Page 3 of Soft Erasure

“Be good,” I said, to no one, with my hand on my stomach where the muscle memory was older than Jeff.

I was seven months.

Caldren heard me.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly right.”

The matchbook was the only thing on that dock that was still mine.

I stood in clothes that belonged to no one yet. Not mine. Not yet anyone’s. My dress was on the boards behind me. The lake was already smooth. I didn’t look back at it. Looking back was not something a woman in this situation did, and I was already becoming that woman.

By the time we reached the car, I was someone else. The lake had closed over the place where Jeff had been. The official story would be a man who had been drinking, who had fallen from a dock that had not been maintained. My family would see to that. I had only the card.

Only afraid. That would be the simpler sentence, and simpler sentences are what they hand you so you stop asking why you, and not someone else. A list already had my name on it, long before I gave anyone a reason to write it there.

Not the woman they made. The woman they selected.

It was mine. Nobody had told me yet.

CHAPTER ONE

Adherence: 95

The discharge room was the color of the inside of an oyster.

Pale, faintly iridescent, a shade expensive enough to look like nothing at all.

The man with the sandy hair had been running a cleaning product across the doorframe since six this morning.

The wear on the wood said he had been doing it long before that too. It had never once been dirty enough to need him.

The wiping was the point.

Matthew was sitting in the chair across from me.

In a dove-gray sweater, the same cut, the same Ward & Huxley merino, the same silhouette he wore in every room he entered.

The colors varied. Nothing else did. He had decided one thing about his appearance and wore it without revision.

His ankles were crossed.

Matthew with the platinum ring catching the recessed light, the green seam finding my eyes before I had a reason to look away, and looking away took more out of me than it should have, for as long as I had been here, which was a length of time I could not name, because whole stretches of it had gone under sedation, days that never got laid end to end, and the months since the lake had not been mine to count.

The walls were a ceramic-coated drywall that stayed smooth under any cleaning product.

Everything in the room had been chosen. The chair I was sitting in was a Danish piece I had once seen in a magazine, in a photograph of a rich woman’s husband’s office, on a coffee table beside a cup I’d been holding in an apartment that was not mine.

The band on my wrist had been unboxed in front of me by a nurse whose nails were the same shade as her blazer.

The band was heavier than the cuff bracelet I had bought at a stall on Valencia Street for fourteen dollars the summer I had been subletting on Guerrero. I had worn it for two years without taking it off.

In the apartment on Guerrero I had been a woman who chose when to hold and when to let go. I had called it choosing.

It was a reflex.

I had never logged which came first, the erasing or Jeff.

This band I knew only by what it cost me.