A Study in Crimson

In which Shawn finds her. Two a.m., May sixth.

Before I get into the breadth of the story I'm really trying to tell here, you should know that it was Fi who taught me the difference between scarlet and crimson.

You see, scarlet is closer to orange. It's brighter, she said, like the red you see in the rising sun. That was her pretentious poet coming out, I said. I associated scarlet with The Scarlet Witch, from the Avengers. Crimson, on the other hand, was a darker red, the color of her lipstick when she wanted to look dangerous and sexy. I always thought of The Crimson Chin.

But for now, that all is beside the point, because I am not the one who finds her, two a.m., May sixth. I am the one who stumbles in our front door, exhausted, throwing my jacket, bitten by the night's chill, onto the couch. I am the one who tells Captain Kirk (the grizzled, fat beagle she insisted on taking in) to shut up, because a fat-assed, howling, snarly old animal keeping me up all night is not what I need.

It is Captain Kirk who finds her, sometime before I come home, and sits next to her at the foot of the bed, howling a howl that was more than a howl in Fiona's kingdom by the TV. He is dutiful, singing her an epilogue before any of the rest of us even know the story is over. He is better than me because he listened to her analyze Sonnet 57 out loud, he nipped at the pocket she kept the stolen pills in. Captain Kirk belongs to her, and he dies a week after, of a broken heart, I'm sure.

It takes me about five minutes to tire of Captain Kirk's one-man--one-dog--harmony, pull my a*s off the couch, and trudge towards the bedroom to give him something to fill his stupid mouth with. Then to swing the door open and for him to waddle over to me, still whimpering.

Four seconds.

One. What has she done? A pair of socked feet protruding from the end of the bed like the Wicked Witch of the East has fallen into my house, backwards, still dead. I am through the doorway and past the bureau.

Two. She said she was getting better, that she wasn't using anymore. She said I wasn't the cause for her turmoil, and I knew I was, somehow, but she said she was going to be okay. She told me she was working on it, and that she was even on speaking terms with her parents now. She told me she'd stopped stealing oxy from the pharmacy, stopped popping it to numb her pain. She said we were making progress in terms of the depression.

She was lying. I am at the opposite end of the bed, the side where I sleep.

Three. It's like her parents are looming in over me right now, with grim but satisfied faces, sneering at their daughter's worthless boyfriend, not even fazed by the idea of their only daughter being dead. They come not to mourn her, but to mock her, teeth bared like grizzlies but cackling like circus bears. They may have given biological life to her, but they are not her family. They have been embarrassed of her since she began to think for herself, but when she dies they will put on the concerned act, pretend to have been loving, nurturing, healthy from the start. They are even bigger liars than she is, and I hate them all the more. I am on my knees next to her leg.

Through history, literature, and a whole ton of soap operatic media over the years, they have said that scarlet is the color of blood. It's been said that the s**t will spurt out of a body like spunk in majestic scarlet streamers, coating the walls in a thin layer of light red stick. I can't tell you how many horror movies I've seen that spray the stuff in excess out of body parts you forgot even had blood in them. I also can't tell you how wrong they all are.

Because the stuff that's been trickling out of Fiona's mouth and nose for some time now is not that color she described to me. It is not a jolly Christmas red, undertoned with sunrise or mystical powers or the dark side's lightsaber. It is much thicker, blacker; tar-ish, comparable to the sticky stuff coating the matted pads she crammed to the bottom of the trash when she couldn't handle a tampon, then trudged back to the bedroom, closed the door, and curled into the fetal position for hours on end without a word to me or Captain Kirk, who is now lapping at my fingers around her thighs, and he is not crying because I am here to make everything better, obviously, but he does not know that my girlfriend's lifeless body on the floor of our bedroom, soaked in her own blood, cannot be fixed by elbow grease or a tighter distributor cap. Even so, Fiona is very much like a carburetor, worn down immensely by time and experience and extra fragile when the weather changes. And, because I really am a s**t mechanic, both fall apart when they meet my fingertips.

Four.

I am not her tragic hero. She is not a damsel in distress. I am a boy well broken in and she is a girl at the point of breaking at the seams.

She would not have wanted me to save her if I could.

It takes almost thirty minutes for me to turn a stunned, empty silence into an ugly gasping in of air and an ugly expulsion of unnecessary noise and salty hot tears and Captain Kirk finally singing once more with me, curled up beside her body with his nose against her hand, wishing she could reach down and pet him again, pretend it was all a joke and that she will hold him to her chest again, crying out mirthfully that we both fell for it. Another twenty minutes or so for me to stumble to the phone to dial 911, even though there is a cell phone in my pocket, but its wallpaper is a candid photo of her laughing, eyes crinkled up and her hand over her mouth, hair disheveled and wearing a lacy white bra with one of the straps falling down her shoulder. Forty minutes for the cop cars, ambulances to get here, both useless now, though one of the EMTs insists I am in shock and forces a blanket around my shoulders. I throw it off when they load her body, trapped under a thick black sheet, into one of the ambulances. Nothing in my body moves in time with my head. My feet try to, pacing me back and forth in front of the house, between the lawn and the cop who is trying to get more information out of me, but nothing moves fast enough to spin Earth the other way, take us back in time to keep her from doing any of this.

“Son,” he says, pulling the glasses off the end of his gnarled old nose. “I understand that this is a hard time for you, but you're gonna have to cooperate with us on this.” He spits a brown jet onto the pavement not far from my lawn and I have to physically restrain myself to keep from hitting him. Who the f**k wakes up for an emergency call, puts his clothes on, then puts in a big old wad of chew?

“I've told you everything I f*****g know, okay? She said she was getting better, she said she...God...” I hate myself for crying in front of him. I hate myself for having to wipe my nose on the end of my sleeve like a God damn kid while he watches, knowing that I'm nothing more than a college dropout who had to scrounge for an automechanic job while his girlfriend, the smart, tortured soul with steady work at the best pharmacy in town went and put a barrel in her mouth. Even this a*****e knows that I don't deserve her, and that's probably the most disgusting thing I feel tonight, especially when it prompts a heavy stream of bile to rise up my throat and purge my body of the food it's attempted to hold in the whole night. I lose it all right there in front of him, into my already-spotty lawn, in front of all the cops and EMTs and deputies and f*****g everyone.

“Shawn, sweetheart?” a familiar voice calls from behind me, but I cannot lift my head yet, my hands on my knees and the breath stalled in my throat under the thick layer of vomit. “Shawn, honey, what's going on?” Instead of standing up like a normal human being and turning to face her, I bend my knees a little more, peeking between my legs to look upside-down at our neighbor, Mrs. Milligan, roughly sixty years old, in her pasty white nightgown and turquoise hair curlers, running up the sidewalk in bare feet, huffing a little.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Milligan, please go back to sleep,” I force myself to croak, finally turning around but sitting down on the curb. The cop takes his chance to swoop down on her like a vulture, start asking questions at a whirlwind pace. She doesn't understand at first, because it's so early in the morning and nothing makes sense, until the ambulances, the police cars, and the inquiries about Fiona's mental health all fall into place, and then she does that old woman weep that no one, my cynical self included, can fail to empathize with.

“But I just spoke with her this afternoon!” she wails defensively, more effectively waking up the whole neighborhood than all the sirens have put together. “She just came over to borrow some butter for breakfast tomorrow!”

“Waffles,” I interject, looking up from my knees. “We always have waffles for breakfast on Sunday.”

While Mrs. Milligan continues to prattle to the cop about plans that will never be, talent that will never be appreciated, a wedding that will never take place, I cannot keep myself from watching the ambulance roll away, her empty body inside, the lights on top flashing as it returns to the hospital for her official autopsy. I keep picturing the color that pulsed out of her body in soft waves, and how she wears that color on her body so often, on her fingernails and toenails and, many times, her lips. I keep picturing the smile she wore telling me about that color, the light laugh she used when describing its connotation. I cannot put down my study in crimson, a study in crimson that I did not begin.

Author's Note

The finished product; please review! :)

Reviews

[Stephanie]

Wow. This is amazing. It's so real and I can see everything happening in my head. I think one of the best aspects to this is the four seconds, detailed out in everything Shawn is thinking. It seems impossible to think so much in so little time, but it happens and its devastating, its confusing, its surreal. This story is heartbreaking but such a wonderful read. Even someone like myself, who has never been through the situation, I felt everything. Again I say, wow. Great job Mia.