retreat

The day Cassie died, I was in turmoil.

The room was spinning. Words didn’t make sense. Adrenaline was blurring in my veins in the hospital, and when the doctor told us she didn’t make it, that she finally slipped from a coma into something more permanent and dark, I let go.

I didn’t get out of bed for anything except to drag myself to the bathroom. Mom brought me food with dark circles under her eyes and shaky hands, and I kept the lights in my room out, the curtains drawn, like an unspoken eulogy for everyone. Because I felt like it was my fault.

I could hear pattering in the house. Quiet sounds of life from my parents, but nervous and tense, like little mice, skittering around, trying to hide themselves in the walls. I knew they were grieving. They thought I was grieving, too, but instead I was just slowly letting myself go into the bedsheets, letting everything I was melt away, desperately hoping I wouldn’t be a person anymore when I finally came out.

After a month of this, my parents got rid of me. I remember Dad coming into my room. He still looked gaunt and listless, a small fragment of who he once was, but this time he had a tiny spark in his eye. Determination, but also anger.

“You’re going to a retreat,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at his face, and I wondered what life would be outside of this tiny room, in a world that had shrunk so this was all I knew. I hadn’t smelled fresh air in so long, I forgot what it felt like. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to continue life, and I was being forced to. I didn’t have a choice to live or not. It wasn’t my choice anymore.

“It’s either that or inpatient care.” His voice was so small, and the suffocating stench of emptiness in my room diminished it bit by bit, until all I could hear was my own heartbeat and shaky breath. Flashes illuminated in my mind, images of white walls and bars over windows, hard beds stripped bare, crude blinking red lights in the corner of the room, nurses watching me sleep or stand or cry or scream.

“I’ll go.”

I never said I was sorry. I felt sorry, but if anyone outside of the family wondered why I was sorry, and thought about it, even for hours, they wouldn’t know why I felt so awful. Outside of survivor’s guilt, or the normal grief symptoms, my frigid and apologetic heart would make no sense. But it was my fault, in the end, and things just got worse.

I know I should have talked to Mom and Dad before I left. Before I climbed into the car with my aunt Louisa, who had come to pick me up from Roberts Creek in an old blue truck. She lived near the retreat, on a small patch of overgrown land, with prickly blackberry bushes and ruthless foxes who targeted the few chickens she had.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your sister, Mina.”

And she talked about it during the car ride. She talked about everything I had been avoiding talking about with anyone. I had been keeping it to myself. I didn’t want the morbid thoughts to leave my head or my mouth. So the only thing I said was:

“It’s like a disease.”

Cassie had been happy all her life. I could tell she didn’t understand me. I wasn’t the picture-perfect cool older sister I knew she wanted. Sometimes when she wanted to talk I ignored her. When she tried to push her way in, I shoved her out and slammed the door. When she cried, I was stone, and I was cold, and she didn’t understand. It felt like locking out a puppy, because I knew she only wanted to help me. She was innocent. She didn’t understand it, but she wanted to.

I didn’t let her. I didn’t want her to become like me, a fuck-up who couldn’t make it to classes, who lived in a permanently rainy grey world. I didn’t want her to learn about what I did to myself in my mind, how I destroyed myself from the inside, until my innards bled out of the outside.

Then it really started to show, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t leave my room. The world had shrunk again, like it always did when everything felt exhausting and overwhelming. I was becoming a skeleton. I was weak, and I couldn’t even try to mask it for anyone else anymore. Mom would bring me food. Sometimes Cassie would try to bring food to me instead, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d tell her to go away, and when she stopped, when her legs froze in the doorway and she started taking in the room, my voice would get more shrill, raspy, until I sounded like I was screaming directly from my irregularly beating heart.

When it got to her, she was good at hiding it. She never showed that I had ruined her, that my clouds and thunderstorms soaked her, penetrating her mind with an endless cold that never goes away, no matter what kind of fires you try to stoke. Nobody knew she was locking herself inside of her mind, and it was winter, so nobody questioned the long sleeves.

In February, Mom found her. Dad was still at work. Cassie had told Mom she was going to a friend’s house, but then that friend called and said she didn’t know where Cassie had gone, that Cassie had left her house, and that she was crying, and saying things that were confusing and not like Cassie at all—mean things, cruel things, directed at everything and everyone, a venom that finally left her. And when it left her, Cassie had left, out the back door, and now it was a darkening evening, and Cassie was missing.

When Mom told me she had to go look for Cassie, she didn’t bother asking if I would come. She just grabbed her car keys, and I wondered if she was able to drive safely on the ice with the frantic mind of a mother wanting to know where her manic daughter had gone on a winter’s night.

The retreat was ten acres. It had a river that passed through it, and a lake that was near the edge of the property. The main building was a big white farmhouse with crumbling exterior, and when we first arrived, the image matched how I felt: a lonely building in the middle of nowhere under a sad, trickling sky.

The grass tickled my legs until we got onto the gravel path. Aunt Louisa didn’t bother asking if I wanted her to go in with me, she just drove away, and I stared at the woods as the little blue truck retreated into the mist.

The inside of the building was cozy. There was a common room, with rocking chairs and a crackling brick fireplace, a faded antique carpet on the rough wood floor. When I walked in, an older woman was pulling on snowboots, and she looked up and smiled at me.

“Mina,” she said. “I was just about to come and get you. I saw you standing there in the fog. We’ve been expecting you, and we’re glad you’re here now.”

She was gentle with me. She had streaks of grey in her dark brown hair, and wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes. “If you want, I can show you your room now.”

I nodded.

“I’m Claire,” she said, and she took me up two flights of narrow stairs. The walls in the hallways were cream-coloured and a bit battered, and there were no paintings. I could hear people talking quietly throughout the house. When we got to the third floor, we walked past the bathroom, and a girl with wide brown eyes stared at me, briefly diverting her eyes from the mirror, before turning back to it and frowning with misty eyes.

“This is your room,” Claire said. She opened the door, and my eyes met cornflower blue, knitted quilt, dusty curtains, and chestnut furniture. I forced a smile. The room seemed so small and uninviting. I knew it was only until I felt better.

The first week or so, I lost count of days. I slept in, and the weather hardly ever changed. Rainy, maybe windy, misty, then a tiny crack of sunlight at the beginning of the day, then grey, grey, grey. When I looked out of my window, I saw the woods enshrouding the farm, and I saw the tree right outside of my window that scratched the house with its branches when the wind decided to wrestle. Sometimes I saw flickers in the trees, and every morning, birdsong was there, eventually fading out in a small harmony, until the birds were just little patches of noise on occasion through the day.

I never saw anyone else other than Claire. Claire brought me food, and she was patient. She didn’t ask me questions, just gave me a strong smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes. I could tell she wanted to talk, but she never pushed.

And eventually, I felt a bit better, piece by miniscule piece. My thoughts were a reel of my life in rose-gold tinted sepia, a montage with endless music, some sad, some nostalgic, some happy. Imagery like a movie, the freckles on Cassie’s nose, the crinkle of Mom’s smile. Sometimes other things would creep in, too, like thoughts of beginning life again, and how would I do that? Then my breathing would get shallow, until I had to numb the world and shut out every thought, so it was just my heart thudding. Manageable, and outside of my control. My heart always pushed through.

One day I went outside. I didn’t say anything to Claire, or anybody I passed in the hallway. Some doors were shut when I passed them, but a few were open, and I saw a girl painting. Another girl was sitting on her bed, tracing circles on her legs, then caressing her arms, staring up at the ceiling. It was weird seeing the rest of the world, and when I went downstairs, my world expanded a bit and my breath caught and I was scared. My body stopped moving, but then I remembered that I wanted to go see the birds, and I wanted to touch the bark of the trees and feel the damp grass on my skin. So I kept going, past the door, at a steady pace, until my feet were crunching on gravel and I felt freer.

This was the first day I went outside. Then the days melded together, but it was always something new. The weather affected the entire mood of the scenery, whether it was grey and gloomy or misty and mysterious. Rarely, the sun would break through, a little ghostly warmth, and the trees would be bright, and the leaves would cast a dappled shadow on the forest floor. When the sky was wet, snails and slugs and worms came out to celebrate on tree trunks, and following them came the birds. When the sky was warm, the birds sunned themselves on high branches and sang praises. Sometimes the birds would fight, screaming songs against a raucous raven that had appeared from the sky, and they would try and drive it back, fluttering around the big, arrogant creature. And it would leave.

One night I went outside. Claire was in the living room, and she looked up and smiled. I knew she wasn’t worried about me. She knew that I was getting better.

Gravel crunched, branches snapped. Moonlight lit my trail until I found myself by the lake, staring out at the water, and I crouched down, wrapping my arms around my knees. It was gorgeous and surreal, the crescent moon reflected in a warped image, the tops of the trees straining for the edge of the lake in the water.

I let myself cry then, fat droplets of salt, and my body shook, and I felt alone. I let my mouth open so I could hear the breaths exiting my chest, the air re-entering. At some point, the moon reached the peak of the sky, something I saw through blurred eyes, and voices faded in my head. Cassie begging me to let her in, Mom talking to me, asking me when I would be okay. Doctors at the hospital, telling us that Cassie was in a coma. That the car had given her multiple fractures, brain trauma, broken ribs, a punctured lung. I remembered asking them if she would be okay.

I remembered before that, screaming at Cassie to get out of my room, to leave me alone until my voice was hoarse and tears were streaming down Cassie’s face.

Then everything faded out, except for my voice, and I was left with the chill of the lake and the light of the moon.

I wiped my eyes and looked across the lake. There was a blurry form with a pale, ghost-like face and wide eyes. For a second, before I blinked, those were Cassie’s eyes. But if it was Cassie’s spirit, she didn’t look angry, she just looked understanding.

She looked sad. The owl looked sad.

It opened its beak again and shrieked, a shrill cry, and I watched as it took flight. It flew towards me, over the lake, wings quiet, skimming the air. And then, as quickly as it came, it left, flying over my head, and when I turned to look for it, it was already gone.

I told Claire about it in the morning, when she brought me breakfast. For once, my door was kept open, so she didn’t need to do her usual soft knock and ask if it was okay if she opened the door. I left the curtains open all night, with the window cracked open, so the forest air could infiltrate my lungs and I could dream about the lake while I slept. She noticed all this with keen eyes, and she smiled, and this time it reached her entire face and split her in two.

“I’m glad you’re getting better, Mina.”

“I saw an owl last night.”

“Did it have a white face?”
“Yeah. It screamed, too. It was kind of… haunting.”

“That was a barn owl,” she said. “They like the lake, but sometimes they come near the house to watch over us. They’re fascinating.”

I cried, then, but she came over with questioning eyes, and when I reached out for her, she held me in a tight hug. My tears were over sooner than they ever had been, and when I breathed in, it was slow and deep and with the freshness that air has after you let out something you’ve been holding for your entire life.

Sometimes to keep living, you need to die a bit first.