From the vault: Marcy Olden

Note: I started this long ago, and just never really figured where to go with it. Like all the Lincoln stuff, there are a lot pieces lying around waiting for me to get smarter and put them together right.

At first there was nothing but grief. Tears. The damn tears welling up and streaking down her face. The wads of Kleenex strewn across the floor, the sofa, the metal chair she loved on the patio and piled up in shredded mounds of flaky paper and snot. The tears poured out like there was some great reservoir of saline draining forever out of her eyes. With each tear, each sob, sharp pricks of pain stabbed up her spine.

For months after her son, her beloved Todd, was found dead, grief pierced Marcy Olden on a daily basis. Life for the 40-year-old woman, married to a man wrapped up completely in his own tragedy, could not get any worse. One afternoon, she even sat in the garage with her station wagon running and door closed for seven minutes. She could not withstand the pain any longer, could not raise her sword to the sea of troubles anymore. Yet, she did not have the courage to go all the way. The fumes billowed up clouding the air between the three dung colored walls and the two-stall door behind her. Tools hung in precise order that was a stamp of her husband’s meticulous nature, although the strands of cobwebs growing between them sullied the image. Her husband, Terry Olden, had little use for tools these days.

Her limbs were disconnected from her thoughts, her body clumsily floated from the car door to the green glowing button hanging next to entrance to the house. Her arm extended impossibly far out in front of her. While the hallucination fascinated her, she realized she still was not pressing the button. She lunged forward, her fingers finally smashing into it hard and the garage creaked as it rose.

Outside the world was gray, but she twirled and stumbled toward it. The yard was frozen from a month of continuous snowstorms. She hit the crisp, cold air that froze her wet hair and the snot collected in her nostrils.

Marcy fell to the snow piled up to the right of the lane and let it soak through her clothes. Eventually, the nausea and dizziness receded and the debilitating pain returned with a wave of shivers. The neighbor boy, who had been making a killing shoveling driveways and sidewalks, found her and scooped her up off the ground. He draped her arm over his thin shoulders and bore most of her weight. Inside, he dropped her on the couch and covered her with a blanket. Then he left, returning with his mother minutes later. She undressed Marcy and put her in some warm pajamas. Marcy slept for three days. She never found out if Terry noticed she was catatonic for so long or if he even checked on her if he did.

When she awoke, she was ill. She vomited and collapsed in spasms. Terry did show up then and drive her to the hospital. There she stayed for two weeks recovering from pneumonia. He stopped by after teaching at the high school usually asking if she felt any better and then staying quiet while they watched decade-old sitcoms on the TV.

Even on the antibiotics, the pain remained. She told the nurses the next time she got the chance that she’d leave the engine on longer and make sure the door stay closed. They thought she was delirious because no one was aware of her unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Yes, for months, Marcy Olden was very much ready to die because she was sure there was nothing more unbearable than the pain and that it would never subside in her lifetime.

She was wrong on both accounts.

A week after being released from the hospital, the pain went away. She was standing at the sliding door looking out over their backyard when it occurred to her that she felt no more grief, no more stinging in her stomach or spine. It was gone, all gone.

Any other woman would have smiled or cheered in relief, but therein laid the problem. There was no relief, no contentment, definitely no joy. There was nothing at all. No emotion and no feeling. She realized it right away because for so much of her life she had bubbled with positive emotions. Instead, there was nothing and it bore through her worse than any hurt. It was pain without the feeling. She thought about how lying in the snow had slowly numbed all her senses till she eventually was floating without any control of her faculties. The numbness settling in was the same.

She very nearly walked back out to the garage to end it, but she didn’t move. She did not have the urge to pull a stunt so dramatic, so final. Instead, she was stuck in a purgatory of gray.

That night Marcy asked Terry to make love to her in hopes that it may invoke some feeling for her, but he claimed to be tired and rolled over in bed. When she asked again the next night, he pretended to be asleep. He started staying later at the bar and waking up earlier to avoid her. The frost between them was thick and with each passing day, a thaw became less and less likely.

Marcy abhorred the nothingness and knew she could not go much longer in this state. Without a job, she wandered around the house alone all day long. She prepared meals that she picked at and were cold by the time Terry came home. She didn’t watch TV much and didn’t like to read. She had spent her entire life devoted to a household that was irreparably broken. Something needed to change, and morbidly, she longed for the hurt to return, the pain, for anything.

That’s when the sex started.