The Chickadee Girl

Pressing On

*Some readers may find the content of this chapter unsettling. 

***************************

Isa hovered on the threshold of the darkened laundry room. Her skin prickled, and her tongue clung paper-dry to the roof of her mouth. Something moved. Her fingers trembled, and she had to keep herself from slamming the door shut. She reached in and flicked on the light. 

The rough, straw-coloured rope that dangled from the heavy pipes over the clothes dryer looked as though it had been cut. It swung loosely in the draft she'd created by opening the door, the knot at the end of the rope describing tiny, tightening circles in the air. Isa approached it in a daze, and reached up to touch it, to pull on it gently. She'd tied it tight - her fingertips carried the memory of the knot. Her foot had knocked into something on the floor when she'd stepped forward, and it rolled - an empty pill bottle. She remembered the way that the cap had resisted her shaking hands, and that she'd had to press down on the lid as she'd turned it. 

She remembered it all, suddenly. It came back in pictures.

Open your eyes, Isadora.

Her bare feet on the carpet of the hallway, inching soundlessly onward, as Peyman Hall slept around her. The rope she'd lifted from the boat house, and hidden in her backpack all day long.  How she'd struggled to knot it properly. The prescription she'd filled at the village pharmacy the week before, clasped in one sweat-sodden hand. How she'd closeted herself in the bathroom and swallowed the whole bottle, pill by pill, just in case she lost her nerve. Insurance. 

And yet. 

And yet as she stood there and surveyed what she knew was the scene of her own death, there was also one thing she struggled to remember. Try as she might, she found she couldn't recall what she'd been thinking in those last awful moments - the horrifying physical facts, yes, the sensations, in minute detail. But what had she been thinking? She could recall no sadness, anger, bitterness. She couldn't remember feeling any emotion at all, not even resignation - only blank space, an absence. It was as though someone had reached in and wiped away those thoughts, or pulled a curtain over them. 

 Surprisingly, she felt no grief, only utter bewilderment. What could have possessed her to end it all, and so suddenly? It made no sense. It was as though she could remember someone else having done it, while she, puppet-like, had only watched from a corner. Distantly, as she played that final moment over, she recalled a clatter as she'd stepped off the dryer. She'd had something... something in her hand, and it had fallen - something besides the pill bottle. She dropped to her knees and scanned the floor. After a moment, she reached under the dryer and drew out her chickadee pin from the dark dustiness beneath. Her other hand travelled to her pocket, almost absently. Hadn't she had this only a moment before?  

Did you really do this, Isadora?  

She'd never been a  cheerful person - she didn't have Cass's happy-go-lucky spirit, or Daphne's unyielding passion for life and art, but surely there could have been no reason for this. Such a final act. Why? 

Her heart beat faster in her chest. She couldn't have. She was here, wasn't she? Drawing breath, pulse racing? If she'd died there in the laundry room, where was her body? How could she still be walking around? Why couldn't she remember the reason she'd done it?

But hers were the hands that had tied that rope. She remembered the chilly steel of the dryer under her bare feet, and how the cobwebs on the pipes had looked from up close. The rope had disturbed some of them when she'd secured it around the pipe, and they had drifted in the air, untethered, barely there. She reached up and gently drew her fingers down her throat, recalling the scratch of the rope. It had happened.