Swansong Read Online Free PDF

children must have been really screwed up.”
    Mr. Tenner leaves me once he’s satisfied that I’m not about to blow my brains to bits.  He has a brief chat with Judas by the front door—I don’t hear it, but I’m guessing it’s about the therapist.  When he’s gone, Jude calls me into the sitting room.  We go through my prescriptions together.
    “This one you take twice,” Judas says, peering closely at one pill bottle.  He picks up another.  “This one you take weekly.  Christ,” he mutters.  “You’d better write all this down.”
    I do.  I tape the lined notebook pages to the wall beside my bed.  I stack the drugs on the nighttable.  I’m afraid if I put them anywhere else—the meds, the reminders—I’ll forget all about them.  I can’t trust my own mind.
    The therapist is the next day.  I try and dress nicely; but my striped blue leggings are baggier than they used to be; and my favorite skirt, orange and yellow, won’t stay in place without a belt.  Judas drives me to a squat sandstone building out east.  The clinic looks out of place in this commercialized city, where rust and glass and plastic are the status quo.
    “You really don’t have to do this,” I mutter for the umpteenth time.
    “You’re living with me,” Judas says.  “You’re going to need therapy sooner or later.”
    The clinic’s lobby is plastered in parenting posters.  The support beams look like they don’t belong in a building like this.  Two desks stand off to the side, one for checking in and one for checking out.  Judas signs me in at the former.  The woman behind the desk hands him a small blond folder.  We open it when we sit down on the colored plastic chairs in the waiting area.  My name’s inside it, and there’s a check mark next to today’s date. 
    “I feel like we’re in the subway,” I mutter.
    “You want me to wait outside the door?” Judas asks.  “When they call you upstairs.”
    “It’s okay.  I can find my way back down.”
    He ignores me:  My name echoes over the loudspeaker and he follows me up the drafty staircase.
    My therapist’s name is Dr. Grace.  I didn’t know Grace was a last name.  We sit together in a tiny, carpeted room, a spectral screensaver dancing on her laptop.  Dr. Grace smiles nervously at me.  She’s very fair-haired; I wonder if she’s Scandinavian.
    “Talk,” she tells me.
    I talk.  I don’t know why.  I talk about the nights I stayed up watching “football” with Dad.  I talk about the time when I was eight and Mom barged into my school to protect me from a bully.  I talk about the teddy bear I owned when I was four, the one Jude decapitated with a pair of scissors .  So much makes sense about Jude, in hindsight.  I even talk about Jocelyn, how she complains about my dubious fashion sense, how she always steals a tiny piece of my lunch.  Day after day, I have to remind myself that Jocelyn isn’t here anymore to steal my lunch.  And when my phone doesn’t ring at three in the morning, and she’s not on the other end, complaining of cramps, the silence that ensues is the loudest silence of all.
    When I leave Dr. Grace’s office, I feel—lighter, almost, like gravity isn’t trying to pull me down.  Judas meets me out in the hall.  We walk past black-and-white photos in crooked photo frames.  We walk downstairs, over to the checkout desk; then out the front door.
    “Did you go to therapy?” I ask Judas.  “In prison?”
    “No.”
    Something tells me he could have used it.  But he’s the adult; I’m the kid.  I don’t have the right to pry.
     
    * * * * *
     
    Late at night, Judas shows me the stairwell that leads to the apartment building’s rooftop.  I’m not sure I like the roof, because the ground—if you can call it that—is scratchy and dirty, and the water tank nearby smells stale; and if I take a step too close to the parapets, I’ll fall twelve stories to my death.
    They say it only takes one second