POV: Jasmine
The light came in around the edge of the curtain and I was already awake to feel it.
I had not slept. That was not the same as having stayed up. I had been somewhere underneath sleep, in a flat, low room where the mind kept running because nothing in my body had asked it to stop.
Now there was light at the curtain. Now it was morning. Now I had to be a person again.
I did not move.
There was a small set of footsteps in the hall. The handle on the bedroom door turned. Aurora climbed up onto the bed.
She did not get under the covers. She crawled across the duvet to my side and sat there in her pyjamas with the rabbit under one arm and her hair in a small mess that had been Finn's attempt at a ponytail the night before.
She put her hand on my shoulder. "Mama."
I let one eye work. "Hi, baby."
She crossed her legs under her and studied me. "I am hungry. Can I have French toast? With the powder thing on top?"
The word no did not arrive in my mouth. The word yes did not arrive either. There was a flat space where the word was supposed to be and nothing in it.
She leaned closer, her voice smaller now. "Mama?"
I managed a sound. "Mm."
She waited a beat, and when she spoke next her voice had changed to something careful and old. "And then can I have a hug?"
I lay there and looked at her.
She was the most important thing in any room I had ever been in. I knew that the way I knew my own name. And inside the body that knew that, there was nothing to give her.
I am not making French toast. I am not getting up. I cannot get up. I do not have a hand in me that can pour the milk into the bowl. I do not have an arm in me that can lift to hug her.
I had nothing.
The shame of having nothing arrived under the nothing, and the shame was heavy, and the shame was the wrong kind of weight — it did not push me up out of the bed the way shame had pushed me up out of every chair in my life. It sat on top of the nothing and joined it.
"Aurora," I said, and my voice came out flat and far away. "I need you to ask the nanny. She will do the powder. She does it better than I do."
Aurora's hand tightened on my shoulder. "But —"
"And I will hug you later, baby," I told her. "Not now. Now you have to go and eat."
She did not move. I did not look at her face. I did not give myself permission to look at her face, because I knew what it would be doing, and I did not have anything in the body that could fix it.
Her voice got very quiet. "Mama. Are you sick?"
I closed my eyes. "A little. Go on, baby."
She sat there for another second. "Are you going to be okay?"
"Yes," I said, and the word cost me something I could not name. "Go."
She slid down off the bed slowly, the way she got off a chair when she was disappointed in something but did not have the words for it yet.
The rabbit dragged on the floor behind her. She walked out. She did not pull the door shut.
I rolled over. I rolled toward the wall.
I do not know what time it was when she went into the kitchen. I heard the small mechanical sound of the coffee maker from down the hall the way you heard things from inside a long tunnel.
The day did not stop. The day kept going around me.
I heard the nanny's voice and Aurora's voice in the kitchen, low and far away. I heard the television come on. I heard, at some point, Aurora laughing at something on the screen.
The laugh was small and contained. She is being careful with the volume of the apartment. At four. She is being careful for me.
I did not get up.
I lay on my side with my face toward the wall and my eyes open and then closed and then open again, and the light at the curtain crawled up the wall in a thin pale band and crossed the picture of Liam on the chest of drawers and went past it.
I was not sleeping. I was not thinking. I was not, technically, doing anything.
It was different from sad. Sad was an active state. Sad arrived with a direction and a colour. This was the absence of direction. The body refusing to move and the mind refusing to file.
Get up. Why. Get up. To do what. Get up. There is nothing to get up to.
The arguments my mind tried to start with itself ran out of fuel halfway through and fell down between my ribs and stayed there.
The picture on the chest of drawers was Liam holding Aurora at one. His hand was around her stomach. She was facing the camera with one tooth out. He was not facing the camera. He was looking at her.
I looked at it for a long time. The handle on the door turned.
The nanny's voice came through the gap, soft and professional. "Ms. Harlow. Are you all right?"
I did not turn over. "I am fine. Thank you."
She opened the door a little wider. "Aurora has eaten. We have done some colouring. She is watching her programme. Is there anything I can bring you?"
"No," I said. "Thank you."
She paused. "A glass of water?"
"No," I repeated. "Thank you."
She is reading me. She has been working in this apartment long enough to know the difference between not hungry and not in the room. She knows.
Her voice softened further. "I will check on you again in an hour."
"Thank you," I said, and the door closed.
I did not move.
The light at the curtain went from morning gold to the white of midday to the long flat grey of late afternoon. The picture of Liam had been in shadow for a while now.
I stared at the wall. I cannot do this for her. I cannot do this for her.
The sentence ran on a loop and did not land anywhere. The shame and the nothing held me to the bed the way a heavy blanket held a person in the middle of the night when the room had gone too cold to leave.
The phone on the bedside table lit up.
I saw it without turning my head. The screen made a small pale square on the pillow next to mine. A name came up on the lock screen.
Nora. A short message underneath.
Jas. I'm thinking about you. Call me when you —
The screen went dark. I did not pick the phone up. I did not reach for it.
I lay there with my hand under my cheek and my eyes on the wall and the light going slowly from grey to a darker grey, and the phone on the pillow next to me went dim and stayed dim, and I did not move.