Under My Skin. Lisa Unger

is not new. Since his death, I vividly, urgently dream of my husband—embraces, lovemaking, his return from this place or that, maybe the store, or a business trip. The joy of his homecoming lifts my heart. These moments—though they are twisted and strange, places altered, patchworks of things that happened and didn’t—are so desperately real that I often awake thinking that my real life, the one in which Jack has been taken from me, is the nightmare.

      And then, when I wake, there’s the hard, cold slap of reality: he’s gone. And that loss sinks in anew. Every single time. How I dread that crush when he’s taken from me again, when the heaviness of grief and loss settles on me once more, fresh and raw, its terrible weight pushing all the air from my chest.

      I wipe away tears I didn’t even know I was crying. And I reach for the remote and let our stored pictures come up on the screen. Photos from our travels scroll—a canopy walk in Costa Rica, lava tubing in Iceland, a selfie that we took while kissing on the Cliffs of Moher. The images transfix, the girl I was, the man he was. Both of us gone. Many nights after work, this is what I do. Lie here and watch our hundreds of photos scroll silent across the screen.

      It’s going to get better, Dr. Nash has told me. With time, the weight of this will lessen.

      It isn’t, I want to say but don’t. How can it?

      Outside my towering windows, the city glimmers.

      I pull myself up, dig the new lower dosage prescription out of my bag, pour a big glass of water. Just about to drink the medication down, I pause. It sits in the palm of my hand, blue and seductive.

      What if I just stopped taking them? What would happen? I should do some research. Jack wouldn’t approve of the amount of medication I’ve been taking, I know that. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol for a headache.

      Or...

      I remember the higher dosage Layla handed me; I grab them from the pocket of my coat, hearing her voice, always so certain: take what you need to sleep. I think about the other pills I took today. How many? What were they? How much wine did I drink?

      To be truthful here, there’s not much of an internal battle. I need the utter blankness of dreamless sleep, the dream life Dr. Nash so values be damned. I need a break from grief, from my thoughts—from myself. I shake out one of the higher dosage pills. Then another. I drink them down. Just for tonight.

      With images twirling around my sleepy brain, I enter the bedroom. On the bedside, the black dream journal rests by my bed. I haven’t written in it in a while, but Dr. Nash’s advice from today is still fresh in my mind. We can learn a lot about ourselves there. I flip it open, and scrawl down what I remember, but it’s faded to nearly nothing. I scribble: a dark-eyed girl on the screen. Who is she?

      The pen feels so heavy in my hand.

      There is no furniture in the bedroom except a low white platform bed, covered by the cloud of a down comforter, big soft pillows. I close my eyes, let the journal and pen drop to my side—pushing away thoughts of Jack, and the stranger shadowing my life, Layla, Dr. Nash. I wait for that blissful chemical slumber.

       5

      The surface beneath me is cold and hard, my head a siren of pain. Nausea claws at my stomach and the back of my throat. My shoulder aches, twisted under me. A sharply unpleasant odor invades. I don’t want to open my eyes; I squeeze them shut instead.

      Where am I? I should know this.

      I open them just a sliver, peering through the fog of my lashes. Silver and white, a filthy tile floor, feet walking by, high heels, sneakers, flats. Scuffling, voices. Music throbbing outside, someone laughing too loud—drunk or high.

      You must be kidding me! a voice shrieks.

      I push myself up. I’m in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl. That odor—it’s urine. I’m on the floor in a bathroom, in a nightclub by the sound of it. My heart starts to race, my breath ragged. I look down at myself. I am wearing a dress I don’t recognize; tight and red, strappy high heels.

      Okay, okay, okay, I tell myself. Just think. Just think. What’s the last thing you remember?

      Jack’s funeral beneath a cruelly pretty sky, leaning heavily on Mac, his strong arm around my waist practically the only thing holding me up. Layla holding my other hand. Mac’s whisper in my ear: It’s okay, Poppy. We’re going to get through this. All of us together. Hold on. Be strong. He’d want that. Our old apartment filled with friends, damp eyes, whispering voices; Jack’s mother, her face ashen with a tray of sandwiches wobbling in her hand; Layla taking it from her, laying it down on the table. My mother chatting with Alvaro, flirting as if this wasn’t her son-in-law’s funeral. I can hear her throaty laugh, inappropriate enough to draw eyes. Me wishing for the millionth time that my father was still alive. Daddy, please. I need you. How silly. A grown woman still calling for her father. Those are the last things I can remember. Where am I now? How did I get here?

      I pull myself unsteadily to standing, the walls spinning. Someone pounds on the stall door.

      “One minute,” I say, voice croaky and strange. I don’t even sound like myself.

      Whoever it is finds another stall, slams the door. The door outside swings open, voices and music pour in, filling the whole room. Then it goes quiet again.

      There’s a bag lying beside me, a glittery black evening purse. Even though I don’t recognize it, I grab for it and open it. My cell phone, dead. Five hundred dollars in cash. A thick compact, which I pry open with shaking hands.

      The woman in the mirror is a mess, long black hair wild, mascara running down her face in sad clown tears, pale, blue eyes wide with fright. I sit on the seat and use some toilet paper and my own spit to clean my face. I do a passable job, running my fingers through my hair, using the makeup in my bag to fix myself up. In the small shaking mirror, I’m almost normal again. Except for the fact that I have no idea where I am, or how I got here.

      Okay. Deal with that later. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I just need to get myself home. I can figure everything out once I’m safe. I’ll call Layla then. We’ll figure it out. She’ll know what to do.

      I wobble through the stall door, tilting in heels too high. Two women—one black, one white—applying makeup at the mirror glance at me, then at each other. They both start to laugh.

      “You okay, honey?” one of them asks, not really caring. She smears a garish red to her lips.

      “You need to Uber your ass home, girl,” says the other, frowning in disapproval. Her hair is dyed platinum blond, her lips dazzling berry. I feel a lash of anger, but a wash of shame keeps me from answering back.

      Their laughter follows me out the door, until it’s drowned out by the heavy techno beat. Bodies throb on the dance floor as I push my way through the crowd, wondering where the exit is. Instead, I find myself at the bar, taking a seat. I’ll rest here a minute, my legs so unsteady, head spinning.

      The bartender comes over and leans in to me. She brings me a glass of ice water. Embossed in ornate script on the glass, a word in red: Morpheus.

      “Your boyfriend’s been waiting for you all this time,” she says as I take a long swallow. “If you thought you lost him, you didn’t.”

      I glance in the direction that her eyes drift—they are violet, eerie and strange. Color contacts. On her arms, tattoos—a dragon, a tower, a woman dancing. I stare, fixated by the lines and colors. I can’t focus on anything for very long.

      “He sees you.”

      Who is he? Long sandy hair, pulled back, a thick jaw and strange eyes that seem to defy colors—amber, green or steely blue. He gets up and comes over, leans in behind me.

      “I thought you left.” His voice in my ear sends a shiver down my spine.