Title: Elizabeth and the Yellow Boat
Author: Tote
Genre: ANGST.
Rating: PG but with warning: dark themes, mature content.
Author's note: I hope this story isn't offensive to anyone. Remember that it's written through the eyes of someone suffering from intense depression and suicidal tendencies—it's not meant to give the impression that the dream meant she should commit suicide. This was written after I had a dream about a red-haired woman in a yellow boat. R&R
She lost her faith gradually.
It slipped through her fingers slowly and each day her feeling of being complete in the chain, in the circle of things, a ripple in the water, got farther away until she could only remember it and then she remembered remembering.
There was no circle, there was no water and there no chain but the one around her neck, the necklace he'd given her.
Out of habit, she still wore that silver necklace with the cross and when she felt her fears come in their flashes and shivers she would play with it absently, not to remember God, but to remember who'd given it to her.
Sometimes it was enough to remember him and who she was in his eyes and other days there was nothing but the dark of disbelief, the quiet of desperation that lived inside.
Watching him filled her with pride. He was so patient, so good. His eyes shone with the innocence of the young and his laughter filled the house like music. As he grew up, he became more and more like his father but in many ways she saw herself in him too and that terrified her.
Sometimes despair was tempting and it always lay in wait for her. When she gave in, she ignored him, because he reminded her of herself at that age.
He came home, not laughing or even smiling, but frightened. When he came into the kitchen or the shed where she sometimes sat to escape, his face told her he was waiting to see who she would be today: good mom, bad mom, whether she was dead or alive.
Some days it made her feel protective of him and other days it made her angry: wasn't she trying? Was it her fault? Who was he, to question her, with those eyes that were hers, that knew so much?
She began to make jokes that no one laughed at. Absently, smiling, she was known to say things like: "well, just shoot me." Or: "Oh, good, another reason to live, I'm running short."
Her smiles were brittle and strange. Adam took to telling her he loved her as often as once or twice an hour, as if it were an incantation that could heal suffering.
Carl, on the other hand, battled his anger toward her. He understood her sorrows; he'd known her so long that she didn't even need to speak in full sentences most of the time. But he would never put up with the way her sadness tortured their son.
He alternately comforted her and shouted at her, depending on her mood, how far gone she was. When she made those horrible comments, he scowled at her and tried to assure Adam she was kidding. Adam nodded glumly, because he understood everything and he knew that was a lie.
Then the dream came. The dream that released her. She awoke, knowing where she was going. She'd been sleeping in lately, sometimes past the time Adam came home from school but today she got up early, swinging her legs over the side of the bed with fresh spirit. Now she knew what was to be done.
The blade—sharp, too much blood. And she hated red these days, the color of her own hair.
No, the pills were better. Oh, there were so many pills. Pills for depression, for Carl's heartburn, for Adam's earache. She lined them up in neat rows, remembering the rocking boat and the shining water. She took them methodically, one by one, and swallowed them down with Carl's favorite bourbon. It tasted like him.
Smiling, she remembered Adam laughing: Adam, her joy.
Adam.
A moment of hesitation.
Her head already felt fuzzy but she reached for the stationary and wrote with shaking hand, writing him, her dearest love. She wrote, remembering water and sun and color and rocking and laughter and Adam, Adam, Adam—always Adam and one day, she'd see him again.
She knew it.
Lying down, she felt her pain begin to recede as the pills went through her system and she smiled, thinking not of death but of the yellow boat in her dream, the boat carrying her away.
But she forgot the ripples.