I Never Can
“Gradually his repentance deepened into a remorse that left him no peace of mind.”
— Lafcadio Hearn, “The Reconciliation."
This is the story version of an early short film of mine, loosely inspired by the story quoted above.
I was pretty happy with how our film turned out, but writing it as a short story allowed me to explore the inner thoughts of the protagonist and go to some even spookier places.
If you’re curious, you can check out the film version here.
You can also see the film and its two sequels in Portland on October 24th, 2019.
But in the meantime… let’s get spooked out of our minds, shall we? Keep reading.
TRIGGER WARNING: This story contains themes of suicide, violence, and mature content.
Every night, I think about leaving her. And every night, I never can.
There are so many people I've forgotten over the years—whose faces have become nothing but blurs in my mind. Why she can’t be one of them? Why do I see her eyes whenever I close my own? It makes no sense to me.
Some nights, her wet hair tangles up in my face, keeping me awake, and making me wonder what first attracted me to her. What dark force, back in the blurry days of high school, tricked me? How could I have known I'd spend most of my youth like this?
I've gotten used to the pitying looks from people in public whenever she throws a fit. Some of the looks are from women. I find comfort in those looks.
Whenever I leave the house, she treats it as a form of abandonment. My phone erupts in my pocket and I need to kill it to get any peace of mind. The only solace I can find is when I’m driving.
And at night, when she’s asleep.
Like now.
I slip out, grab my pants, buckle my belt, and sneak out the door, into the first early hints of pale blue dawn. I didn’t realize what time it was. It's easy to lose track of time when every day brings the same insanity.
But that's about to change, I tell myself.
I walk down our driveway, careful to not make too much noise as I pass our bedroom window, which she left open a crack.
Yes, I’m on my way to go see Susie. She’s a writer; a weaver of fantastic tales.
No, not weaver. That’s Jenny’s last name, “Weaver.”
I can’t think about Jenny. Not now. Not on my way to see Jenny.
Susie. SUSIE.
SUSIE’s house is a short drive away. I admire the glow of the streetlights through the morning fog. I imagine they’re the bright city lights of my dreams and that they’re spelling out my name: Matt Ronin.
Or should I go by Matthew? Matt P. Ronin? Matthew Patrick Ronin…
No, he sounds like a pretentious douche. I like Matt Ronin. Jenny once said that—
Nope.
I imagine my parents smiling down from Heaven—if there is such a place—proud that I’ve made something of myself. I imagine them turning to the other angels or whatever and saying “Our son is Matt Ronin, the famous actor. We’re so proud of him. Even if he never makes it up here to join us...”
Susie is working on an indie detective film. From what I hear, it’s between me and one other guy for one of the big roles. Not the lead—that's going to some old guy who was on every cop show everybody's mom watches.
But I'm up for playing that guy's drug-addicted son. You can bet your ass everybody's mom is gonna be buying this DVD from the store racks someday. That may sound laughable, but hey, acting is hard work. There are guys who'd eat you alive to get on that store rack. And I'm close. I'm so close. All I have to do is make her forget that other guy she's considering.
Lucky for me, that other guy’s married. I’m not. Not yet, anyway. Maybe never. We’ll see.
I buzz at the gate. (She has a GATE! Iron, with climbing red roses like something out of a fairytale. What even is this?)
There’s another buzz, coming from my pocket. No one else would be calling at this hour. It has to be her. She must have gotten up to go to the bathroom, noticed my absence, noticed my empty parking spot...
I’ll think of something.
The gates open. I roll in, feeling everything I've worked for just beyond my reach. Just inside that massive stone mansion, just behind that giant mahogany door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
She answers herself, and I’m surprised. I guess I was expecting a butler or something, but no, there she is in an expensive-looking silk robe. Her hair is dark, like Jenny's, but it's better kept. She pays attention to her hair, rather than leaving it in perpetual tangles...
No. No. Stop thinking about Jenny now. Jenny’s at home. You’ll deal with Jenny later. She’s out of sight, out of mind.
“Hey stranger,” Susie says with a smile.
She’s ready to go, and I’m ready to be gone.
I close my eyes for most of it. I have to. Every time I catch a glimpse of dark hair, it reminds me of Jenny’s. Come to think of it, she has dark eyes, too. And pale skin. It’s soft, like Jenny’s. She cries out:
“Oh, Matt…”
And it sounds like Jenny.
“Oh... baby,” is all I say, not wanting to call her the wrong thing. My mind has gone back home, to Jenny, remembering our first time. It was just like this—the same pace, the same feel.
Stop it, Matt. This isn’t Jenny. This is…
Wait... who is this bitch again?
There have been so many... how could I have forgotten them? Samantha, the producer who was going to take my short film to Sundance. What had ever happened to her?
What had happened to Kaylee, or was it Kylie? The P.A. making the national car commercial?
Blurred faces in my memory. All I can remember is hair. Dark hair. And going home to Jenny… Does Jenny know?
“Matt I’m going to make you so famous…”
That’s what they all said… but why hasn’t it happened?
I stop.
And I remember.
That’s what Jenny has always said to me.
All sorts of memories come flooding back to me. All those nights she picked me up after bad auditions in her beat-up green pickup truck. All those late-night snack runs. All the ice cream we’d eat from the tub together with shitty plastic spoons, laughing as it melted all over her car.
She’d tell me don’t worry Matt, you’re my movie star… I’m gonna make you famous if it kills me…
If it kills me…
I stop, aware of the sweat… pools of it. The sheets are so soaked that my hands feel as though they’re submerged in a shallow pool of water.
My panting could shatter worlds. My eyes remain closed. I wonder if life would be any easier if I were blind.
“What’s wrong?” what's-her-face asks me from way-down-wherever-she-is. I know she’s only inches away, but her voice is quiet and echoing as if she were speaking to me from the bottom of a deep well.
I finally open my eyes. The sight that greets them is impossible.
It isn’t what’s-her-face beneath me at all—but Jenny. Jenny, staring up at me with her dark eyes—her white face between my arms, submerged in water, floating. As I stare at her, rose petals drift by. I recognize the fabric on her shoulders—the ruffles of her favorite white sundress.
I can’t tell you what exactly this feeling is. Confusion? Panic? Dread? I keep staring down into Jenny’s eyes.
She knows. She knows everything.
I get the feeling that this has happened before… that this is always happening. Somehow this impossible vision seems to be the truest thing I’ve ever seen.
And then, without closing her eyes, she lowers her head into the water, wet dark hair drifting in to cover her face.
“No!” I shout. Before I know it, I’m on my knees, shifting weight from my arms that are tingling from holding their position for so long. I grasp at Jenny, pulling her out of the water—
But no… there is no water. Only a bed. Only a sweat-drenched, king-sized, luxurious bed. A bed I don't belong in, where a confused woman is wondering what's wrong with me.
I am out of that house so fast I don’t have any memory of leaving. I only know I grabbed my clothes because I’m wearing them, now. They cling to my soaking, shaking body as if in fear. I nearly swerve off the road the whole drive home.
The sky has gone from blue to black. How long could I have been there for? In that woman’s house? The lights I pass no longer seem like welcome invitations from the golden city of fame. They’re more like warning signals. Red lights that I speed through for the rest of the roads.
I don’t care about whatever job that woman may have gotten me. Nothing matters but Jenny. Nothing matters but that Jenny is safe.
I don't remember locking the door, but I must have because it won't open. I don’t have my key. I always forget my stupid key. I grab the spare from under the little bonsai planter she leaves outside. I hear the water running before I see the light streaming through the open door to the bathroom.
She's there, in the bathroom. Exactly as I envisioned her. White dress. Rose petals. Full tub. Her head submerged.
She isn’t breathing. By the looks of it, she hasn’t been for a while.
I fish her out of the tub, shake her. Water spills from her gaping mouth. I lay her on the floor, knocking over the remnants of an orange pill bottle. How many had she taken?
I’m pressing her chest. Chest compressions my EMT character had done on that shitty TV pilot. I’d put a lot of research into that damned role and now was my time to put it to use. I plug her nose, breathe into her mouth.
Breathe, press, breathe, press…
Please cough, please cough, dear God please cough…
She sputters, coughing up water. Her face is veiny and red as her eyes flicker open.
Jenny…
I cradle her soaking body in my arms, hugging her more tightly than her waterlogged dress. We’re there, together on the bathroom floor, silent, for what seems like eons.
Now that she’s safe, I notice how she’d decorated the bathroom for her attempted grand exit. Lit candles, rose petals, incense. She could have taken the whole goddamned apartment with her.
Her throat wheezes from the violent coughs and she vomits on the floor. I’ve never been so glad to see someone vomit in my whole life. I brush away the cobwebs of dark scraggly wet hairs from her face.
My heart is pounding away like a kid on his very first drum kit. My skin drenched in a combination of my own sweat and the dripping bathwater that had almost taken her from me.
“Jenny,” I say, kissing the top of her wet matted hair. “How could I do this to you?”
Jenny wheezes, still unable to speak. I towel her hair, wrap her in one of my robes, and we drip our way into the kitchen, where I sit her down and start to make her tea.
She has a red tea that kettle she loves. It was a gift from our eccentric hipster friend Sean—the only person I’ve ever met who comes close to replicating Jenny’s obsession with all things Japan. It came with a huge collection of loose powdered tea that I rifle through our kitchen looking for.
All the teas look like something from some woo-woo hippy-dippy herb shop or something. I pick a green one. She gulps it down as though it’s the revitalizing water of life. To think, she almost gave up tea and kettles, and everything else in this world, all because I hurt her.
There’s a picture of us on the wall—an old backstage photo that she framed for reasons I’ll never fully understand. I’m still in my costume as a vampire, complete with black eyeliner. Jenny’s standing beside me, smiling at the camera, holding the red roses she’d brought me.
I glare at that grinning son of a bitch in his eyeliner. He's blissfully unaware that someday he’d hurt the poor woman next to him so badly she’d try to take her own life.
Unbelievable. I’m not worth it. I’ll never be worth it.
“Jenny—don’t ever do that again,” I tell her, clutching her pale hands in my own. We’re such a couple of pale weirdos, her and me. I was well cast as that vampire.
She stares at me, her face still flushed, her wet hair dangling limply over one eye like a clump of tangled seaweed.
I see pain, anger, sorrow, all encompassed in her eye. For a moment, I become the jealous one, envying her eye’s ability to punch an emotion right into my soul like that.
“Who was she this time?” Jenny asks, her voice as calm as I am tense.
This time. She knows about the other times.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her, and I mean it. Or, at least, I try. “I’m here now,” I add, squeezing her hands.
She laughs without humor. “Not for long.”
“I mean it,” I tell her. Convincing her, I've decided, is my objective. It's the most important thing that ever was, that ever will be. I don’t have those eyes that transmit emotions so gracefully. I’ve never been that good of an actor. Hell, that’s why I'm in this mess.
The sorrow in her face, still, the doubt. She doesn’t believe me.
“I mean it,” I repeat. Then, impulsively, I stand, pulling her from her seat at the table. I take her in my arms like the cheesiest goddamn romance novel hero you’ve ever ignored on a bookshelf.
“I. Will. Never. Leave. You. Again.”
The hint of a smile. Could it have worked?
“Promise?” She asks me. “Promise on your life?”
Anything to get her to believe me. I press my forehead to hers, feeling the wetness—how is her hair still this wet?
“On my life,” I tell her. I see the corners of her mouth flicker, so I add, “On everything.” Then just for a good smattering of extra cheese I add, “On eternity.”
That did the trick.
She’s kissing me now, with force, with passion. You haven’t kissed, I decide, until you’ve been kissed by someone who was just about to die. Jesus, she’s into it, and hell, so am I.
This time, my eyes are open. This time, I can’t look away.
Afterward, as we lay on the floor on top of the shitty little knit blanket that lives on the couch, she laughs. It’s a soft laugh, first, and then it grows into a sort of cackle.
I ask her what’s so funny, brushing hair out of her face… how is her hair still wet?
“Next time,” she tells me, as if it’s some hilarious joke, "I was gonna try wrist cutting."
“Hey. Don’t talk like that,” I say, angry that she would find that funny at all. “Don’t even joke like that.”
A look. Uncharacteristically emotionless, for her, as though she’s staring me down… Challenging me. She rises, walking naked through the hallway in the dim morning light.
Is it really morning? What?
I follow her.
She stops, without turning around.
“Did you mean what you said, about never leaving me?”
“Yes,” I assure her. “With all my heart.”
She keeps walking. I keep following. We’re headed toward the bedroom.
Of course. It’s late, we’re tired. She wants to sleep. We’ll crawl under the less scratchy blankets on the bed and forget all this.
And that’s what I’m thinking when she stops at the door and turns back.
I’ll never be able to explain it, but the thing that looks at me isn’t her. The whites of her eyes are completely yellow... And instead of pupils—instead of irises—she seems to be crying blood from the center of each eye, from where her pupil should be.
Which is impossible...
I can’t speak. I’m rendered dumb by my lack of sleep, by my emotional exhaustion, by the fact that I’m kind of dumb to begin with.
And this—thing, whatever it is… In a quiet, unfamiliar voice, it says,
“You’ll never know how much that would have meant to her.”
And then it's gone.
The door swings open.
Jenny sits on the bed, on her knees, in that white dress. She’s holding the short, black sword from her katana set. It's pointed towards her abdomen. The tip of it has already gone in. Blood has pooled and is dripping around it.
“Goddammit Jenny, not again!” I find myself yelling as I rush over to the bedside and pry the small katana from her death grip.
“It’s fine,” she says. “You’ll be so happy after I’m gone. I’ll be a sad story you’ll tell the women you meet."
"No! Jenny... That's not—"
She gives me a sad smile. Blood drips out of the corner of her mouth as she does it. She whispers "Think how much action you’ll get with a sob story like this one.”
I grab the sword out of her hand, but the moment I do, I realize it’s clean. There isn’t any blood on it—none at all.
Why?
After a moment, I realize that I’m alone. Jenny isn’t here. My bed is empty. I’m standing in the middle of the room holding that short sword of hers. The one from that stupid set her parents bought her, that always gets in the way of things.
There are trash bags in the room. Trash bags full of Jenny’s clothes. A vague memory returns to me of trying to put her clothes in bags and giving up. Of melting into the floor and weeping like a baby in huge, ugly sobs. Of wiping so much snot and tears onto my shirt that I became as waterlogged as she was…
I hear a knock at the door. I am so disoriented I almost bring the sword with me to go answer it. I also almost forget to put on clothes.
The sword wouldn’t have mattered—because the person at the door is our friend. It's Sean, the one who got Jenny that tea kettle. He likes to pick the swords up and twirl them around when he comes over. A memory returns to me of trying to give him the swords, and him refusing them.
Jenny would kill me if I tried to get rid of them, no matter how much space they take up, I thought. Why would I have tried to do that?
Sean stands in the doorway, his giant brown beard and curly mustache reminding me of some kind of wizard from a fantasy novel. The hints of the tattoos he’s always covering—probably for work—snake up his neck from under his hoodie. Like usual, he has a knit cap over his head. This one is brightly colored, with little black Halloween cats on it.
What the hell, Sean?
But I find myself welcoming how random it is because it means that this is really happening. Right?
“Hey Matt,” he says. “I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by... How ya doing?”
How am I doing?
I don’t even know how to answer that.
“Sean now’s not really a good time,” I say. I’ve said that before, I think. It seems like I’m always saying that to Sean.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I, uh, I brought these for the shrine you set up. I know they’re tacky, but I remember she liked them…”
“What are you talking about?”
He’s holding out a bouquet of red roses. Blood red, deep red, roses. They look at least a day old. The leaves are drooping. It looks like he left them in his hot truck for an afternoon because he wanted to put off this visit.
He wasn’t in the neighborhood at all.
I can’t look him in the face because the realization is sinking in. The realization that my life is hell. That I am insane. That Jenny is gone but will also be with me forever.
He’s holding out those roses and he might as well have struck me in the face with them. Because at that moment—in that horrifying, all-too-real moment, I remember everything.
I wrap my hand around the stems of the roses and feel the thorns cut into my fingers and I really don’t care. I deserve much deeper cuts than these.
“Do you remember how long it’s been?” I ask, more to myself than to him.
He tries to smile, probably to make me feel better. Neither thing works.
“You know, it seems like it was just yesterday we were all out on the porch having that barbecue, doesn’t it?”
It doesn’t at all, Sean. It doesn’t at all. Also, way to not answer my question…
“Hey, if you need anything, let me know,” Sean says. He’s trying to reassure me. This isn’t working either. He’s bad at this. His voice is not as sagely as his beard.
I stammer out a “Thank you” because it’s all I can say. I shut the door in his face because I can no longer look at him.
But I can’t help but notice, as the door is closing, that his eyes—for a split second—are inexplicably wide. They seem to be staring into my soul like Jenny’s. They seem to be telling me,
“I know what you did, you son of a bitch.”
And now, so do I.
It’s a long time ago, or it’s yesterday, or maybe this never happened at all.
In the darkness, I reach under that dead bonsai tree in the spider-infested planter. I pull out the spare key to unlock our front door, not remembering that I had left it unlocked when I left.
All I can think about—all I care about—is being noiseless, not waking her up.
I contemplate making her breakfast and some of her weird tea from Sean in the morning as a way to placate her. I have no idea what blurry-faced woman I’ve just been to see. They are always the same, and I always leave their house the same way, in the same hurry.
The floorboards creak. I worry she’ll notice how sweaty I am. I’m concocting elaborate stories to explain myself.
Babe, I "snuck out" to go shoot that commercial at the airport, remember? I didn't wanna wake you up. Well, I couldn't answer my phone—we were recording.
I walk down the hallway, towards the bathroom light. Towards the open door. Towards the smell of roses and burning wax and blood.
The first thing I see are the candles, dozens of them, in varying shapes, sizes, and colors. Some of them have burned down all the way to the wicks.
Pools of wax have caked into the bathroom counter. A stream of wax is dripping onto the floor.
I will never know how long those candles have burned, or how long it would have taken for the apartment to catch fire.
The stupid sword lays bloodied on the bathroom tiles. She really did try wrist-cutting this time, but this wasn’t so much wrist-cutting as it was wrist slashing. She did a lot of damage to her forearm, and the flesh is dangling off of it…
How are we going to fix this? I’ll need to call 9-1-1 again. Those paramedics will ask all their intrusive questions… The cops will ask questions. They’ll think I had something to do with it…
But I don’t care about any of that if it means she won’t die.
I pull Jenny’s head out from under the water, submerging my hands and sleeves into her watered-down blood. I shake her. Bloody water drips from her mouth. Good. I shake her again. I fish her out, lay her on the ground. I press on her chest. I blow air through her cold lips.
It isn’t working. Why isn’t it working?
I pull back. I didn’t realize it before—but the floor, and the edge of the tub, and the toilet… are all covered in blood… blood that seems…old. Dry, very dead rose petals cover the floor…
Why are they so dry? Why are they so dry?
Then I see her arm resting on my lap. Maybe it's just the dim light, but it takes me a moment to properly register her skin.
Her skin is a dark purple color. Like a bruise. The wound she carved into her arm—that I've been pressing on with my fingers like the world's shittiest tourniquette— it isn't red and bleeding... It's gaping and black.
Blood and wax and water and dried petals everywhere. Everywhere. Through the reddish-brown of the filthy bathwater pooled around her body on the floor, I can see her dress. It's not white. It's been stained a gross peach color in the blood, clinging to her discolored, swollen skin.
Her eyes are open—the whites of them are yellow and dry as old paper. They are the only part of her that is dry.
From the center of her eyes are two red marks—vertical cuts that spilled blood down her face. Down her bloated, blackened, incredibly dead face, gaping up lifelessly at the ceiling.
I see that same bloody bath-water pooling in her open mouth, dripping from the sides…
And that’s when I know that she tasted her blood in her mouth when she died. That she drowned herself in her own blood.
I scream, and scream, and scream, and scream, and with each scream, I feel myself losing more of my sanity, more of my control.
How could anyone who sees something like this not go insane? How could anyone who caused something like this not want to disappear? To blink out of existence and never think or feel anything ever again?
Vomit flies out of my mouth onto Jenny’s lifeless, distended legs. Streams and streams of it mingle in the pools of her blood. It makes me vomit more. I begin to choke on my own vomit. It starts coming out of my nose, next. My throat is on fire. I’m trapped in an endless cycle of gagging, screaming, water, death, guilt.
The walls, then—that’s when I notice the cracks in the walls. At first glance I thought they were burns from the candles but no, the walls are cracking. It's impossible, but the cracks in the walls are full of…hair.
Wet, tangled hair descends in tendrils like spider veins from the ceiling. It snuffs out the candles until we are in the darkness there together, on that wet, bloody bathroom floor.
When they find me, I am fully clothed in the bloody bathtub under the weight of Jenny’s corpse. Her hair in my mouth, as I drown on lukewarm bathwater mixed with very old blood. They pull me out of the bathwater, and I see the thing that saves my life.
Blue eyes. Bright blue eyes. Something different. Something other than Jenny. An unfamiliar but soothing woman’s voice telling me that everything will be alright.
Just hang in there, Matt. Everything's gonna be okay.
Even as the face blurs and I lose consciousness, I still see the blue of her eyes…
Most of the flowers on the dining room table are completely dried up. I have never thrown any of them away—there isn’t a point to it. The only person who ever seems to visit me is Sean, to come bring more roses for Jenny.
At the center of the shrine is a portrait of her, standing on the railroad tracks in her white ruffled sundress. Pictures are the only place where I can remember what her smile looks like. Most of the time when I see her, she’s screaming, or crying, or not doing anything at all.
She only seems to laugh when she jokes about wrist cutting.
Jenny’s body was taken to Japan, where her family had moved when she was still in high school. Where she should have been living all this time.
Sometimes I drudge up the dusty memory of high school Jenny telling me her parents were moving to Japan. High school me begged her to stay and move in with her aunt Valerie. She hugged me and told me she’d do anything it took to stay close to me. But I was thinking of her aunt’s theatre company that paid its actors—of what I’d be willing to do to land a role in a show there.
They held a funeral for Jenny in Japan. I did not go. I actually don’t remember if her family invited me or not.
Her aunt Valerie called me from New York, where she had moved to get away from the rumors after casting me as Romeo. I didn’t answer. I never answer.
I don’t remember things. I don’t remember what being on stage or being in front of a camera feels like, but I want to feel it again. I want to feel anything apart from guilt and shame and fear.
I want to feel like I’m allowed to be alive after everything that has happened to me.
Sometimes, I remember the blue eyes of that paramedic. They remind me of an ocean, somewhere warm and far away from here; somewhere I could escape to. I like thinking about them.
I lie awake in my bed, sleeping to one side out of habit—and also in case she shows up again, which she sometimes does.
I hear my phone go off. A text.
Who could want to text me right now? Sean with more roses? What time is it?
I’m surprised to see it’s from a girl named Sierra, and I smile. I’d completely forgotten her. She had been the Juliet to my Romeo back in the day. We’d always had a good banter backstage. I’d enjoyed driving her home even though it was out of my way because she had great stories and a pleasant laugh. Plus, it gave me a few more minutes of freedom from Jenny, who would always be waiting up for me…
I can’t remember what Sierra looks like, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll know soon enough. I text her back, telling her that wow, it’s so great you're in town for the week and yeah! Coffee sounds great.
Then, instinctively, I look over next to me—as if to make sure that Jenny is still asleep. No one is there, of course. I don’t need to do that anymore. She’s dead. She’s dead but I got to live, thanks to that blue-eyed paramedic, out there somewhere in the world.
I kick off my sweaty blankets, sit up, reach for my pants. I see my arm in front of me… there is a scar from the night I found her, running up my arm. I must have gashed it open. I must have forgotten… but the scar is massive.
How could I forget something like that?
My fingertips almost touch my pants on the floor when the wet fingers wrap around my wrist.
I look up and I see her, staring down at me, her dark, wet tangles drip bloody water onto my face.
Her eyes look like they did in that hallway. They're impossibly big, impossibly gushing blood from the center as she pushes me back onto the bed... If it even is the bed. I don’t know what's real anymore. Maybe I’m back in the bathtub.
Maybe I never left the bathtub.
She has me, and I can’t move under her dead weight. Her hair and blood are in my mouth, and even though I close my eyes, I can still see her. I can still see her disfigured corpse on the bathroom floor.
All I can do is hope that my brain will reset like it always does. That I will forget everything until I remember it again. Until Sean comes back with more roses.
Time is no longer linear for me. It is only an endless cycle of loving her, leaving her, and coming back to find her corpse. Again, and again, and again, and again, in an endless loop that has driven me to madness.
I must have drowned in that bathtub, because this is what hell must be. Nothing could ever be worse than this.
And every night, I think about leaving her. And every night, I never can.
