​Drowning in Air

The call came around 1:47. Mika’s voice on the other end already wrong. Already somewhere past language and into the country of sound alone. Laughing and then stopping and then laughing again, and none of it had anything to do with joy.

“Get your shoes on, Shay,” I said.

Shay looked at me from the couch with the blanket still on her lap and the show still going.

“What happened?

“I don’t know yet but we’re going.”

She didn’t ask again.

The parking lot of that club is a mouth. That’s the only way I can describe it. Cars lined up like teeth and the bass coming through the walls like a pulse and people standing outside smoking or scrolling or doing that thing where they lean against someone else’s car and act like the night belongs to them. I found Mika near the side entrance propped against a wall with one heel off and one heel on. A girl I didn’t recognize was sort of holding her up but also sort of already looking for somewhere else to be.

I said I got her. The girl left without giving me her name.

Mika threw her arms around my neck and said, “there he is, there’s my guy, there’s daddy,” and I felt my stomach go flat. I knew she wasn’t being playful, not because of the word. It was the weight behind it. There was nothing behind her eyes at all. Just a wide smooth absence where Mika used to be. Like someone had scooped the yolk from an egg and left the shell standing.

I got her to the car. Shay was in the back seat and Mika crawled in and immediately put her head on Shay’s thigh and started running her fingers up Shay’s arm and saying things. Low things. Syrup-voiced things about how soft Shay’s skin was and how she always thought Shay was so pretty and we should all just go somewhere together, we should all just be together tonight, why not, why can’t we. Shay looked at me in the rearview. Her face was careful. Her face said this isn’t right but she hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

I had though.

I knew it the way you know a room has gone cold before you touch the window. Something in the rhythm was off. Mika didn’t drink like this. Mika was a two-margarita girl who nursed her second one for an hour and then switched to water because she had work in the morning. Mika was not this…this loose puppet motion. This chemical want that came from nowhere in her and pointed at everything.

We got inside and she tried to sit on my lap and I moved her gently to the couch and she laughed and reached for Shay and said come on, come sit with me, and started pulling at Shay’s shirt. Shay caught her hands the way you’d catch a child reaching for a stove and held them and said, “Mika, Mika, hey, look at me, you’re okay.”

“I’m great,” Mika said. “I feel amazing I feel so good.”

Her pupils were the size of dimes. Shay whispered to me, “she’s never been this drunk before.”

“I don’t think she’s drunk. Call her dad.”

Shay’s face changed. It went from confused to afraid in the space of a breath and she said, “what do you mean?”

I repeated, “call her father right now. Something isn’t right. She’s been given something.”

The phone rang and rang and rang and nobody picked up.

Mika started taking her clothes off. Just standing up from the couch and pulling her dress over her head like she was alone, like we weren’t there, like this was a sequence she had been loaded with and was now executing without consultation. Shay grabbed her and I turned away and Shay walked her to the bedroom. I heard her talking soft and steady, the kind of voice you use with someone who is drowning in air, and after a while Shay came out and said, “she’s in pajamas now. She wants food.”

I made scrambled eggs. I don’t know why that’s what I made. I stood at the stove and pushed the eggs around the pan and listened to Mika talking nonsense through the wall and I thought about the parking lot. The girl who was holding her up. How fast she left. How she didn’t ask who I was. How she already knew she wanted to be gone from whatever this was. I thought about who else was at that club. Who bought her something. Who waited. Who watched her drink it and started counting the minutes.

The eggs came out fine. I brought them in and Mika ate them cross-legged on the bed with Shay sitting beside her stroking her hair and Mika ate like she hadn’t eaten in days and then she fell asleep mid-sentence, just stopped talking and went out like a lamp, and Shay pulled the blanket over her and came out and closed the door and looked at me and neither of us said anything for a long time.

We slept on the couch. Shay pressed against my chest and me staring at the ceiling and the apartment so quiet I could hear Mika breathing through the door.

In the morning she came out slow. Blinking. Holding the doorframe like the floor might move. She sat at the table and Shay put water in front of her and I sat across from her and we asked the questions gently. How do you feel. Do you remember anything. Are you okay.

She said, “yeah I’m fine. I feel weird. Like foggy. But I’m okay. I just don’t remember anything from last night.”

Shay looked at me. I looked at Shay. And then we told her.

We told her carefully, like setting something fragile down on a counter. The things she said. The way she was moving. How I recognized it and how we brought her home and kept the room safe.

Her face did something I will never be able to write well enough. It crumpled. It went from open to closed to broken in a sequence so fast it was like watching a building come down floor by floor. She started crying and apologizing. Saying I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, oh my god, I can’t believe I did that, I’m so disgusting, I’m sorry.

I said stop. I said none of that was you. I said you have nothing to apologize for.

And then she said the thing that changed the temperature of the room.

She said, “no, I’m sorry I let this happen again.”

Again.

I felt it land in my chest. This small heavy word. Again. Not a confession. A inventory. A woman counting incidents on a list she keeps somewhere private, somewhere no one else is supposed to see. I asked if she wanted to call the police and she said no.

“I don’t even know who it was. I’m just glad you’re not mad at me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

She looked at me like I had said something in a foreign language. Like mercy was a dialect she recognized but did not speak fluently.

“Did…Oh God…,” She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed until she was so small, until she was a fist. As if she could feel a part of herself being evacuated from her own body and whatever had been poured into her had loosened something essential and if she let go even slightly the last of her would spill out onto the floor. “Did I do anything to you?”

I said no. I said “I wasn’t even in the room when you got changed. Shay took care of you.”

The relief that went through her body was visible. It moved through her shoulders and her jaw and her hands and she closed her eyes and breathed and I thought about how many times a person has to be hurt before relief becomes the highest thing they hope for. Before the best possible outcome is just that nothing was taken.

She said, “I’ll be okay. I just need fluids. I’ll be okay because nothing happened this time.”

This time. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t mine to open. But my blood went cold and then hot and then quiet the way a wire goes hot before it burns, and I stood in that kitchen with my hands on the counter and I looked at nothing and I felt the kind of anger that has no mouth. The kind that doesn’t shout. The kind that just sits in you and becomes part of your architecture.

Shay held her. I hugged her. She asked us not to call anyone and we didn’t.

She’s drinking water now and walking around the apartment slowly like someone relearning the dimensions of a safe place. She’s resting now.

When she was grabbing at me and calling me that word I didn’t see desire. I saw machinery. I saw a body running a program it had not written and did not consent to. When she was reaching for Shay, for Shay who she has never once looked at like that in all the years of knowing her, I saw the proof. I saw the evidence walking and talking and pulling its clothes off in someone else’s living room while the real person was locked away somewhere behind her own eyes screaming into glass.

I think about the parking lot. I think about what would have happened if I hadn’t picked up the phone. If I’d let it ring. If I’d said I’ll get her in the morning. I think about the girl who was holding her up and who left so quickly. I think about a city full of rooms and closed doors and music loud enough to cover anything.

She’s up now. She’s sitting on the couch with a blanket on her lap drinking ginger ale. Shay is beside her watching something on her phone and showing Mika videos of dogs to make her laugh and Mika is laughing, a real laugh, a laugh with the whole person behind it, and I’m standing in the kitchen and I’m watching them and I’m glad. I am glad she called me. I am glad I went. I am glad the door was locked and the eggs were warm and the pajamas were soft and that when she woke up the first faces she saw belonged to people who would never hurt her.

That’s the most I can do. That’s the least anyone should.