Free Low by Anna Quon

expected answer. Dr. Chen nodded and scratched something on her legal pad. “And why did you want to die?” she asked. Adriana gaped.
    â€œSurely there must have been something that made you want to end your life,” Dr. Chen asked, with a small tight smile. Her pen, in her small brown hand, was poised to write. Adriana tried to think. She’d quit going to classes and it had felt like a wall had crumbled from beneath her. And then there was nothing, days and days filled with nothing, her mother’s eyes always on her, reproachful and accusatory. Adriana had tried to escape Viera’s gaze—but then when Bartholomew Banks conjured her mother from the dead, it was as though she was a different person than the one Adriana had clung to for all these years. She didn’t think the doctor would understand, how this discrepancy had swept the earth from under her.
    Dr. Chen shifted in her seat, leaning toward Adriana. “Was there a trigger? Did something happen that pushed you over the edge?” Adriana shook her head, giving up. Then said weakly, “My mother.”
    Fiona looked concerned. Dr. Chen looked at her notes. “Your chart says your mother died when you were 11 years old,” she said. Adriana nodded. Dr. Chen pushed on. “So what was it about your mother that made you feel like killing yourself?”
    The words seemed too harsh, to Adriana. She let her hair fall in front of her face, and refused to speak. Fiona cleared her throat, a small, apologetic sound. Adriana looked up at her, saw her eyes shining with concern.
    Dr. Chen sat back and waited, but Adriana was not prepared to offer her anything. Dr. Chen made a point of sighing. “Okay Adriana, I understand that you have been depressed for some time.”
    Adriana nodded, but didn’t look up. She closed her eyes, and tried to hear the sound of the waves breaking against the shore, down the hill below the railway track. Dr. Chen seemed to soften. “How would you feel about my asking your father for some information about you? It would help me understand you and your situation better.” Adriana nodded. “Alright?” said Dr. Chen. “I think we’re done for today.” She stood up and bowed slightly, ushering Fiona and Adriana out of the room.
    Â 
    When Adriana finally emerged from her room again, in the same rumpled johnny shirt they’d given her to wear at the ER, Fiona ran Adriana a bath and gave her some shampoo to wash the charcoal out of her hair. “It’s good you’re getting cleaned up now, my duck” Fiona had said in her warm Newfoundlandese, handing her a towel and a couple fresh johnny shirts.
    Adriana lay in the bathtub in the little room off the women’s washroom. Like the toilet stalls, the door had no lock, but a little knob to turn the sign under the handle from “vacant” to “occupied.” Adriana was miserable enough that it barely mattered. Her middle, sunken below the level of her jutting hip bones, allowed water to pool between them. Having her stomach pumped had given her a raw throat and a feeling of being scoured internally. Then she’d thrown up the charcoal drink they’d insisted she finish to coat her stomach, leaving her as empty as she’d ever been. Adriana covered her face with her hands and sank lower into the water. She had stopped doing her face exercises , and every other routine that had given form to her days, to concentrate on the wound that had opened inside her, like a split seam.

Chapter 12
    Someone rapped on the tub room door and Adriana sat up slowly, hugging herself with her arms. The bathwater had grown tepid around her. She could almost pretend she wasn’t a patient in the mental hospital, except for the smell—a flat, industrial-chemical scent. “Ma’am?” the person at the door said in a loud, but garbled voice. “You almost done? I wanna shower.”
    Adriana, her