Free The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst Page A

raised her head to look at me. “I used to pull my hair out. It’s kind of a nervous disorder.”
    I nodded. “I’ve heard of that,” I said. “Let me think, what’s it called?” I puzzled out the possible Latin and Greek roots. “Trichotillomania?”
    Lexy stared at me and shook her head. “You know the damnedest things,” she said. “Anyway, my parents took me to a couple of different doctors, and they put me on medication for it, but nothing worked. So one day, I just decided to shave my head and be done with it.”
    I thought about my Lexy as a young girl, standing bald and brazen before the world. It was a strangely moving thought. “And did it work?” I asked.
    “Well, yeah. There was nothing left to pull on.”
    “Right.”
    “So I kept it shaved for a year or so, until I felt like things were better in my life and it’d be safe to grow it back. I got the tattoo as kind of a talisman. It’s my secret strength. It protects me from falling back into that place where I used to be.”
    I reached out tentatively. She took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “For what?”
    “For ruining your nice proposal.” She held her hands out before her and looked at the words again. “It was very sweet.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “I just need some time,” she said. “To trust that this is all real.”
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
     
    So I waited. I waited for five more months. And one morning, I awoke to find a single word printed across my palm.
Yes,
it said.

THIRTEEN
    H ere’s the thing: I wasn’t entirely honest with Detective Anthony Stack when he asked me if Lexy had ever mentioned suicide. In fact, I wasn’t honest at all. Which is not to say that I had any reason to believe Lexy was suicidal in the months and weeks leading up to her death; at least, I had no such reasons at the time. But it would be dishonest of me not to reveal at this point that she did, during the sweet, breath-holding time of our engagement, tell me that there had been moments in her life when she had thought about killing herself.
    The only time she came close, she told me, occurred during that hair-tearing year of her adolescence, the year the snakes took up residence on her scalp. Her parents were going through a divorce, and she was having a hard time in school—but I say that as if those are reasons. As if the fabric of human misery can be spooled apart into threads just like that. How many young girls that year had trouble in school, had trouble with their parents, and still never thought to pick up a knife and press its cold point against their wrist? No. There’s more to it than that, and more scientific minds than mine have yet to piece it all together.
    But whatever that fatal elixir is, that mixture of circumstance and temperament that leads a person to the edge of death and sometimes back again, it flowed through Lexy’s body like blood. She fell into a deep depression, and the effort of wading through each day, the weight she carried like a stone in her gut, left her exhausted. She would come home from school and crawl into her bed and stay there until it was almost time for her mother to come home from work, and she knew she had to rouse herself and create some semblance of normalcy. During those afternoons, lying in bed until the light faded, she wrote things on her arms and legs, places that she knew could be hidden with clothing, digging deep into her flesh with the pen.
Sometimes,
she wrote,
I feel like I could start crying and not stop for a day and a night, and maybe that would be enough. And maybe it wouldn’t.
She wrote,
Sometimes I feel like I have a ragged hole inside me, and it gets bigger every day.
She wrote,
Once upon a time, there was a girl who just disappeared.
She laughed when she told me these things, making fun of the drama of her teen angst, but I could see that it hurt her to remember. It was during those afternoons in bed that she began to pull out her