The Down Below – Part II
I stood, swaying back and forth in the darkness. I felt the world move on its axis – I felt as if I had vertigo. The letter in my hands felt hot and sticky and my stomach, which had been deprived of real sustenance since the fire, suddenly filled again with the nausea of fear. How did this happen, I asked myself? Had I been so blind as to suspect that I had escaped the man in the black suit?
I remember when I was twelve and my mother brought me to see a psychic. My sister had died. The psychic was, apparently, to help us say one last goodbye. We had driven out of the city to find her – she lived in an old tenement building with red shutters and dark, broken-brick siding. My mother led me by the hand, clenching her fist into mine, the entire span of the parking lot. I hadn't wanted to go – I hated anything that had to do with the supernatural. The fact that someone could possibly see into my future other than me had seriously unnerved me.
We approached the door. A sign containing the words “Psychic Readings – Inquire Within” had been duck taped to the door. “This looks bad, Mom. This place is kind of scary,” I said, staring at the dirty carpets and water-stains covering the walls.
“Tina, i'm here. It will be fine,” my mother cooed, “You can sit in the waiting room if you want.”
I saw the room and had no intention of leaving my mother's side. It was a basic living room set – two floral upholstered couches, an uncomfortable looking loveseat, and a coffee table with an ashtray full of cigarettes. It was all of those things and more – it was disgusting. The walls were no better – some of the wallpaper looked as if it had been scratched off and there were, like the hallway walls, water marks scattered randomly throughout the room.
As we closed the front door, a woman, probably around forty years old, slipped out of a room in the corner of the living room. She wore a low cut, flowy polyester shirt and a pair of leggings – I thought that it was odd a psychic would wear such casual clothes. She smiled at us, her eyes wrinkling. “Welcome to my studio. I assume you are here for a reading?”
My mother and I stared at her, unable to speak for a moment. The woman's smile seemed to slide away as my mother finally blurted out “Yes, hello, my name is Madame Percy. I am a psychic.”
“Madame, yes. Well, I am Liesel Delecroix and this is my daughter Christina.” she said, pulling our arms up in a swing. The words left her lips cautiously, as if they were afraid to come out in open air. My mother never liked unfamiliar situations.
followed her from living room into her study. I supposed this is where she did her divination. The lighting was dim and red, pulling a crimson blanket over the room. The walls were lined posters of unicorns, fairies, and dragons; I remembered that the weird girls at school loves all three of those things. Finally, we sat ata round, oak wood table in the middle of the room. The seats were uncomfortable folding chairs which, when I sat down, proved to be unstable.
Madame Percy sat down gracefully across from us, “Ready to begin?”
My mother looked over at me – my face read skeptically. “She can read cards too, you know – you can just do that and go into the other room if you don’t want to hear about....”
She trailed off. Saying her name was still difficult.
I nodded slowly, peering over at the psychic’s pleasant face. “How the hell is she so happy?” I wondered, “She lives in a really crappy apartment.”
“I sure can, Christina. A simple one maybe?” She looked over at my mom who shot her a quick approving smile. Percy nodded, stood up, and walked over to an armoire near the back of the room. From the top drawer she pulled a deck of cards. They were longer than the playing cards I had seen and, as she walked back to the table, I saw little complex pictures on them.
“What I want you to do is pick a card. Any card in the deck. Just look them over.”
Percy handed me the cards. I turned the deck over and looked at the pictures – one by one. They all seemed to have a theme – they were either named cards, or pictures with various scenes of people using either a pentacle, a cup, a sword, or what looked like a big stick, but I think were wands.
I settled on a card called The Fool. I had seen a performance of As You Like It by Shakespeare in my literature class and I loved Touchstone.
She smiled gently. “You like to jump off cliffs, don’t you?”
I didn’t understand. “You like new things. You will go where the wind takes you. You don’t hold back?”
I didn’t understand, then.
I put the note in my bra. I turned; busted through the door. I couldn't think quite straight and the buzzing from my ears had me falling into some kind of trance. I could feel my feet on dirt, feet over trash and I could hear, from the distance, a little bird. It was chirping and getting louder and more high pitched and so I stopped and covered my ears. The chirping got closer and closer and I turned: my eyes were fuzzy and so the thing, getting close to me, I couldn't see it right. The darkness all around me engulfed the edges of it – I couldn't see the figure but for the faint angles of light bounding off him, flowing from the makeshift streetlamps. It was almost to me when the buzzing started to slowly; I could hardly hear it anymore in seconds as the bird came closer and put its hands around me. I screamed as it held me, “Terra!” it yelled. I looked up and focused my eyes. It was David. It wasn't a bird at all. It wasn't anyone who sounded like a bird either - “Terra, you're okay, you're alright.,” he said softly.
My body relaxed into his hold. I felt my senses return to me – I was woozy for a moment as I gently pushed off of David and held my own weight. It was then I remembered, “He's gone. He took him!” I stuck the note in David's face, beginning to feel my eyes swell. I could just slightly see his eyes defocus for a second as his head moved backwards in avoidance of my hand. Quickly he snatched away the note and brought it to his face to examine it. “I can hardly read it in this light. Damn.” He reached to his belt and pulled out his flashlight from some kind of holster. It might have previously been for a gun – I wasn't positive. He turned the front of it. The light flickered for a second before becoming steady. He put it up to the note and read it. I filled him in on the details I didn't go into with him the night before at the fire. He didn't say a word until he was done tracing the note up and down a few times, reading it for clarity.
“Roost? How would he get Augustin all the way to Roost?” he spit, gruffly. “Are you sure this isn't a fake? A joke?”
The thought flicked in my head for a second. I could see Aug with a smug expression, setting the note down and escaping out of the hovel. But it did not seem plausible to me. He had never played jokes before. He hadn't been insensitive before. I couldn't believe that he would start now.
“No,” I replied, disturbed, “This is real. I fucking wish it wasn't but I don't think he would do this. He definitely wouldn't leave me alone for this long. He hasn't left my side since I found him.”
“Right. I suppose he wouldn't then.”
“I have to go get him. You have to tell me how to get here. If I don't find him i'll never get out of here.”
David stared at me in the shadow. My hands trembling, my thoughts becoming as dark and unending as the tunnel. “What happened to being afraid?” he asked with genuine concern as he stopped and turned again to me, “What happened to being afraid of your boogeyman?”
I suddenly remembered the man in the black suit; trembling. I had felt safe again in the darkness of the underground. But how did he follow me down here? I was unsure. I never wanted to meet him again, but thinking about what David had said, “Fucking fight for it,” - it rang in my ears, “Fight for everything.”
And I felt swept away with my thoughts, instantly, to a vision of me running through darkness. Forward into the nothingness. A flashlight in my hand in a foolish attempt to light the path to Augustin. I flipped a switch in my brain and I flew back to reality.
“It doesn't matter right now.” I let the words slip from my mouth. There were clear droplets of anxiety in my speech, and my brain, but I said it anyways. “I need to go find him...” and suddenly I felt a burst of that old anger climb up my throat and out my mouth like some kind of strange, fiery bile, “What else am I going to do? Sit in the darkness, bleeding my insides out until he comes to me?”
David's lips remained closed. Silence hung for a moment – all we could hear were the movings of the other residents, picking up and putting down.
“If that is what you want, it is my duty to take you there,” David said. The way he said it, the way the words trickled out sounded chivalrously. “If you remember I said I served in the government,” he continued, “Well I never told you how I served.”
My mind flew back into my memories and the scene from last night visualized in my mind's eye. Yes, I did remember him saying that, but I shrugged it off – I didn't think people cared much about the governments from up there, down here. I didn't want to bore the others at the campfire.
When I didn't answer, David spoke up: “I was in the Army. I served Operation Desert Storm.” He proudly saluted. For a second he seemed quite dashing in his shabby clothes, “Don't worry. You're in safe hands.” I smiled.
But in my head a flashbulb went off and I was back in middle school learning about the homeless populations in the city. My teacher recited: “Many of the men you see out in the street are veterans. A lot of them have a terrible mental disease called post-traumatic stress disorder. It makes them very emotionally unstable and a lot of the time they were too unstable to hold regular jobs, so they ended up in the streets.”
I wondered if that had happened to David. If his emotions had eaten him till all that was left were little pieces that put him underground.
I wanted to be polite and protest David horribly. I wanted to try to act classy after my little outburst, but I couldn't take the chance. “Okay. You can take me.”
- - -
An hour later we were walking towards Roost. David told me that it was a journey of about two hours walk and that most of it was in complete darkness. There were two ways to get there – a more quiet, out of the ways tunnel with various intersections and the main road. While the back way would take less time, the main road seemed like the better option. David said (and I eventually noticed) that it had a system of powerful over head lights every hundred feet. If the man in the black suit came to find us, we would at least have the advantage of light on our side. Before we left, David had gone back to his shack and grabbed an extra flashlight and filled a backpack with batteries and provisions, mostly beans and canned tuna fish. I got the extra flashlight and the backpack – I thought carrying thirty pounds on my back was the least I could do for someone willing to lead me through a vast underground system of tunnels teeming with refugees from the sun.
We were walking at a steady pace. David was trailing behind me, flashing his light in all of the shadows that the beams from the overheads couldn't murder. He hadn't talked much since we started off. David was the kind of man who said things when you asked him them, but didn't need to engage in small talk to feel comfortable. The Canal was silent except for the occasional drops of liquids that had condensed enough on the ceiling to fall. The tunnel, however, was large. The heavy lights that illuminated the area reached high above my head – but not enough to touch the ceiling.
I could hear David's footsteps, loud and clear. It comforted me to know he was so close – I didn't want to be there alone.
“David, how did this place even start up? You never finished your story.”
He groaned, but I could tell he was joking around, “What am I, the entertainment?”
“No, I was just being genuinely interested, but if you don't wanna tell it...” I replied, playfully.
He chuckled, and I knew I had got him. “It started in the late 1920's. Back when the city was being built, they attempted to revolutionize the subway system – they wanted to build one under the complete span of the city with hundreds of little tunnels. With all the tunnels, the above ground area could focus less on transportation and, therefore, the over city could be much more condensed. They completed half before the residents started complaining that the city was claustrophobic. In an effort to quell the complaints, the city planner had much of the project abandoned and began work on what we now know as the subway system, with a few changes here and there.”
“That must have been ridiculous, you know, having worked so hard on all those tunnels and then being told you had to abandon them,” I responded.
“I suppose it was. But for the people who were already taking to the streets up there. When they found out about the tunnels it was wonderful. Somewhere no one would bother them,” he trailed off for a second, as is trying to catch fleeing thoughts, “I guess a lot of people had the same idea. But that was how The Down Below started.”
“And how did the different cities start?” I asked.
“I think there were people who liked being closer to the top, and there were those who like being closer to the darkness. The Down Below is closest to the entrance. We deal with the people from up above when they come here. A lot of the time that's how we get supplies – people from up above who come down and give us things.”
“Who even knows about this place?”
“The city officials do, but they leave us alone as long as we stay pretty quiet. Keep to ourselves.”
“What about the people who come down here? Don't they go and tell people about this place when they leave?”
“Most people who come down here don't leave. Once they see this side of the city they feel compelled to remain. But, to answer your question, I don't think I’ve ever heard of a person spilling out their guts about this place. Who would believe them, anyways?” He chortled as he finished.
The thought that this place was such a secret was a fact that had haunted me since I had arrived. Why don't people know about this place? I wondered.
The lights – the ones above us, flickered. It happened only for an instant, but in that instant my head went numb.
“Fuu...” I attempted to spit out before the moment ended and instead I blurted out, “What was that?” I turned around to see David's eyes wide. I looked at our current location a moment – it looked as if we were close to an exit -I could see the light changing slightly up ahead and the dark outline of a passageway extending into a great darkness. Possibly a room with a makeshift station platform. I wasn't sure.
“We're probably fine.” David said reassuringly. “It must have been a tick in the system.”
“Probably.” I muttered, turning around and continuing to walk.
We had reached the big room soon after. It was huge – the ceilings must have been four stories high. I couldn't understand how far down we were nor could I understand how it was possible to make such large spaces underground. As my eyes maneuvered between the overhead lights and the shadows, I could see this room, completed, could have had the aesthetic quality of Penn Station in New York City. All the beauty here was half-masked in old tarps, water damage, and dirt.
The lights suddenly flickered again, this time returning after a full two seconds of darkness. The only light came from David's flashlight.
“Does this happen often?” I asked my friend, my eyes darting in the darkness. David flashed the light on me. I was blinded. “Terra, take your flashlight out of the bag.” he said, his voice shaking slightly, “We're gonna be fine, we just need some more light.”
I nodded and pulled the backpack off of me. I placed it on the dirty ground – David's light followed it. I unzipped the bag. The flashlight was on the top. I turned it on. I stood up. I shined the light on David.
Four or five figures were behind him – I could see them moving towards him. Suddenly, one picked up speed and ran at David.
“David behind you!” I yelled frantically.
He grabbed David as the others began to speed as well. David's flashlight fell from his hands upon impact and flew several feet away. David tried to fight them off. I turned my flashlight to face my friend and his attackers. They were all men in tattered clothing, with holes and patches as numerous as I had ever seen in the depths. They turned to me – my eyes darted to theirs. Shining brightly, reflecting the flashlight. I was sweating, shaking, but somehow, in the bowls of my mind a kind of adrenaline kicked in that I didn't know I had. I ran towards them.
I wrapped one on the head with my flashlight; the bulb shook for a moment, dying for only a moment before relighting. I moved backwards, flashing my light towards the man I had hit. He was grabbing his head where I had hit, a look of confusion washing over his face.
“Terra, help!”
David cried out, falling to the concrete floor. The men quickly overtook him and I rushed as they kicked his head and his stomach. I could hear the air escape from his lungs in large gasps. That was when I saw him, or his eyes. In the light, I saw them dark upwards to his attackers. As they focused, I could see a calm rise within them. David quickly ran his right hand down his leg, and with a flash, pulled out a serrated knife. I hadn't known he had it.
“Keep the light shining on them – keep it off me!” he yelled, brandishing the knife in front of his foes. They wavered and stepped back, groaning like monsters. David picked himself up off the ground, waving the knife in front of the men’s faces, “You get back, now,” he commanded.
I could still see the glassy eyes of the men, the mirror eyes reflecting the flashlight’s bright illumination. Slowly, they began to back away – it was clear they had expected us to be unarmed. I ran to David, keeping the light shining brightly on our enemies as I ran.
“Get back, you fucks. Get back and get away,” I warned as I reached him. I could see David only slightly in the darkness. His face was fearful – I felt his bravery but I felt his terror as well. I grabbed his free hand as he held the knife in his other.
David leaned over and pushed his face close to my ear, “In a minute we are going to run. Shut off the flashlight until I tell you to. Keep holding my hand – I know the path by heart.”
I was dreading the escape. There were rats and the ground wasn’t entirely level. I could feel the sweat pouring down my face. I had not been this scared since the man in the black suit had found me in my home. I stared at our attackers one last time. They were older, probably in their forties or fifties. They looked tired; their eyes baggy and limbs, while still strong, shook as if their entire body contained some unfulfilled desire.
David squeezed my hand. Under his breath I could hear him counting – “One, two, three!”
I flipped the switch on my flashlight and again we were in the darkest darkness.
-
After escaping the men, we had continued running till the lights flickered back on. We celebrated with a can of beans mixed with tuna. It was possibly the closest i've ever gotten to pig slop that I had ever been before. It was food, though, and even I realized that.
We turned our flashlights back on and remained diligent, making sure that we stayed as far away from the shadows as possible.
Eventually, we reached our destination – the front gate of Roost. The entrance to Roost was contained midway through one of the smaller tunnels in the underground. David told me that in the early days, when the vagrants moved away from the tunnels close to the city, they found a large, large room. The room, supposedly, was supposed to be main hub for the entire system. The best luck of all was that the entrance tunnel was small enough to create a gate. For those who hated the above ground, Roost became the perfect escape from reality. Of the four major locales under the station, Roost was the one the guests stayed away from most commonly, mostly for the strange, ambivalent nature of the vagrants there. David said that was where most of the best people under the city lived, but also some of the worst.
If the man in the black suit was here, I guess I believed David in that respect.
We arrived at the gate to find two men on either side of it. It was a wooden structure that spanned from all to wall with a hole in the middle. Two guards stood at each side. They were dressed in the usual rags, but held what looked like police batons. I was confused.
David stopped a moment and turned to me. “Pretend like you are looking for something in your bag.” I did as I was told. “Good. Now listen, you need to play along with me. You need to pretend we're going to see someone. We are, but you need to lie about who you are, and how you know her.”
He could see the confusion on my face because he stopped a moment, his eyes stained with a look of frustration. “Her name is Rebekah. She is my daughter. You're going to be her childhood babysitter. Do you understand me? If they give us any kind of trouble, if they try to contact her to ask, she knows it will be me.”
I didn't question David – David was an honest man. I could tell – there was something in his eyes that denoted some kind of spark for people. He knew how to get them to react – how to treat them to calm them down or fire them up. I wondered for a moment, studying his features. He had short hair but I could see some of it graying. He looked almost noble. It was evident even in the way he stood, presented himself. I figured it was partly the army training, part something else. There was, in all his goodness, a strange part of him I could see when he didn't think I was looking. It was a kind of longing in his eyes. They always wandered, searching for something that was locked away in the shadows, it seemed.
“Are you listening to me Terra? Are you ready?” he said gruffly. I nodded, closing up the backpack. I fell in line behind him – better to let them see him first. I thought, Act like a waif. Innocent. Bat your eyelashes.
“Hello, Sir, do you have a card?” the guard on the left said. He was tall and round, wearing what looked like an old Mexican poncho. He was most definitely Caucasian.
David shook his head, “No, I don't live in Roost.”
The corners of the guard's mouth dropped, “I see. Well, what are your names?”
“David and this is Lucille. We are here to visit my daughter,” was all he said.
I wondered what David's last name was. I wondered if people down here had last names – I had never heard of someone with one.
The man looked over to me, smiling, “What about you, Miss Lucille? Is that all true?”
I nodded, slowly bringing my lips into a bashful smile. “Yeah.”
“What's his daughter's name then?” the man asked me.
David interjected, “Margaret.”
The guard glared at David. “I was asking her,” he snapped.
“I used to be her babysitter,” I muttered, trying to make direct eye contact without looking suspicious.
The guard laughed, “Oh really? And how old is she?”
David once again stepped in, “Do we look dangerous? A middle aged, graying black man and a white girl?”
At once, the guard looked us up and down. His face looked rather queezy – I was unsure as to why.
“No, no. I guess you're right. Sorry for giving you trouble. I'm giving you a temporary resident card. You have three days before you have to return here and renew it. You have to leave something for collateral and both your names. If you don't come get a new card, we keep the item and come find you. Then we kick you out.”
I didn't understand why the underground had these rules. I couldn't go back up without Augustin, I had to have a card to get into a city; it was like a prison.
David reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver pocket watch. He handed it to the guard. “I will be back for this. Don't you worry.” David turned to me and nodded, “Come on Lucy. Give him something.”
I gave him my earrings. They were pearls – my mother had given them to me when I was young and I still wore them occasionally when I grew sentimental. It was strange that I was wearing them the morning of my attack. I passed them to the guard and he opened the gate. I walked further into the tunnel with David until I could see the lights.
Roost was, in my opinion, more lit up than the city above at night. Each and every shack, shanty, and hovel had some kind of lantern on it. There were even two, and in some places three story structures. The streets were immaculate – while in The Down Below there were heaps of trash around the edifices, this place was clean.
What got me the most, though, was the tower. It lay in the middle of the enormous room. It looked like one, massive pillar of light. As my eyes caught it, David caught mine; “They call it Sunshine Pillar. Here, in Roost, they have day time and night time. Apparently they have had it for years, adorning the tower mostly with Christmas lights stolen from the dump or from electric shops after people throw them away for having one or two bulbs broken and no patience to fix them,” his eyes began to search for something. The pillar was lit, so it was daytime – it was already bright, but the combination of all the house lights made Roost really shine.
David led me on, turning a left then a right down the alleyway. It became clear to me that this was a much bigger settlement – there were plenty of people in the streets, many of them working or selling outside of their houses. Little knick-knacks. Tinkered trade goods. That sort of thing.
“But a few years ago, I guess, someone traveling up there found this abandoned warehouse. There were a bunch of those LED lights, the ones that are like sunshine, and they got a bunch of people to gather them all up and bring them down here. I don't know how, cause I never saw them in the Down Below, but its evident...” he paused for a moment as he continued searching, “...don't you feel a little happier here?”
I recognized it immediately. For the past few minutes, it was as if a weight had been lifted. I had began to speak when David stopped and pointed to a rather large tarped building behind a few small shacks. “Down here.” I walked down the path with David, looking at the tarp. It was clear, and there were shadows inside.
Upon approaching our destination, I spied next to the tarped building another building. It made out of wood - small, but sturdy looking. “Over here,” said David, walking towards it. I followed him and stopped a few feet short of the door, which David knocked on.
“Coming!” we heard from inside. The door opened and a girl, probably around twenty-one, poked her head out. “Hello?” she paused a moment, looking David up and down. “Daddy!?” she shrieked, pulling the door open and jumping outside. David held out his hands and she fell in them. “Did you just get here? What are you doing here?” she said, her voice cracking lightly, “You must be exhausted.”
“You don't know the half of it,” David half-whispered into her ear. He smiled, letting go of her. “I'll over some coffee or sometihng, please dear,” he moved over, motioning to me. “This is Terra. We have a little problem but nothing too severe.” the girl nodded. She was quite pretty – probably around five-foot nine, skinny around the waistline with a very dark complexion. Her eyes were large and round and hair dark and untamed. She looked like a queen in pauper's clothes. “Terra, i'm Margot. Nice to meet you. No worries, this isn't the first time Dad has brought home trouble. Come on in. You look exhausted.”
I was. We entered the shack to find it had carpeting, three rooms, and a stove. It even had an out house I could see from the window out back. The lights mainly consisted of Christmas lights strung around the top of the room and several lamps scattered around – they were all on. There was a couch, and I darted to it. I hadn't felt cushions in weeks. David and Margot said down at a table across from me. As I lay my head on one of the dingy pillows, I could hear my companion telling his daughter about the situation. I closed my eyes.
And I dreamed.
My sister was twenty-five when she jumped off the Bell Bridge. She awoke at seven-thirty that morning, took a shower, did her hair, makeup, and came downstairs into the kitchen at around eight thirty for a quick, final breakfast. She smiled at me from across our oval shaped wooden table as she ate a bowl of granola flakes cereal. She wore around her bright green eyes a black mascara. It highlighted and widened them. With her short, black hair and stout nose, she was reminiscent of a house cat. Her lipstick color had been born when she was fourteen and she discovered the glamour of the twenties through The Great Gatsby. She had loved the clappers; they were airy, easy, and she imagined they wore the reddest rouge imaginable. They embodied their enormous passions on their lips.
She pushed away her half-empty cereal bowl and rose from her chair – and she smiled so brightly, gloriously, as she hovered over to my seat and kissed me on the cheek. It had never been so tender and bashful and ashamed. She had left a vibrant red kiss mark on my cheek. I licked the back of my hand and rubbed it against the lipstick. It wouldn't come off with water.
She was getting married to a big wig rich man. His name was Peter. I hated him for everything he was going give to my sister and everything that he was going to do to her. She had, since she had met him as a nurse to a patient, wore a scent of privilege my parents had never doused her in.
But I enjoyed blaming Marty; it was easier to think he was the reason she fell. I still refuse to blame myself. I was difficult to deal with when I was younger, absolutely, but I wasn't born till she was fifteen, and by fifteen a girl doesn't want her parents' attention anyways.
There were hardly-bloomed tulip flowers still smothered in morning dew; crystallized and reflective. She didn't look at them as she picked up her blue plastic bowl and placed it in the old, plastic dishwasher. She forgot to empty out the milk so it spilled over the other dirty dishes, sprinkling over them a milk that would drop down their sides and stay. Residue would remain and the milk would soon sour and our dishes, when we had believed they had been scrubbed clean did, if someone pays enough attention, still stink of the milk my sister forgot to wash out in the sink first.
My sister had taken two cinder blocks from under the backyard deck. She had cut down the tire swing the night before and removed the rope. She tied the cinder blocks together and then tied a noose around the other end. The moon was half-mast and the stars were staring as my sister, unobstructed by the clouds, placed her cinder-block ball and chain in the trunk of her black Volvo sedan.
I think that my parents should have not began taking sleeping pills. They did it so that neither of them would have to lay in bed together wondering if they were going to have to have sex or if the other one was even still attracted to their aging bodies enough to perform at all.
If they hadn't taken those sleeping pills, maybe they would have heard her sneak into their rooms the night before she jumped.
My sister left quietly after saying goodbye to my mother – father was still showering. She acts normally. There are no tears for her to cry or hugs to give to anyone. There are no discernible differences between a regular day and her jumping day.
My sister drove twelve minutes to the bridge. She stopped in the breakdown lane and left her car keys in the ignition. The cars slowly trudged forward – the bridge was saturated with morning traffic. She could almost hear the music of the other cars through her windows that she never opened. My sister only used the air conditioning her car. She always wore sunglasses too. They looked like an old lady's wing-sided spectacles. She told people she liked them because she hated the sun in her eyes and loved how they tinted the world orange. My sister sat in her car, staring our at the bridge. The jump alone may kill her, but she wanted to be sure of it. She turned to the passenger side seat and stuck her hand (with that pretty, lavish diamond ring) into the darkness. She rummaged through the purse a moment, her hand tracing the bottom for something specific. Moments later, a bag of blue pills emerged from the depths. They were my parent's sleeping pills. My sister brought the bag in front of her face and stared at them, noticing every crevice in the tiny ball of compact chemicals. They were my parents' prescription. She turned the bag over and shook a few out onto her other hand. She swallowed them. She did it again. And she did it again. And she did it till they were all gone from the bag. She had probably eaten over 25 – my parents were midway through a pill cycle.
My sister realized her time was short.
She left the keys to her car in the ignition. She thought that calling a tow truck would cause those people crossing the bridge even more of a delay. My sister never wanted to be a burden to strangers. Her family, though, remained a different story. After the fall she left us jackasses, strapped with bags of raw emotion on our backs.
My sister opened the door to the car and hurried to the rear. There, she opened up the trunk and pulled out her cinder-block death dealer. She moved to the side of the car, hiding from her possible saviors driving bumper to bumper. She had minutes – her brain began to race as the medicine slowly caused her stomach to cramp. She was sweating in the sun. Her cat eyes began to sink and drizzle down her face. She faced the river with wide, melting eyes. She placed, with great, great difficulty each of the blocks on the side of the railing. She climbed up and side on the side, her satin black dress with red rose print shimmered like black diamonds in the wind. She felt so weak as the medicine began to kill her. Her stomach began bubble up. She could feel the need to purge. She was losing consciousness. And she pushed herself (and the cinder-blocks) off the bridge and into the deep water. The gravity soon pulled her down to the bottom and she crashed, but felt nothing. No longer could she feel anything and the last things she could see was only black and blue. And some kind of bright, sunny day somewhere above her.
And the cinder blocks kept her weighed down as the water fully penetrated her lungs. Her eyes were closed and unresponsive. Blood seeped out through the various breakings she encountered upon hitting the bottom.
My sister's assemblage lay submerged, a noose around her ankle, floating in the currents, her arms flailing, the bubbles dipping furiously out of her mouth.
She was still wearing her perfectly applied waterproof rouge.
