TW: Suicide, self-harm

July 19th, 1816

I feel as if something important has happened, but I can’t yet be certain of it.  All I know is that I feel changed—even more changed than I was by Frederick’s absence.  That all happened so fast that I can’t yet be sure how it has changed me.  Though it surely has.  But that’s not what I want to write about.

Uncle Samuel had me go with him to the market.  He’s been worried about me; everyone has been.  There wasn’t much reason to go to the market, though.  The potatoes are hardly worth more than a handful of coins, there’s so few of them.  The frost has been bitter, worse than the wind.  Not worse than the sky, though, which is heavy and gray.  Ominous.  A storm is not a matter of if, but when. 

As we were driving, I found myself focusing on the fringe of Jenny’s shawl more than anything else.  I feel awful still having to borrow her clothes, especially since we still haven’t made up.  I shouldn’t have yelled at her.

Perhaps it was these plain, firm thoughts that caused me to be seized by a sudden impulse to be frank.  I knew that my time here was running short.  Frederick had sent off the letter informing the Retreat that I’ll be returning home early weeks ago.   There wasn’t any time left for cowardice.  So I asked Uncle Samuel, plainly, “Was my mother like me?”

Uncle Samuel frowned at my question.

I supposed I wasn’t clear enough.  Or perhaps I didn’t want to be clear enough.  “Was she melancholic?” I asked.  I’d never even spoken the word to him before.

I was certain he would deny that she was.  After all, Uncle Samuel has proven to be quite loyal to his sister.  Or at least, to the memory of her.  But maybe that’s precisely why he said, in a low voice, “Yes, she was.”

That was all I truly needed—the confirmation was more than enough.  But he was resolved to tell me more.  Everything, he said, that I should know.  As he spoke, his typically jovial face sank, and he looked much older.

He told me how she had had the same slumps of sorrow that I do—the sorrow for no reason and yet for every reason there is.  He told me how my mother would hurt herself, about the scars that she thought no one would notice.  I can remember those raised lines on her arms, how she wore long sleeves even during the summer.  Of course, I do the same.  I just never realized that we did it for the same reason.

Uncle Samuel insisted, as the wagon jostled us and the wind stung our faces, that it had never gone farther than that.  He seemed a little too certain, his face a little too still.  He said the melancholy is just part of our family, that Abigail had it too.  But not since her children were born, he assured me.  I somehow doubt that.  After all, it didn’t go away for my mother after I was born.  But I think there are certain things we force ourselves to believe.  I know there are falsehoods that I’ve forced on myself, feeling I would break if I acknowledged the truth.

Though I’m glad he trusted me with so much, I could sense that Uncle Samuel was disconcerted by my asking at all.  I’ve come to realize that people aren’t fond of discussing problems that can’t be fixed.  And he could tell there was more.  Of course there was.  I gripped my fingers around the wooden plank that served as a seat.  I held myself firm against the world that went soaring past me.

The truth fell out of me like a waterfall: a war against gravity, where hesitance will always lose.  I told him about what happened in Liscannor, ten years ago, when my mother and I arrived unannounced.  Perhaps the reason I came back.  I don’t know.  For all my doubt, though, I can never stop remembering it.  I can trace too much back to it.

It had been right after my mother dragged me from the O’Brien’s home, just as she had dragged me from my own home to go on that mad trip.  She would get ideas in her head that she couldn’t fight, and I think that journey was one of them.

We had been alone, at the shore, me and her.  I was happy.  I was so glad to be rid of London.  I hated crowds, they made me anxious.  I didn’t know enough to think anything of my mother’s heavy breathing, her glazed eyes.  I knew she was just like that sometimes; I attached nothing else to it beyond her silence.

We kept on our travelling cloaks, but took off our shoes.  The sand was hot under my feet.  I wriggled my toes through it.

My mother stood staring at the sea, her back to me.  I watched the wind play with her dress, the faint sunlight dapple her auburn hair so like my own.  I always liked that we bore the burden of red hair together.

Sitting in the sand, my hands sticky with it, I watched her breathe.  I watched things go through her. 

Wordlessly, she stood.  She did most things without saying why.  She let her cloak slide off her, and into the sand.  She walked until the waves lapped at her bare feet.  I called for her and she didn’t turn around.  I was frightened, I remember, because the waves were so loud and I didn’t want to go near them.  But I didn’t want my mother away from me in this strange land either.  I wanted to see what she was thinking, I never knew what she was thinking. 

She didn’t turn around.  She kept walking.

I screamed then.  I screamed on that empty beach for her to come back.  I didn’t want to be alone.  I was all alone without her.  But she kept walking, until the water reached her knees, then her waist, her shoulders, until it had completely consumed her.  The wind kept howling, the sun kept shining, my mother was gone, and I was alone.  I buried my face in my hands and I sobbed, the kind of sobbing that nearly makes you vomit.  Maybe I did vomit, I can’t remember that.

And then, I felt a hand upon my shoulder.  I looked up and my mother was there.  Sand was stuck to her cheeks, and her long hair was down, dark and wet, so dark that it looked black instead of red.  Her dress stuck to her and I could see her underclothes.  She didn’t say anything and neither did I.  I couldn’t.

My mother laced up her boots.  She tied mine too.  Her face was still slack, as if she were in a trance.

Once my shoes were tied, I didn’t get up.  I stayed seated in the sand, even though my mother was standing, even though I wanted nothing more than to leave.  Eventually, she took my hand and pulled me to my feet.  I followed her, walking miles back to the inn instead of taking a coach.  By the time we arrived, it was dark and my mother’s clothes were mostly dry.  I suppose she didn’t want anyone to see her like that.  I just never wanted her out of my sight again.

I should give up on wondering what she wanted.  But I can’t.  So I’ll say my suspicions, that I don’t think that she ever meant to see her family on that trip.  Meeting Uncle Samuel and Jenny in the village that day was truly an accident.  I should know better than anyone that the adage is false.  Misery does not love company.  But it does love memory.  And I think that she returned to Liscannor to drown in it.

I suppose I tried to do that once, if that’s what suicide is.  “The incident” as it’s formally known.  I never think of it as its euphemism.  My mother always said that words ought to say what they mean.  She never really said what she meant, but that’s besides the point, isn’t it?

“Incident” doesn’t speak to it.  It was too big for that.  It was too clear.  That’s what no one at the Retreat ever talked about.  When you try to end your own life, you have such a sense of purpose.  It’s a complex one, since you never really want to do it.  But it’s such an easy task.  It can be accomplished in the blink of an eye.  All of a sudden, you’re in control.

I thought of my mother when I tried to do it, when I plunged myself into the ice-cold bathtub.  I wanted to drown, because that was what I always thought she wanted to do.  I was thinking of her, while my nostrils burned, while every animal part of me was begging for air.  I just wanted to see her again.  I just wanted to know what she wanted.  Then a maid pulled me out and I vomited a river onto her in thanks.

I didn’t tell Uncle Samuel any of that.  Just the parts about my mother.  That seemed to be more than enough for one day.

Uncle Samuel listened to all of it.  He never interrupted, never said a word.  He just scratched his beard in silence.  It was only when I had finished that he even turned his eyes towards me.  He flicked his reins, and stopped the wagon, right there in the middle of the road.

“We can’t stop here,” I said.  “What if someone else is coming?”

“They can go around,” he replied.  His voice was brittle, rough as I had never heard it before.  I was shocked, and for some reason embarrassed, to see that there were tears in his eyes.  Maybe because it made me realize that I too was crying.

“Elsie,” he said.  “It’s not your fault.”

It was as if something cracked open then, as I took a gasping breath of cold air.  I don’t know how he knew that I was carrying that; I didn’t know I was carrying that.

For so long, I’ve thought that if my mother had loved me a little more, if I had been worthy of her love, she wouldn’t have wanted to leave me there.  She wouldn’t have wanted to drown—if that was even what she wanted.  I don’t know if it even matters.

I’ve been trying to drown for so long.  And I’ve clung to people too tightly, because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.  Because I couldn’t stop her.

When I fell into tears, I didn’t need to reach for Uncle Samuel.  He held me without having to be asked.  And I clung to him.

I clung to my mother, but sickness took her before she could take herself.  I clung to my father, but he knew less how to save me than he knew how to understand me.  And I clung to Frederick.  My suffering kept him present, as he made it grow.  The more chipped and tattered I was, the more certain I was that he would stay. 

I have discovered things here, not about my mother, but about myself.  I’ve realized that I need to be needed.  And he didn’t need me, not like I needed him.  And he knew that.  He used that.  I’ve spent my whole life doing whatever it took to be needed. 

That day on the beach, I convinced myself that I wasn’t needed, worse than that, that I wasn’t wanted.  But I think there may be things in this world, secret pains we hold, that no other person can understand or heal.  I like to imagine that my mother was like me, that she wanted to live, just not the way she was made to.  Not drowning.

I’ve reached the question then, the one we both kept asking, the one I keep gripping, keep losing.  We’re stumbling creatures, my mother and I.  How do you live with water in your lungs?

On the ride back home, as the crickets chirped and the sky bled into black, I realized something.  I never seem to remember the fact that my mother came back.  For whatever reason, she chose not to drown.  Perhaps she did cling to me, as tightly as I clung to her.  But what am I to hold onto now?