Dans l'obscurité de la nuit

1

MAYBE AND MIGHT

NICHOLAI

People used to tell me that everything would be okay. When they found Elspeth, she was blue in the face, with a belt tied around her neck. They told me that she was still breathing and that she would be okay. As they lowered her into the ground a week later, they all patted my back and told me that the worst was over. Her suffering was over. She was happy now; at peace.

The rest of us would be okay.

Except that the rest of us weren’t okay. My mother fucked everything up in her desperate attempts to feel okay. She confused all the advice: the pill scripts, the lists of activities to soothe her panic and anxiety. She mixed the wrong prescriptions and fell asleep in the relaxing bath that some idiot had told her to take.

I found her floating there several hours later, lavender-scented candle wax still ripe in the air, a teacup of diluted whiskey on the counter.

Things were never going to be okay. Not if people sat back and did nothing—hoping beyond hope and believing beyond rationality, writing their ‘odd jobs’ lists and mapping out their weight-loss goals while the whole world went to shit around them. You had to work hard to survive. To survive all of the pain and the fury that gradually built up with the full hellish spectrum of human experience.

I wasted the eight years after Elspeth’s death with my head thumping against a parade of textbooks, studies, and bound collections of statistics. I wanted to know everything there was to know about the science of saving people from themselves. I scoured every known study out there about abnormal disorders. I watched session tapes until my eyes were red. I skipped sleep, I refused to eat, and I drove my professors and supervisors crazy in my quest to fast-track my degree. Not a single professional—not the old philosophers, or the modern psychiatrists—could tell me what I should have done differently. What I could have done to save her. Them.

It’s not your fault. The same consolation over and over again. There’s nothing you could have done.

Eventually, I graduated from learning to practising, but it was all a waste, because I still didn’t know. I was still losing. I was losing friends, friends of friends, and complete strangers. I lost a student in my first six months of social work at the school. Around me, they were dropping like flies, and I was losing hope.

Maybe they were all right. There’s nothing I could have done differently, because the reality was that a person needed to save themselves, and there was nothing I could really do. Nothing any of us could really do. Our only hope was to stand by on the side-lines, waving our pathetic flags of support every day and fearing the shrill sound of the phone every night.

But …

There were times when I couldn’t accept that.

Like when she walked into my office.

Mika Grey.

She had the same look about her. The one I’d seen on Elspeth’s face. I couldn’t shake the sick premonition that it was only a matter of time before the need to chase pain would start up inside her, driving her to change, to slip into that cupboard of psychology that flipped the world into a game of chance.

This might help.

This might change everything for the better.

You might survive this.

I might be able to save you.

The difference was that Mika didn’t have anybody. She wasn’t anybody else’s Elspeth. Nobody wanted her, and nobody was going to stop her when it started to happen. Maybe it was time to throw it all away: everything that I had learned. All the certificates, the university awards, the half-finished books and my clusterfuck of a thesis. Everything that I had wasted my life on, leading up to this moment.

To the one person that really needed me. The one person I might actually be able to save.