test.txt

I'm so much happier now that I'm dead. Technically, missing. Soon to be presumed dead. But as shorthand, we'll say dead. It's been only a matter of hours, but I feel better already: loose joints, wavy muscles. At one point this morning, I realized my face felt strange, different. I looked in the rearview mirror – dread Carthage forty-three miles behind me, my smug husband lounging around his sticky bar as mayhem dangled on a thin piano wire just above his shitty, oblivious head – and I realized I was smiling. Ha! That's new. My checklist for today – one of many checklists I've made over the past year – sits beside me in the passenger seat, a spot of blood right next to Item 22: Cut myself. But Amy is afraid of blood , the diary readers will say. (The diary, yes! We'll get to my brilliant diary.) No, I'm not, not a bit, but for the past year I've been saying I am. I told Nick probably half a dozen times how afraid I am of blood, and when he said, ‘I don't remember you being so afraid of blood,' I replied, ‘I've told you, I've told you so many times!' Nick has such a careless memory for other people's problems, he just assumed it was true. Swooning at the plasma center, that was a nice touch. I really did that, I didn't just write that I did. (Don't fret, we'll sort this out: the true and the not true and the might as well be true.) Item 22: Cut myself has been on the list a long time. Now it's real, and my arm hurts. A lot. It takes a very special discipline to slice oneself past the paper-cut layer, down to the muscle. You want a lot of blood, but not so much that you pass out, get discovered hours later in a kiddie pool of red with a lot of explaining to do. I held a box cutter to my wrist first, but looking at that crisscross of veins, I felt like a bomb technician in an action movie: Snip the wrong line and you die. I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper arm, gnawing on a rag so I wouldn't scream. One long, deep good one. I sat cross-legged on my kitchen floor for ten minutes, letting the blood drizzle steadily until I'd made a nice thick puddle. Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick would have done after he bashed my head in. I want the house to tell a story of conflict between true and false. The living room looks staged, yet the blood has been cleaned up: It can't be Amy! So the self-mutilation was worth it. Still, hours later, the slice burns under my sleeves, under the tourniquet. (Item 30: Carefully dress wound, ensuring no blood has dripped where it shouldn't be present. Wrap box cutter and tuck away in pocket him finish it). Check. Item 32: Change into generic clothes, tuck hair in hat, climb down the banks of the river, and scuttle along the edge, the water lapping inches below, until you reach the edge of the complex. Do this even though you know the Teverers, the only neighbors with a view of the river, will be at church. Do this because you never know. You always take the extra step that others don't, that's who you are. Item 29: Say goodbye to Bleecker. Smell his little stinky cat breath one last time. Fill his kibble dish in case people forget to feed him once everything starts. Item 33: Get the fuck out of Dodge. Check, check, check. I can tell you more about how I did everything, but I'd like you to know me first. Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn't really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy. What kind of woman would do such a thing? Let me tell you a story, a true story, so you can begin to understand. To start: I should never have been born. My mother had five miscarriages and two stillbirths before me. One a year, in the fall, as if it were a seasonal duty, like crop rotation. They were all girls; they were all named Hope. I'm sure it was my father's suggestion – his optimistic impulse, his tie-dyed earnestness: We can't give up hope, Marybeth . But give up Hope is exactly what they did, over and over again. The doctors ordered my parents to stop trying; they refused. They are not quitters. They tried and tried, and finally came me. My mother didn't count on my being alive, couldn't bear to think of me as an actual baby, a living child, a girl who would get to come home. I would have been Hope 8, if things had gone badly. But I entered the world hollering – an electric, neon pink. My parents were so surprised, they realized they'd never discussed a name, not a real one, for a real child. For my first two days in the hospital, they didn't name me. Each morning my mother would hear the door to her room open and feel the nurse lingering in the doorway (I always pictured her vintage, with swaying white skirts and one of those folded caps like a Chinese take-out box). The nurse would linger, and my mother would ask without even looking up, ‘Is she still alive?' When I remained alive, they named me Amy, because it was a regular girl's name, a popular girl's name, a name a thousand other baby girls were given that year, so maybe the Gods wouldn't notice this little baby nestled among the others. Marybeth said if she were to do it again, she'd name me Lydia.