Indigo Dusk Read online

  Fight or flight had always seemed like a choice, a decision one makes that determines who you really are.

  Now though, I know it’s primal inevitability, an urge that runs so deep we cannot break free from it any more easily than a hummingbird trapped in a gilded Victorian cage.

  And so, with that thought in the back of my mind and my blood pounding fast in my ears, I run.

  “Kairi, medication!”

  I startle awake at the sound of my Pa’s voice, old leather-bound copy of The Green Fairy Book by Andrew Lang propped open and heavy against my aching ribcage.

  “Okay…” I hear myself speak, cottonmouth making the words sloppy and inarticulate.

  Buttery sunlight falls across my chest, warming the lavender tartan blanket covering my now stiff limbs, joints full of broken glass. I sit up, shoulders creaking, neck twinging and causing an electric shock, no doubt due to a trapped nerve, to fizzle down my spine without mercy. My eyes, still heavy with sleep, fall closed again as the ache I’m so used to comes back to me fully.

  I shouldn’t have slept in the window seat, should have known better than to head into one of my old favourites for easy night-time reading under the moonlight. I had wanted respite from the pain of yesterday, but my carelessness will most likely cost me today’s comfort as well.

  You know better. I scold myself, stretching and hearing my elbows click, a rush of pain sparking down each of my forearms in turn.

  Most twenty-three-year olds don’t have to think about making this kind of bargain with their body. But I am not like most twenty-three-year olds.

  I’m a Zebra, suffering from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that has reduced my life to exactly this. Bargaining, pacing, compromising, never quite knowing how I will feel in five minutes from now or if I’ll feel the same even five minutes after that.

  The diagnosis had changed everything, and I’m still too devastated to hide it or hope that I’ll come out the other side.

  Even if I do, I know I won’t be the same woman I was going in.

  I push the thoughts of my own painful evolution down deep, ignoring the shame that comes with admitting how weak I’ve become, how much my body is failing me for someone so young.

  Catticus Finch, my stocky ginger tomcat, eyes me from the floral violet cotton of my bedspread, not impressed by his lack of a human heater for the night. His eyes are startlingly lime, watching my hunched frame with superior reproach as his fat tail swishes left and right, disturbing dust that catches like glitter in the early morning Tennessee sun.

  I sigh out, pushing from the padded baby blue window seat that looks out over the balcony, which wraps fully around the outside of the attic of the converted barn. The scent of coffee climbs the stairs, creeping beneath the heavy oak of the door and rising until it settles just beneath the wide beams supporting the steep apex of the ceiling. The beams are wrapped in fairy-lights, my attempt to bring the night sky I love so much indoors when I can’t leave my bed, the floor scattered with piles of books that don’t fit into my multiple and overflowing bookshelves.

  I’m wearing only a pair of boy shorts and a baggy t-shirt, so quickly tug on some soft navy yoga pants and my oversized UCLA sweatshirt. Glancing in the mirror as I pass, I find the grey tone of my skin and my glassy periwinkle gaze staring back. My hip is agony as the floorboards creak underfoot, my heart plummeting as I take in what I barely recognise as my own face anymore.

  I look like crap, the same as yesterday and the day before, and so yank my long caramel hair up into a messy bun and turn my back on the disappointment in my expression as I yawn and walk with painful slowness toward the door.

  I take the stairs down to the main floor with excruciating care, the place still not feeling quite like home despite the fact I’ve been living here for the last six months. My knees complain right along with my ankles, but I ignore it, choosing instead to focus on the twirling wooden ceiling fan that hangs over the great room, blanketed gold by the light of the early hour.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” my dad, Michael, calls with familiar gruffness from the kitchen as he hears my slow amble down the creaking wooden stairs.

  My hand clings to the railing as I fight my crappy lack of balance, brain still foggy from sleep and eyes burning against the too-bright glare of sun-drenched wood.

  “Hey…” My voice cracks, and I know I should say something more, but I can’t find the energy just yet.

  Even breathing in and out is effort, my mind becoming once again used to pacing the crumbling cage in which its trapped, rattling angrily on the bars.

  Catticus overtakes me as I reach the fourth stair from the bottom, trotting onto the plush bohemian rugs that are piled haphazardly across the floor of the open plan living room, his orange butt wiggling with natural feline sass.

  As I hit the ground floor, I make a half-turn to face the kitchen, finding my dad making breakfast and Matthew, my pa, sitting at the table reading the news on his iPad.

  The entire space is carved from gleaming rich oak, carrying the scent of sawdust as it mingles in with the coffee that Pa is drinking while he gazes at me with contemplative attentiveness. The expression is familiar and expects a status report as I step fully into the kitchen, but all I can do is give him a small smile.

  I slip into my usual seat beside his, tired of standing already. Here, a barrage of luminous orange pill bottles, caps off, are lined up next to a glass of water atop the chunky farmhouse table, waiting.

  “Sleep well?” he enquires at my lack of greeting, covering my hand gently with his and looking up as his eyes cloud with familiar care and sympathy. I plaster a smile on my face, slipping my hand quickly from beneath his, not wanting to worry him.

  “I did, thanks.”

  Across the table, my dad pulls a bowl with a peach floral pattern around the rim from the microwave within seconds of it eliciting a high-pitched ping that rattles around my skull. It’s too early for my body to process any kind of intense sensory input, and it causes goosebumps to rise on my arms, leaving my stomach churning like a storm-tossed sea.

  I wrap one fist in my sleeve, gritting my teeth as I pick up the glass in front of me and take a sip as distraction. The cold-water rushes down my throat, making my eyes water and teeth tingle before settling in my stomach, icy and foreign.

  As I set the glass back down, dad places a bowl of oatmeal topped with blueberries and honey in front of me, steaming.

  “Pills…” Pa reminds me in a pretend offhanded tone, looking up from the screen he’s holding in his dextrous hands and gesturing to the luminous bottles with his eyes.

  I feel my jaw tense against the ache it constantly provides.

  It’s impossible not to feel infantilised with a condition like this because often I need help doing things that even a child could manage. Frustration seeps into my subconscious, causing an icy clarity to fall over everything, rage waking me with more effectiveness that any pill.

  I want to say something, to scream that after a year of dealing with this day in and day out that I know the drill, but I also know that he cares and that he’s doing everything he can.

  So, I take the pills.

  Swallowing all seven with water, I watch as my dad circles behind his husband, delivering a swift kiss to his stubbled cheek before sitting down to join us with his own breakfast.

  “Got any clients today?” I ask as he lifts a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice to his lips. He swallows, almond hued eyes widening substantially and nodding with enthusiasm.

  “Yes, I have! A veteran actually. I think we are going to work with Archie for a bit. He’s the most laid back of the lot, so I figured we’d start there,” he explains, voice thick with pulp, and I smile for the first time this morning with genuine pleasure. My body finally relaxes as I slump back against my seat. I pop a blueberry into my mouth, savouring the cool juices as they burst over my tongue in a tart torrent, thoughtful as usual.

  I don’t know why, but I spend my
waking hours either lost in the past, trying to make sense of the narrative that has brought me to where I am today, or the narrative created by authors I’ve never met. Indulging the present and practicing mindfulness as so many of my therapists have preached seems impossible, and what’s more, unimaginably painful.

  I have enough of that already.

  I lean forward again, twirling my spoon slowly in my palm and taking in the faces of the two men who raised me as their own. My dad, Mike, is well groomed, dark hair slicked and divided by a clean side-parting. He can usually be found wearing any number of obnoxiously loud band t-shirts paired with tight fitting jeans. Matthew, however, is almost the polar opposite. I guess what you’d expect from a successful PhD in media and journalism. Hair wild and caramel coloured like my own, his green eyes always pop from his face, contrasted by the crisp button-ups he wears, collar sharp enough to cut you.

  Both my parents had been screenwriters back in LA, but since the move, Mike, the younger of the two, has set himself up as an independent trauma counsellor, specialising in Equine therapy. We have six horses in the stables round back and miles of land on every side that are home to four separate paddocks for use by clients. It still amazes me the insane difference in property value as you move farther from the west coast. I mean, our house in LA hadn’t been small, but it was nowhere near this big and probably worth at least twice the amount if not more.

  I observe their tired smiles, thinking on everything they’ve sacrificed, and popping a half spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth, stomach grumbling in anticipation.

  When I was diagnosed, they sold the house I grew up in, and we moved across the country so I could be close to Nashville and to the best doctor in the country for my condition.

  They had left their lives, friends, jobs, everything… to help me live a better life.

  This is not the first time I have felt guilty, and I know it won’t be the last.

  It has been such a long road to this place as getting diagnosed alone took twelve months. I mean, being adopted hadn’t helped as I have no known medical history, and the genetics of my biological parents remain an inconvenient mystery. My reality was reduced to hospital visit after hospital visit for a year while dealing with multiple dislocations, excruciating pain, and fatigue every single day. I was exhausted from it all, and I still am.

  Nobody had answers for the pain until one day, the three words I try not to think about came into my life, changing how I perceive everything.

  Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

  I didn’t expect the answer to come with no cure either. I didn’t expect to have to give up everything I’d worked for at UCLA in securing funding for a master’s degree because my new reality meant that making it to lectures and staying awake was impossible without being bedridden the next day.

  Everything changed, just like that, and yet the one thing that stayed the same was my parents’ unconditional love for me.

  My heart becomes leaden as my mind whirs back into the anxious, self-loathing cycle it seems to occupy all too often these days. Staring at them now as we eat breakfast like any other family across America, I know I don’t deserve them because of the burden I’ve become.

  They didn’t ask for this when they found me on that beach, an abandoned baby squalling on an incoming tide in a handwoven basket made from palm leaves and cane.

  It was a miracle I’d even been found alive and not washed up dead, let alone that the couple who just so happened to run across me decided to adopt me as their daughter.

  Stirring the honey deeper into my oatmeal, I chew my bottom lip and feel my leg beginning to jiggle beneath the table.

  I’m such a mess, and yet the two men sitting in front of me haven’t ever given up on me, not once. My eyes tear up, and I wonder if I’ve reached the point in my life now where I just start randomly bawling into my breakfast.

  My Pa notices my sudden drop in mood, an all too common occurrence, and clears his throat.

  “You know what day it is?” he asks me, a coy smile upturning the left corner of his mouth.

  “Warehouse Wednesday? Already?” I ask, perking up immediately. I lose track of the days so easily I hadn’t even realised.

  “That it is!” he grins, taking a sip of coffee from his cliché I heart L.A. mug.

  The world seems to right itself suddenly, my mind flooding with those feel good chemicals I’m always desperate for.

  “Wheelchair or braces?” he asks me, not making eye contact as the question comes tumbling out into the air. My breath catches in my throat as I eye the wheelchair I hate so much, propped innocuously by the back door behind him.

  I don’t want to need it, but I don’t know if after last night I’ll be able to make it around the enormous used bookstore in my knee braces.

  “Wheelchair,” I bite out, not catching his gaze as I heap another spoon full of oatmeal and blow on it, dispelling the heat.

  “I thought so. You look… exhausted. Are you really okay, did you sleep okay?” Pa asks me, mouth thinning as he holds his breath.

  He knows I hate it when he asks.

  My dad looks between us both, spoon frozen halfway to his lips as the air thickens with discomfort.

  “I’m fine, just tired. Really. Please, don’t worry,” I reply, the answer not even truly meant but just default.

  Tired just doesn’t even cover it.

  It takes just over an hour before I’m finally sitting in the driver’s seat of my trusty orange pickup truck also known as The Tangerine Terror, Pa loading my wheelchair into the back. My fingers caress the curve of the steering wheel as I eye myself in the rear-view mirror. My cheeks have finally coloured up a little, thanks to the food and medication, not to mention the fact that I look forward to this exact trip every single week.

  The ranch sprawls out on all sides beyond the windshield heather, lavender, and wildflowers swaying gently beneath the golden sun as the silhouettes of horses, just fed and released from their stables, gallop free against the horizon.

  “Okay, all loaded up! Let’s go.” Pa smiles at me as he clambers into the passenger seat, yanking on his seatbelt. I tear my eyes from the easy grace of the horses, dark tails streaming behind them like inky ribbons in the distance, focusing on the task at hand.

  Hearing the click of pa’s belt engaging, I start the ignition and lean back into my seat, enjoying the familiar low rumble of the engine. Then, after a deep breath and a few last-minute checks, I begin the drive down the long stone road that winds between Hickory Oaks’ surrounding fields.

  Driving feels foreign at first seeing as I only really get behind the wheel on Wednesdays now, but eventually I relax my tense posture, the tall oaks on either side of the path coming at increasingly sparse intervals the closer toward the main road I crawl, listening to the gravel crunching beneath the freshly pumped tyres.

  “So how do you like Old Hickory?” Pa asks, making conversation as I check both up and down the road for oncoming traffic, neck twingeing.

  “It’s fine… The ranch, I mean. Hickory Oaks, it’s beautiful.” I stick out my tongue, concentrating as I straighten onto the highway.

  “I fucking hate it here,” he confesses, and I feel my head snap sideways, a shooting pain zipping down my left trapezius. My Pa never swears.

  He catches my startled expression and sighs.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have… I just, I had to say it to someone,” he admits, and I feel my mouth turn up at one side.

  “Don’t worry. I fucking hate it here too…” I admit, and he smiles, mirroring my expression with twinkling eyes.

  “I know. It’s just so…” he begins, and I nod in agreement before finishing his sentence.

  “Rural?” I ask him, eyebrow arching.

  “Exactly. I miss… the noise and the bustle of L.A. There was so much going on, and now I’m just stuck searching for a new job, with my own thoughts, surrounded by grass on all sides.”

  I smile, remembering walking L.A.’s perfectly angula
r concrete jungle with a latte in hand and shades shielding me from the unending sun. I just know the smell of gasoline, the sea intermingled with expensive perfume, and the constant honking of angry drivers in the clutches of road rage will be something that will always be an intrinsic part of me, no matter where I sleep at night.

  I miss the city… the sense that just by living there you were in the centre of everything important in the world… but its more than that.

  “I miss it… I just, those last few months… the noise… it was too much for me sensory wise. I was constantly overloaded when I was out. It made even going out to grab a coffee painful,” I remind him, realising that perhaps I don’t miss L.A. quite as much as I thought.

  Perhaps, in fact, I miss the person I was when I grew up there, before the chronic pain, before the medication, when it was just me and my books, future sprawled out in front of me like flawless raw silk. Sensuous and alluring.

  Now when I think about my future, it looks like a tangle of thorny vines, shredding what I had once thought was coming into delicate smithereens instead.

  “I know, honey. This isn’t your fault. When me and your dad became your parents, we knew we would always put your needs first, and faced with the same choice I’d do exactly what we did again in a heartbeat. I just wish I could find a damn job is all. I’m not great at sitting around playing house.” He smirks, and I roll my eyes, knowing the utter truth of this sentiment only too well.

  My Pa is a great writer, an amazing dancer, is fantastic at chess, and has a knack for being able to predict who will win America’s Next Top Model, but a man of leisure he is not. He gets restless so easily, and where dad is far more laid back and spontaneous, Pa has always been a strenuous planner.

  “I’m sorry…” I admit. He shakes his head, eyes becoming fierce.

  “Don’t you dare. I love you more than anything, sweetheart. You know I’d do anything for you.” He places a hand on my shoulder as we devour tarmac beneath the tyres, and I smile at him, though I can’t quite make my eyes sparkle like they should.