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When Lottie returns to the US, she does so by boat. It means more time spent stuck alone with her thoughts, but less chance of having a PTSD-induced breakdown and getting sent right back to the psych ward. Opportunity cost and all that shit. So yeah, she travels by boat. She sits in the sun and tilts her face up towards the endless blue sky. (She's always looking skyward, gaze insistent, as if the sheer force of her will can make time fold in on itself, can bring her back to before her heart burnt to bits in midair.)
Lottie looks up at the heavens and she thinks about... about everything, really. But especially about this past year. It's been a bridge, in a way. Between getting out of the psych ward and getting on this ship. Between electroshock therapy and open ocean. When she thinks back, it all blurs together, runs like a broken egg yolk. Sunny yellow and opaque, obscuring almost everything. Almost, but not quite, because there are a few things that stand out. Things Lottie's learned about herself, or about this new existence she's wandering through. Things that here, beneath the bright, unyielding sky, she runs down like a grocery list.
One: The pills don't banish the visions, but they do make her numb to the horrors, and that's enough, right? It has to be enough.
She lays awake at night, staring at the water spots on the ceiling of the cheap hostel room, drugged to the point where she doesn't scream when something moves into her peripheral vision. She just lays on the bed like a dead fish, even as deer with entrails wrapped 'round their antlers dance in and out of the shadows. Even as their dark eyes call to her, beg her to replay the memories of what happened out there. (Of what she did.) Blood drips from their mouths onto the shag carpet, stains their carnivore teeth. You're a monster, they say, and their voices are echoes of her dead friends - her victims. Gen and Melissa. Mari and Akilah. Javi. Jackie.
"I know," Lottie says to the empty room.
You're wrong inside, and you always will be. The words are familiar. The voices have changed from the dead to the living. Her parents. Tai and Van and Shauna. Travis and Nat and Misty.
"I know that too," Lottie says, and then she laughs. She laughs 'til her face hurts, even though it isn't funny. Wonders, briefly, if the poor, unsuspecting Austrian couple next door can hear her cackling through the thin walls. For some reason, that makes her laugh even harder. Just another thing that she should be guilty about, she supposes. That she will be guilty about, once the meds wear off. If the meds ever wear off.
