“It’s gonna be really loud.”

“You’re right.”

Turtle just wants the garden to work. She gave Jacob a year. They’d moved her from the ICU to a children’s surgical unit, and when the swelling in her damaged vocal cords subsided, she told him in her harsh rasp of a voice that she didn’t want to see him for a year. She didn’t want him to see her broken and useless, gutted, lying in her hospital gown draining septic filth out through long, clear, bundled tubes into graduated plastic bags and collection chambers. She didn’t want to yield to circumstance. She didn’t want to talk to him or see him or think about him, and after a year he could come back, and if you picked the homecoming dance as your anniversary, today was a year, and if you picked
the calendar date, he had two days, and if you picked the date she’d had the conversation with him—he had longer yet, and she wishes she’d been more specific, but it hadn’t felt right, exactly, to hammer out the details. It doesn’t matter, though, because she is sure that he will not come, and if you really wondered if people were for real when they said that you would be all right, the proof would be if Jacob came back, if Jacob thought you were going to be all right, and more than needing him to come back, she needs his faith in her.

“I don’t know what to do,” Turtle says. She is beginning to cry and flushes with annoyance. Anything can make her cry now. A week ago, she’d been in the living room doing her independent study reading when Anna screamed from the shower. The blood had drained out of Turtle, run out of her face and out of her guts and down to her feet and left her cold and, somehow, with no memory of crossing the intervening space, Turtle had been at the door and the door had been locked, and Anna had yelled from the other side, “Stop! Turtle, it’s fine! It’s fine!” and Turtle had stepped back and thought, you have to get through this door, and the doorjamb tore away and then she was in the steam-filled bathroom, Anna leaning around the shower curtain saying, “Turtle, it was just a spider. It was just a spider, it startled me,” and Turtle had leaned back against the wall and cried then, too, her heart hammering and hammering, and Anna had come out of the shower, dripping everywhere, and she’d knelt down beside Turtle and put her head against Turtle’s head and said over and over again, “It’s okay, Turtle. It’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” and Turtle had been unable to say anything, couldn’t even say what she was worried about, had wanted to
say, I know, I know nobody’s going to hurt me, but she’d been unable to stop crying.

Turtle smiles for her, also tiredly, and opens the back door and takes out a bankers box of papers. Tonight is the homecoming dance, almost the one-year anniversary of the shooting, and Turtle knows Mendocino will be filled with high school students getting ready. Anna tilts her head toward the house, and they go on together. In the front yard, there is a deck with a small outdoor shower and an awning where surfboards and kayaks lean up
against the wall. Turtle puts the bankers box on her hip and opens the front door for Anna, and then carries the box in through the living room with its big south-facing windows and into the office.

She just wants the garden to work. She just wants to build a garden and water it and have
everything grow and everything stay alive and she does not want to feel besieged. She wants a solution that feels like a solution, a solution that will stick. This is all she wants. She wants garden beds in an unfenced sunny plot near the cottage and she would like to plant peas, squash, green beans, garlic, onions, potatoes, lettuce, and artichokes.

She and Ted met every Tuesday from 8:00 until 9:00, but their conversations often went on much longer. Turtle was careful to leave before 11:30, because Jacob often came over at lunch to work on his Independent Study Attic Greek, and she did not want to meet him and she didn’t
want him to see her. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, couldn’t articulate it and couldn’t think about it, not closely, and still the thought of seeing him was unbearable, the thought of all she could lose, unbearable, because she felt she had lost him already, had lost so much and wouldn’t know what it would look like for Jacob to keep his faith in her, and she thinks, to see Jacob would just make it sure, how much she had lost.