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Time slips through her fingers, it’s hard to keep track. She knows she’s been sick for a long time. She knows she’s done things. Bad things.
No, don’t gloss over it.
She knows she’s killed people.
She knows she knows, but she can’t be sure, can’t be sure of anything.
It’s not her house. It’s not the house she had with Matt. It’s not the home they built for themselves. She’s not supposed to be in any house at all.
She gets up to look around, awkward, stumbling, like that girl she’d gone to classes with. She’d been losing her sight progressively for about a year, and her parents were always hovering. She cried, twice where Milla could hear, and Milla had laughed at her once, when she tripped over her desk. She feels bad about it now. She understands better, what it must have been like, to lose something you counted on all your life, to feel weak and helpless for the first time.
Why can she remember that when she can’t remember—
Time slips through her fingers. She slips through the fingers of time. She remembers she can’t remember. It’s jumbled and soft, indistinct, muffled. She’s not sure whether it’s her sickness that makes it that way, or the drugs they gave her. She doesn’t know how she got here.
She feels around the… room? It’s not familiar. She doesn’t remember it at all. She was in a hospital. There were nurses, and soft voices, condescending. Her legs are weak, wobbling. They kept her arms strapped to her chest and rolled her in a wheelchair. She doesn’t remember how often she’s allowed to walk on her own. They used to let her do it more, she thinks. They used to use less medicine. They underestimated her, even with all the people she killed just at first. They didn’t think a blind woman could be dangerous. But Matt taught her, for her protection, for fun, and the sickness made her fast and vicious.
She doesn’t remember how many incidents there were. She doesn’t know how many people she hurt, or if she killed anyone else. But they stopped underestimating her eventually.
She’s in a room. She doesn’t know how she got here. It doesn’t sound like the hospital, it doesn’t smell like the hospital. She’s in a room and there are things in it and she’s alone. She thinks maybe she should be afraid, but she thinks she doesn’t know how to anymore. It doesn’t make sense, but nothing has for a while.
There isn’t a straight jacket and there isn’t a wheelchair and her head feels like it’s spinning and she’s stumbling over herself. She realizes she has her arms crossed in front of her chest out of habit. She reaches out. She finds a wall and leans against it. She breathes the way Matt used to, slow and steady. He used to sit cross legged on the floor or on their bed. She used to come up behind him sometimes, and hook her chin over his shoulder and wrap her arms around him. He would pretend to be annoyed at being interrupted but she knew he wasn’t really. And they would sit together like that and she would feel him breathe and breathe.
It helps, the breathing. She feels steadier after, like she knows how to walk again.
She follows the wall until she finds a closet. Matt’s clothes are inside. She finds the tags with the colors written out in braille. It’s been a long time since she had any reason to care about colors, a long time since she was able to dress herself. She used to like clothes, was proud of having a strong fashion sense. It fascinated her, the way she was able to create an image for herself and project it out into the world. She misses it, that sense of power, any sense of power at all, really.
She was never too interested in color, even back then, and she’s forgotten now, everything she knew about them. But red, she knows, was Matt’s favorite. Matt cared about colors, a little desperately. She thinks he would have been louder with them, more expressive, emphatic, if he wasn’t so afraid of messing up.
Why is she thinking of him in past tense? He isn’t dead. She’s the one who went away.
But his clothes are here, in this room. And she doesn’t know how she got here, but she’s here now, and that must mean, that must mean she’s where she’s supposed to be. She’s with Matt. Of course she’s where she’s supposed to be.
She manages to walk back to the bed without falling over anything, and she lies down again. She’s so tired just from walking, but it feels so good just to be able to walk again on her own, to be on her own with no one watching. She misses Matt, though.
He’ll be home soon.
She realizes what this means. Things slip past her, the passage of time, memories. But she is in a new place and it has Matt’s things, and she can put two and two together. She got better. Or she’s getting better, anyway. The hospital let her out and she’s with Matt again.
”I’m home,” She says, “I’m home with Matt. I’m home.”
She repeats it to herself until knowledge solidifies inside her, impervious to all confusion and forgetting. This is the one thing that matters, and she remembers so little, but she knows what’s important. The joy of it fills her up until she feels as though she could float away.
But she can’t do that, of course. Matt will be home soon.
The door opens, and it’s Matt. She doesn’t know how she’s certain, but she is. He’s her husband, she’ll always recognize him.
He doesn’t say anything.
”Matt?” She says, “Matt, is that you?”
He still doesn’t say anything. Is he hurt? Is something wrong? Can he tell, somehow, that she’s forgotten?
She needs to be very normal and very calm. Especially if there’s something wrong, she needs to be alright so she can help him, so he doesn’t have to be worried about her.
“Matt, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?” She says, urgent but not frantic.
He’s still just quiet. She‘s always hated that, the way he gets quiet sometimes, and he can observe her, down to hearing her very cells multiply it seems like sometimes, and she can get nothing from him in return. He always gets quiet when he wants not to upset her, and it always has the opposite effect.
“Matt, say something,” she says.
”Stop. Just… stop,” he says, and he sounds… he sounds… “Milla, how did you get in this apartment?”
(She doesn’t know how she got here)
That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. He’s here and she’s home, that’s the only thing that matters. She knows that. She’s sure.
“How… I live here, Sweetheart,” She says. Matt gets confused too, sometimes. It’s fine. She is calm and normal, and she can be sure of it for both of them. It has to be fine.
”Matt, you’re frightening me. Come here, put your arms around me. Please,” she says, because she needs him to. He needs him to hold her, at least once, just in case it’s not fine. But he just backs away from her, back to not saying anything but at least he’s letting her hear him move, “Why won’t you?”
“Milla… Honey…,” he says, and his voice is horribly, awfully gentle, “You can’t be here. They’ll think I took you. I could be disbarred. I could go to jail.”
No no no no no no no no.
She’s here. She’s here. She’s supposed to be here. She’s with Matt, in Matt’s home. That makes it her home.
What, does he think she walked here by herself? She can barely walk across the room. The hospital was full of nurses, full of doctors. He couldn’t take her. No one could take her.
She was wrong before. She can be afraid.
It’s fine.
Maybe if she pretends hard enough, it will be fine.
“Took me,” she says, “You’re making no sense. This is our home, Sweetheart!” He’s here and she’s here, and that makes it home. That’s the only thing that matters.
She can feel the sickness coming. She can, sometimes. She’s scared, and being scared is dangerous. Matt’s here. Everything is alright. She’s getting better, she has to be. She needs to be calm.
”You’re right, Milla,” He says, “Never mind. I’ve just… I’ve got a headache.”
Does that mean concussed? He’d better not be brain damaged. One of them needs to be able to think straight in this relationship. Still, the relief washes through her. She was right. She’s home, and everything will be okay.
“Let me make some tea,” he says, “I’ll be right there, and everything will be just fine.”
She believes him.
He hands her a mug of tea and sits next to her in the bed with all his clothes still on. The tea is hot, just under a boil, and the mug is ceramic. She could burn someone with the tea, she could break the mug and use the shards as weapons. But it’s alright. She’s allowed to have real tea in a real mug because she’s getting better, and she’s home.
She can taste the medicine in the tea, but that’s alright. She trusts Matt.
She’s not afraid, as consciousness leaves her, because she’s in bed next to her husband, and everything is as it should be.
She wakes up and she’s in the hospital.
Of course she is. None of it was real. Of course it was all a dream. She is never getting better, she knows, she knows. But it’s hard to remember. She doesn’t want to.
She cries and cries until the nurses come.