Page 31 of Dark Ugly Places

I shake my head, willing the full recollection forward, but it doesn’t come.

My stomach lurches again. I gag, and a terrible heave of bile comes up that burns the back of my throat.

I roll my head back and forth and press the temple, hoping for relief, and suddenly, I remember how it started.

The voice.

The face staring back at me, so sure. So confident.

I remember now.

She was here.

And because she was here, I didn’t take Topamax.

She knows. Of course she does.

Smart bitch.

The last time she was here, I didn’t have Topamax. She’s been paying attention.

I muscle myself up onto the toilet and sit, holding my head in my hands, trying to remember. The weight of my torso like a thousand pounds of lead. I need Topamax. I need to think. I need to remember.

I shake out my leg, cold and dead. The nerves pop and prick inside my foot, ankle, and calf, resisting the movement. I rise and limp toward the medicine cabinet, blood rushing to my foot, my nerves awakening. I find my bottle of Topamax and examine it. Empty. A memory comes back, thick and sudden, like waves rolling toward me from the deep sea: tiny pink pills emptying into the toilet, the tinge of pink on the water. My lifeline—all 120 tablets—gone.

It’s not just the hundreds of dollars it will cost me to refill the prescription, nor the withdrawal that will come during the agony of waiting for them. It’s that she knew my dependency, my need. And she took them anyway.

A slow chill meanders up my spine, the steady creep of panic. With the pills, I’m numb, but I’m me at least. I’m here. I can control things. Without them, the panic attacks and migraines get worse.

But of course, when I’m weak, that’s when she thrives.

She’s enviably strong in those moments. Me, but not me at all. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. She is part of me, but better. I almost believe in her, this woman. As if she can do anything. As if she can survive anything. She was made for that.

So why am I afraid?

“What happened?” My own voice echoes, scratchy, tired, like sandpaper on sandpaper. My temples thump with a deep, stabbing pain once again, a warning from within. She is here now with me. I am her vessel.

“Martha, Martha. What did you do?”

14

Martha

Nicola pushes me down again, resisting too hard for me to come through, and it burns. She’s demanding to know what happened, her frustration mounting. After all this time, why can’t she trust me?

Topamax is the main one to worry about. It provides that constant undercurrent of safety for her, and I know she fears being without it like a child without her security blanket. But enough is enough. I need her to let me in. The pink pills flushed easily in a little bit of toilet paper. It’s expensive stuff, and I half thought of selling it along with the opioids, but I couldn’t take the risk.

When all the tablets were gone, I gathered the empty bottles into a CVS plastic bag and tossed them out with the rest of the garbage.

In the kitchen, I placed two tramadol onto a tissue and left a glass of water with a note for Emmy.

That’s all I could manage. I forgot how exhausting it is being the second in command, always fighting to have the light, always pushing her down, back, and away.

I will let Nicola have the light for now. I’ve waited years, after all, so what’s just one more day?

15

Bambi