Blank Slate
“Elea– Dear?”
The unusual taciturnity of the house slightly irritates me. After a long day at the Knick, bubbling with life and helter-skelter, I feel apprehensive, as if the events, reverberating in the back of my memory, haven’t yet faded. In an instant, I relax a little; my eyes fall at the tall grandfather’s clock in the corner of the dining room. Five minutes to eleven. She must be asleep: I’ve had two urgent surgeries I couldn’t reschedule, so I turned up late. She didn’t wait up.
Furtively, I crawl into the bedroom to find a lamp at the nightstand alight and a book lying face-down. Well, she may have attempted to wait but eventually got drowsy. I remember finding Eleanor in the very same state, piled underneath books, papers, documents, and dictionaries, reluctant to go to bed as if her life depended on my arrival. I was about to chide her, but she easily disarmed me with her smile, with a reverent look in the azure eyes, webbed by a thin net of lighter streaks.
Quietly, trying not to cause too much noise, I head over to the nearby table with a bottle of whiskey on it. Sinking into the armchair, I stare at the face of the woman in bed, unconsciously spotting the familiar yet unknown features: the lips, something around the eyes… The eyes that do not possess a modicum of the dread she tried to sleep away but couldn’t.
These belonged to another woman. To the woman that probably knew no tragedy.
I can’t recall when was the last time I felt so tranquil. I pour a glass of whiskey; the dim light reflects in the rich color of the whiskey and drowns in the depths of the glass, finally dissolving. Irresolutely, I take a small sip, savoring the wooden aftertaste on my tongue. Since Eleanor’s first bout of severe depression, I grew accustomed to gulping the drink down, but now I can relax and brood it all over.
I bring the glass to my eyes and stare through it at the spot where the cradle once stood. That day I gazed at it so intensively that I stopped seeing it, and I could pretend it never existed. I glance at the woman in the bed. She turned out to be a better doctor than I was, and she seemed to know nothing about it. As a surgeon with extensive experience, I tended to rely on physical symptoms of a savage disease: checked the temperature and the pulse, hoping to discover the sign that would identify that something was not right. It didn’t work with me, or Eleanor: my medical condition had nothing to do with the body; it appeared to be less straightforward and concealed way deeper than I could cut – no surgical knife could penetrate that far. It was a fever dream that clouded my vision, a harrowing mirage that thickened no matter what I was trying to do. It was a… blank slate.
Blank slate.
When Lillian died, I realized that I felt numb, stymied, and ossified; I felt nothing at all. No searing pain, no grief, no anger, no blame, nothing. I may have been shocked. Even when I held the breathless corpse of my daughter in my arms for a postmortem photo, I couldn’t quite mourn.
I did not believe it.
Nor did Eleanor.
My eyes swerve to look at the set of drawers underneath long rows of shelves packed with exquisite china. Eleanor asked me to bring two photos to her as she wanted to keep me and Lillian close, but I still don’t have enough courage to open the drawers: I occasionally pushed the postmortem photo in there, too. They say such photos help cope with the tragedy. Do they? Will I ever acknowledge that? Will it ever stop hurting? Will she ever heal?..
I take another sip. She doesn’t seem to get better. Whenever I visit her, she asks one and the same question, the answer to which doesn’t probably reach her devastated, deficient mind.
“Everett?”
“Eleanor? Love?” I respond almost immediately.
“Is she okay, Everett? Will she be okay?”
I barely recognize her voice, I barely recognize my wife in this pitiful state, in this shadowy figure. She’s always been petite, brittle, even, but what I see now is an ephemeral apparition, a scrawny silhouette, whose dull eyes roam across the room and the scanty furniture, not focusing on anything in particular. I do not know how many times I have to go through this ordeal.
Her desperate voice, begging to resort to the obsolete practice of bloodletting is still ringing in my ears, reverberating in the brain: will I ever forget the reflection of utter anguish tormenting both my wife and my daughter? Will I ever forget how shattered she looked? Will I ever forget how my hand involuntarily trembled when I pressed the scalpel and made a thin, precise incision in the sizzling hot and yet slimy skin of my own child? I was already in the know that it was a lost cause, it was a last resort, but I nevertheless took my chances.
And failed.
Me, an efficient, experienced doctor. Dumbfounded, broken into smithereens by reality.
Lillian was exhausted by the raving, savage disease, so she barely protested. I… felt like a monster, cutting her porcelain skin. If it wasn’t for Edwards meddling with my goddamn chart and with my goddamn patient–
“Everett, did you see Lillian? She’s so unusually quiet. Did you put her to bed?”
Her eerie voice sends chills down my spine.
“Eleanor,” I swallow thickly, mustering my all courage, “Love… Lillian is… gone.”
“What do you mean – gone?”
She blinks. She doesn’t understand, and I clench my teeth so tightly that I can hear them screech. I am exasperated, furious; I want to grab her by the shoulders and shout that Lillian is dead, and no matter what she does – no matter what we both do – this fact is not going to change. Lillian will not come back, and I am still struggling to cope with it, but she… isn’t even trying to move on. How to make her comprehend?..
“She’s… dead, Eleanor,” I rap out with a sigh, though I hardly squelch an urge to roar from the searing pain these words cause. I hate that, but I am losing my control, and even my sanity may very well be betraying me.
A faint glimpse of understanding floated on the surface of her cerulean irides but eventually drowned in the depths of sorrow.
She’s not ready to accept it and will unlikely ever do. As a doctor, I committed a crime conniving at her plight, egoistically forcing her to lead the life she used to live. She was in no state to stick to the daily regimen, she most certainly needed help, and I ignored it, getting entangled into the machinations at the Knick. The more I remained grieving, the harder it was to keep up: Edwards was building a new world behind my back, and Thack, bolstering his brazen, senseless initiatives, was extremely content with the innovations proffered by this weasel. As if the rascal’s skills could surpass mine! My world was crumbling, my life was falling apart, my family was ruined, and all of it – because of just one man who emerged at the threshold of the Knick completely out of the blue.
Just one man crushed my world. While I was trying to assemble the pieces of what was left, my wife, locked up all alone with her desolation and woe, was slowly going insane. I had to hoist myself out of the muddy swamp of devastation and grief while she no longer latched onto life.
I put the glass onto the table, glanced at Dorothy again, and grabbed Eleanor’s embroidery. I reminisce about how she danced across the room, decorating it with her needlework. Sometimes she hummed a song under her breath or turned to me to smile. She was never intimidated to exhibit how ridiculously happy she felt, even when surrounded by endless battalions of marching nurses in the Knick’s halls or when complimented by good-natured remarks of Thack’s.
I should’ve learned something from her. Probably, it’s indeed the time for a fresh start.
