Under Duress

by Gabriela Rivero

cw: suicide attempt, self-harm, body shaming

I think it’s a whistle. It should be shrill, piercing, something that vibrates in both my ears and makes my head snap towards its source. But no, it’s muffled…distant…under water…

Wait; that’s not right. The whistle isn’t underwater. I am.

I blow out hard and watch a rush of bubbles exit my nose and mouth, scurrying towards the surface. Wavy beams of light shine down through the chlorinated blue all around me, and everything seems hazy. I take a deep breath, and even as water rushes into my lungs, I feel relaxed. I blow out again and choke a little, but my limbs feel pleasantly heavy and the water gets warmer the longer I’m in it. It pulls at me, my arms, my shoulders, my legs, the dark hair that drifts lazily around my head in an ebony halo. I give in and close my eyes, coughing and letting more water in. I’m becoming one with it, letting it not only surround me, but enter me, spread through me, pull me further into it as I pull it into me.

That whistle is still sounding. It’s getting farther and farther away, but it’s still there. I think it’s faster now, more frequent even as the volume gets softer. Indistinct voices join in, blending together like crossed radio signals. They sound urgent, too, but it doesn’t bother me. The water is seeping into me. I am a sponge, soaking it up with all of my being.

Something grabs my arm and all of a sudden I’m cold. I’m above the water, no longer in it, and uneven, rocky concrete digs into my skin.

“Leila?” The voice is closer than it was when I was in the water. “I don’t think she’s breathing! Oh, God!”

A shirtless man is sucking at my mouth as if trying to rid me of snake poison. There was a time in my life where I would’ve killed for this kind of interaction, for the attention, if nothing else. My throat and my nose start to burn, and warm liquid runs down my face like snot in the winter. I cough and splutter, and someone pulls me upright, slapping my back so hard it stings.

“Leila!” The shirtless man sits back on his haunches, his sepia-toned sunglasses resting atop his wet golden hair. There’s a dripping silver whistle around his neck. Was he the whistler from before?

“Oh, thank God!” My mother wraps her arms around me and pulls me to her chest, squeezing me so that I choke harder. Realizing she’s doing more harm than good, she loosens her grip. I lean back and see a crowd of people assembled behind her: men, women, and children of all ages staring at me with wide eyes full of curiosity and concern.

Suddenly I’m being yanked to my feet, and I sway unsteadily. Mom guides me through the crowd, pulling me along by the wrist, trying to go slowly enough that I can keep up but quickly enough that none of the spectators will think to follow. My shirtless savior, the lifeguard, I assume, calls something out to us, but Mom doesn’t answer. She just turns over her shoulder to give a quick nod of acknowledgment before dragging me to the car.

With a click of the key console the doors to the sedan unlock and Mom opens the passenger side door, practically shoving me inside before walking to the driver’s side and getting in herself. She throws her purse in the backseat and locks the doors, then leans over to buckle me in. She starts the car with trembling hands and cranks up the AC. Just when I think she’s going to throw the car in reverse, she takes off her sunglasses and rests her forehead on the steering wheel.

“This is the third time this year,” she whimpers, sniffing. Her hands tighten on the wheel so that her knuckles turn white, and she lets out a little sob. “What’s wrong, honey? Why won’t you talk to me?”

I stare straight ahead without answering. I still feel sort of out of it—heavy, tired, strangely calm. I watch a seagull land on the asphalt lot, waddling over to peck at an abandoned hotdog roll. A little girl in a pink floral bathing suit skips along behind her own mother, who’s carting a canvas bag of towels and magazines. The mother bends down to take the girl’s hand as they cross the lot to the entrance to the pool.

“Leila!” Mom snaps her head up, and her lips are pulled back in a sneer. Her eyes are liquid brown, tears gathering at the edges, and the wrinkles on her forehead are showing. “I asked you a question! Why won’t you talk to me?” She beats her hand on the center console, giving a cry of frustration like a wounded cat. “Goddammit, what’s happened to you? You used to be so happy!”

I look down at myself in my long-sleeved bathing suit as she repeats this phrase over and over. The top is like a nylon sweatshirt, while the bottoms are like waterproof bike shorts. I scan the parking lot, looking for the little girl and her mother, wishing I had a suit like the girl’s. Why am I in this strange ensemble? All the girls my age wear thong-like one-pieces or skimpy bikinis. Why am I the odd one out? I’m not even an athlete.

Oh, yeah. Because of the scars.

And before the scars, because I didn’t like my stomach. Or my legs. Or my chest.

But that’s not why I cut. I didn’t like my body, yes. But I cut not because I was ugly, but because … well, sometimes I forget the real reason I cut. All I remember was it helped. But I didn’t cut because of my figure.

That’s why I threw up.

She knows she won’t get an answer out of me, so she grinds her teeth and looks towards the ceiling, as if her eyes can see through it straight to God. Tears roll down her cheeks, and she bites her lip, squeezing her eyes shut tightly and sobbing again before grabbing the gearshift and backing out. My fingers twitch as I debate turning on the radio, but ultimately, I decide not to. I don’t really care about music. I just want to sleep, so I rest my elbow on the door and my head against the warm glass of the window and close my eyes.

I feel the car roll to a stop, feel my mother watch me as the car dawdles at the red light. I know she’s resisting the urge to reach out and stroke my face, to brush my damp hair from my forehead. I imagine her opening her mouth to speak, then closing it again, shaking her head and lifting her foot from the brake. The car moves forward, picking up speed, and the feel of cruising down Main Street on this hot, sunny afternoon reminds me of what it felt like to be submerged in the pool. The sun envelops me in a warm embrace just as the water did, burning my face and spreading the same pleasant warmth from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes.

We hit a pothole and my head smacks the window. My eyes snap open and I rub my head with one hand, grimacing. There’ll be a lump there tomorrow, or at least a bruise.

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Mom asks, her voice full of concern. We both know that she’s not just asking me about my head. Well, she is. But in two different ways.

I lick my lips, running my hands through my hair and shifting it so that it spills down my other shoulder. Am I okay? What does that even mean? Okay is a relative term. I’m not starving. I’m not poor. I’m not an orphan, or a prostitute, or a transgender woman in Latin America. Comparatively, I’m pretty well-off.

But somehow, it doesn’t feel right to just nod in agreement. Am I okay?

I guess I could be better. Right now I’m just so tired.

I shrug and sink down into my seat. My fingers find the fat plastic bar on the side of the beige cushion, and I shift it so that the back of the seat reclines slightly. I settle myself back against the window, my cheek pressed up against the glass. Goosebumps sprout up and down my arms, and I shiver and turn down the AC before closing my eyes again. It’s not completely dark, seeing as it’s sunny and the middle of the afternoon. Instead of seeing black, I see peachy-orange, like a chick in an incubator. That’s the color of the inside of my eyes. The color of a chick in an incubator.

“Oh, Leila,” Mom whispers, and all too soon I feel the car climbing an incline. The driveway. We’re home.

At least now I can sleep in my own bed.

⮚

She tries to follow me into my room, but I shut the door before she can. As I kick off my flipflops and shuffle to the bathroom, I hear her place one hand on the door, the other on the knob. I stop in the doorway to the bathroom, flicking on the lights and glancing towards the entrance to my room, but the knob never turns. After a moment, I hear the slap of her own sandals and clinking metal as she retreats across the linoleum back to the kitchen to hang up her keys.

I peel my swimsuit off, studiously avoiding my reflection in the mirror as I kick the shorts off my feet and toss the shirt in the same direction. They slop onto the floor in a tight wet pile. I wonder if taking a hot shower would make me feel better—the goosebumps are more pronounced now, and my hair is growing matted as it dries. Maybe a bath, since I feel light-headed? No, Mom will just interrupt me if she hears the water running. The thought of her barging in as I soak, eyes wide with fear and an intense concern, annoys me, but I can’t really blame her. I’d be afraid, too, if my daughter had tried to kill herself three times in the same year. She learned quickly to take the razors out of my bathroom, to cleanse the office of letter openers and scissors, to place the kitchen knives way out of reach and to lock any and all medicine cabinets. She even stored the blades separately from the blender.

I can’t help myself; I sneak a peek at the mirror. My pale skin has taken on a pinkish tone in the fluorescent light, and my scars—thin lines, some in neat columns or rows, others crisscrossing like careless cross-hatching on an amateur sketch—red and slightly raised. I have small breasts, barely a B-cup, thin arms with even thinner wrists, and thighs that are a little (or a lot) too wide for my liking. My ass is huge, my stomach is flabby, and my face is round—full, my mom used to say—though not as much as it used to be. The bulimia actually didn’t help with any of that, which I guess is why I gave anorexia a shot. Or rather, I gave “dieting” a shot. I don’t think anyone actually chooses to have an eating disorder, at least not identified as such.

I cup my elbows in my hands, staring at the hair that covers my body. It’s always made me feel like a Neanderthal, or on my darkest days, the mammoths they hunted. Dark and curly on my head and my sex, but no less dark or thick on my stomach, around my nipples, the small of my back. Mom used to tell me that unfortunately, I got my father’s Mediterranean hair genes and her Anglo-saxon skin ones, meaning I was destined from conception to be the pale hairy monster that skulked around the locker room from 6th to 8th grade. While other girls only had to worry about shaving their legs and their pits, I spent weekends shaving, waxing, and plucking nearly every inch of me, even my damn chin, forced to lock myself in my room for hours afterwards with a bag of ice because my skin would become so pink and irritated. My mom would always tell me I was beautiful no matter what, not to worry about the parts of me that nobody could see—I didn’t even have to shave my legs if I really didn’t want to. But what she didn’t understand was that I could see them, even if no boys could (yet): all this hair and my small breasts and my lardy ass and my flabby stomach, and that was enough to strangle my self-esteem. School only added to what in my head had already established itself as a problem.

I stare for just a moment longer, trying to do what my therapist advised me to—learn to love myself. Look at and accept who I am, and realize that I’m great that way. That there are some things I can change, and some things that I can’t, and that’s okay.

There’s that word again; “okay.” What does it even mean to be okay, to be fine? It has a sense of passivity, mediocrity, just enough. If I was a therapist, I’d tell kids to strive to be great, to be happy. Which I guess is the end goal of therapy—to create a happy human being. Maybe being okay is just a step on the path to being great?

Maybe it’s that they know if they tell us we’re great, we won’t believe them. After all, my mom, and now Dave, constantly tell me how great I am. But they have to, because they’re my mom and stepdad. Especially now, if they tell me I’m anything but great, it might cause me to have a “setback”, as Dr. Stein says. Setback, meltdown, relapse, it’s all the same thing. Without them constantly inflating my ego—or trying to—I may go back to that dark place of self-worthlessness that most days I feel as if I never left. Although personally, I think the barrage of compliments has caused the word to lose all meaning. “Great” might as well mean “okay” in this house, at least to me.

I don’t like them tiptoeing around me, especially since there’s no point. Like I said, their words don’t help or hurt. They fall on deaf ears, as my Nanna would say, then roll down my shoulders and crash to the floor where I step on them. I guess that’s why sometimes I appreciate Max’s harsh comments. My brother—sorry, stepbrother’s—honesty reminds me that I’m not enveloped in bubble-wrap, unable to move. He gives me a reality check, and in some strange way, it’s comforting, even when it irks or upsets me.

I shut off the bathroom lights and pad over to my bed, slipping in bare between the sheets. My blue blinds are greenish with the light of the sun outside, and the air is still. Upstairs I hear the faint beating of water on tile—Mom must be taking a shower in her own bathroom. I breathe out, folding my hands together and tucking them under my cheek, letting myself slip into cool sleep.