Fiction: Fixing You

            “Your eyes are red,” I declared with trepidation.

            “My eyes were watering…”

            “What for?”

            “’Cause of my contacts. I put ‘em in funny. I mean, I put ‘em in wrong.”

            “Um hmm,” I responded. Her false air of confidence had never done much to fool me. Facing away from me, she couldn’t see the suspicious glance I slid her from across the room. She’d turned to watch the wall; it never noticed her eyes.

            “You never wear your contacts,”

            “I guess I just felt like a change today.”

            “Um hmm,” I repeated, busying my hands with the empty pill bottles on her desk. I stacked them up high, little plastic palace, then knocked them down again. How proudly they stand, how quickly they fall.

            “You’ve got those little rings around your eyes again.”

            She pretended not to have noticed.

            “Do I really?  Oh, shit. Hand me my make-up bag? It’s ’cause I haven’t been sleeping.”

            “Um hmm,” I murmured as I passed the little pink cosmetics case. She dotted beige cream under her eyes, and as she rubbed it in, the dark circles that surrounded deep blue faded.

            A long pause. I stared out of the nearest window, unsure of my next move. She was so fragile, delicate as the newborn in the sterile white incubator whose parents pray through the window. I was too young and unwise to handle her; so clumsy, every move came that much closer to hurting her.

            “Are you doing it again?”, I asked.

            “Doing what?”

            “You know,” I answered. “What you used to do last year. And I asked you to stop.”

            I’m the only one who’s ever asked. She answered slowly, searching for a diplomatic answer, racking her brain for a way to make it all seem so trivial.

            “I haven’t done it in like, two weeks. I’m totally fine about it.”

            “But you still do it?”

            “It‘s not a big deal. I mean, it‘s like, it‘s just what I do, you know?”

            But I didn’t know. I started to nod, then stopped.

            “But you’re already so sick. Your body’s so weak. Why put it through this?”

            “You do it,” she said shortly.

            “I don’t do it anymore, Jess. It scares me. The way my head spins and my chest hurts when I do it. It all scares me.”

            “If it hurts, you do it wrong.”

            “No, Jess,” I said. “It’s supposed to hurt. ”

            She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, without the tiniest hint of apology.

            Her father did not swim at the bottom of that sea all those years ago, and when she was only ten, he was gone. I knew I didn’t understand. “I can’t live without him,” she had said me that night when she told me every detail with dry eyes. And so for the past ten years she had not really been living, a ruined little piece of what she could have been.  Had she really drowned along with him?

            “I told you guys I was screwed up. Nobody can fix it.”

            My eyes searched for hers, but she’d crept out of my sight. The bathroom door was shut, both sink faucets on full blast. The shower was running, steam seeping under the door and fogging the windows; no one stands under it‘s stream. Water hitting porcelain is not nearly as noisy as she anticipates. I can’t fix her.