They say one in ten women get depressed, develop postpartum depression after delivering. Doctors say that. I am a doctor, well, a nurse. And I have been subject to that anxiety of being left alone, to not have that warm weight in your gut anymore.
It was pleasant, it was my baby.
John tells me I need fresh air. I believe him, though I see he cares so little. Anytime I see or near my little girl I fidget. Loving her as I do, it just isn't the same. She's still warm, kicks as she did inside me, but she's not the same roundness.
Maybe getting pregnant again will help with the seperation?
Though i'm not sure now. John has moved me to the room above ours. It's truly horrid and nothing a mother should be thrown in. The walls have been papered a faded rose red, the print truly inclining me to just rip it off the wall. Windows, two of them, are curtained in deep gold yellow, timely fabrics, adorned to the lining of the floors. "Do you hate me?!" said I. "This will help you." said he.
Does John think barring me from my baby will loosen my wits? Will I gain what sanity he thinks I've lost?
I go out alot. Running to the park and back, excersize and fresh air will do me good. John tells me it will, but I bet his Sherlock told him that. The smart one, the brains, Sherlock I do like. He visits, brought me gifts once to fit my room. Something to cover the hideous wall. They scream a deepness I wish I could kill.
"Mary, your little girl wants to see you!" said he, walking in with the bundle in his arms. But what's the use now? I'm doing so good, I've been eating again and sleeping again. If I hold her now, I will spiral back into depression, I'll lose it. I don't want to remember her face, the one I can't exactly see in my head.
He leaves, leaving me, alone. The door has a key, sometime I fantasize I hear him jingling it in the lock, sealing me in. Other times I wake up from my restless sleep. My hands are given freedom to actually touch this eye-poison blood-stained wall. In my exile, my fingertips feel the bumpy surface, and then my ear touches it.
Listening close, I can hear a woman yelling. Calling to get out. The first night I heard her screaming, I panicked, yearning for John who bounded in seconds later. But now I know the woman is harmless. All she does is rattle the wallpaper and reach her hands and squish her head in attempt to get out. She's nice, tells me secrets I never knew I needed to know.
"Cheat. He's a cheat. Sherlock..." said her, and I listen. "...John, they cheat." Nails bleeding to get out.
My mind runs through who they are cheating. Me of course, I know. They put me in this hell-red room! With its blue rug under the bed, scratched windows. They cheated only me. My sanity. Plague me with words, promising me once I get better I can move back to my room. I never will.
There came a day when I thought of work. I stole my cell phone back and called, but I was unneeded. I bet John told them that. He told them my condition. Oh, how he cares for me, wishes me to get well. When Sherlock took me out on a ride on the ferry, I whispered for him to take me on a case, that I needed a case. And oh how my Sherlock cares as well, forbidding me to go on a case for I have a child, and if I were to get hurt, John and the baby would suffer.
But i'm in my room still. The door handle becoming greased with the many handprints that grip tight around it, the glass knob no longer transparent. But the ugliness of any detail on the door cannot over fathom the cage of the walls.
Bits in the walls have been chipped inwards, exposing the white interior of the plaster wall, white egg compared to red rose. They pop up in my knowledge every now and then, my awareness of them increasing. I find attaching myself to the walls helps forget about the loss and pain of my sickness. Which I am sick, I realize.
Whatever my child looks like now, i'm sure she's like her father. I dream she's in a room of white walls, walls I prayed John for. But he says I must face the wallpaper because if it hurts me this much, just think of how tossed I'll be in real life. I understand, it's inanimate.
But is it? The woman in the walls is louder at night. I sleep in the day just so I can listen to what she says. Though it's dark and my lamp gives little light, the moon sheds its reflected rays through the windows. The woman, as it turns out, is women.
Multiple bodies of these tall women shaking violently at the wallpaper, breaking skin to get out. Some have, and dance in my windows. Though, no matter how fast I turn they always seem to be looking at me in the windows, dead in the eye. Following me. The ones still trapped don't seem harmful, so I let them out.
I beg John's forgiveness when he comes in some mornings, seeing the small strips of red I peeled to help the girls free themselves. But he doesn't understand the joys I get in aiding them, and he'll never know why I do it.
When dawn breaks, and the girls quiet down, the beating on the walls just their fingers noisily running over the inside, I can feel myself better than the day before. John sits in the room with me, too, brings me tea and sips it with me. We talk like old times. But he never dares bringing in the girl, my girl, our girl. He knows it's too much.
But I do have an idea of what she looks like. Sherlock is the one who tells me.
"Sweet blue eyes." Says he. "Pale ivory skin." He continues. I grind my knees into the bed, leaning up to paw more out of him, "Hair, what of it?" I chase him with a toothy smile. "B-brown hair. Wavy, brown, hair." says he again, looking at me as if he were instinctively ready for another response than the one I gave him.
Oh, brown hair, so common, so fitting. I tilt my head and "aw" at him.
The nights come at me again. The women getting handsy, pulling me to creep along the walls, which I do. There's a bookshelf which I've pushed out from the wall to walk behind as I lean my right shoulder in and drag it along the smooches on the wall. As I square to the door, I hiss as the handle still disgusts me. And I step on and off my bed to continue my creep, shoulder and head now skimming over the bumpy textured paper. I stop each round as I get to the windows, each time pecking at the chips around the meeting of glass, then wood, then the paint left behind, not covered by the maroon-washed red. I display attention to each window, the perimeter of each, the number of chips changing each time.
The women tell me new things each night, the same things but in new ways. "Cheat. He's a cheat... Sherlock" they laugh hysterically. I grow tired, yawn sometimes at their vagueness, "They don't cheat me, this helps me, i'm safe here." I respond. But the women shake the walls to near collapse, bending the walls like butter and pounding me into them like a ragdoll. "He loves him and him loves he." the women chant.
The women aren't friendly.
I go out every now and then, but it's pointless. I like the room, the blue and green wallpaper in the other rooms just don't add up to the red.
Sherlock came over, before he came in he turned the key outside me door, letting me know John does lock me in when convenient. "I want you to know I looked in your files before we-" he smokes out. It's as if he thinks I understand what he means.
My eyes look down, confused, waiting for the walls to speak to me again. "Mary, before that night, I looked at your files." Then my eyes look up, not hearing his words. But I see him. I truly SEE him. He has a lover, his neck is love bitten, he smells not like Sherlock, he's clearly just bound out of bed. The rim of his jean pockets I spot a note, a condom, and the stains of sweat.
"Your files, i'm not telling John, alright?" he says more. But he's done it. I stare at him scared, "John?" Whimpering, I flail my nose around him, smelling deep. "Mary, I- I won't tell, I pro-" My hand slaps on his lips. I calm down to inhale deeply at Sherlock's chest, close enough to feel his body heat.
It was John's smell, on his chest, on his neck, in his pants. John was wrapped, entwined in Sherlock. "Why are you fucking my husband?" quietly, oh so quietly, and gently, I ask him, kneeling back on the bed, hands so tenderly delicate on his hands and body. I want to wring out one answer from him.
Because it's fine. Laying in bed with a mother's husband is natural. Especially if she's sick.
"i'm not sick." telling myself, I turn my head. Sherlock backs up from me, closing the distance to the door. "i'm not, Sherlock. Why would I be sick?" The women in the walls laugh with me, chuckling in a whisper. The few women who didn't get to escape yet, ram themselves to and fro from the walls and I watch in horror as Sherlock comes to protect me from them.
But they blast themselves over and over and over and over, repeatedly into the hard plaster behind the red wallpaper, the beautiful wallpaper. The women screaming insanity, grotesque and bleeding from their heads and fingernails, bruising quickly at their shoulders. It turns out the more Sherlock protects me from them, the quicker they stop.
I turn my head to see the women in the window one last time, and there's two. One woman is holding the other who looks badly beaten, a stream of blood bellowing from the corner of her forhead. She's laughing, still screaming in the other woman's arms. But my vision gets blurry, I can't see the women as clearly and I begin to weep.
The last thing I hear is the last of the girls in my ear.
"She's been throwing herself into the wall"
"Is mummy alright?"
"Mummy is okay, Shery. Daddy Sherlock will take you downstairs now."
...
author's note: you should read 'yellow wallpaper' a story that inspired me. leave comments if you enjoyed!