You Don't Get to Be Good Anymore

“Why do you do this?”

The voice is even, unfrayed. No jagged edge for Mara to wedge the script into. She adjusts the headset; the foam is damp and smells like old breath and lemon cleaner. The plastic headband sticks to her hair, oily where it rests. She hates that. She hates most things that touch her.

“For you,” she says, and hears how thin it sounds, how laminated. She’s said it so often it’s shriveled to a rind. Her name badge: MARA, presses a square into her sternum through her sweater, a little brand. She imagines ripping it off and finding her skin sloughed underneath.

“For me?” He asks. Not skeptical. Curious, like he’s researching something.

Mara presses a fingertip to the F key and feels the dried sugar there. Someone brought cake earlier. A sheet cake with gray-white frosting that sweated under the fluorescent lights. She didn’t eat any. She doesn’t like cake. She hates the way frosting tries to be sweet about smothering imperfections.

“For anyone who calls,” she says. “We’re here to listen.”

“You get paid to listen?”

“I volunteer,” she says. The word sits tart on her tongue, like she’s bitten an apple that’s been in the fridge too long. Volunteer. Saint. Kindly night worker. Let them hang on me like I’m sturdy.

“Why?” he says.

Because I don’t know who I am when I’m not useful. Because being praised feels like the only time the air is warm.

“Because it matters,” she says, sweet and phoney like icing.

“Because you matter.” She takes a small pleasure in the neatness of it. It slots in where it should. She’s good at that; placement, tidy arrangement, putting the sharp thing on the high shelf and the soft thing where someone can reach it. I am a display, she thinks. Look at all the good words laid out for you. The thought makes her stomach turn and she pretends it’s empathy.

The old man on the other end makes a hinge-sound, a not-laugh. The wall clock ticks and Mara’s tongue tastes metallic. She takes a sip of cold coffee; it’s gone gray and leaves a film. Her mug says YOU ARE ENOUGH in cheerful caps. Am I? she thinks. If I keep saying it to strangers, does it eventually boomerang?

“What if I don’t?” he asks.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t matter.”

Mara’s eyes prickle. She’s good at this line. “You matter to me. Your life matters to me,” she says, and feels the hook slide out into the water, glinting. Take it, she thinks. Bite. Let me reel you in so I can be necessary.

“To you,” he repeats, and the preposition slaps wetly onto the desk between them. She doesn’t pick it up.

Mara can hear him breathing. Slow. Counting. It tickles the wire.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“I don’t want to say.”

“That’s okay.” She has a tone for this. Sweet icing, soft enough to stick to the walls and smother all the noise. “Do you have anyone with you right now?”

“No.” A pause. “Do you?”

She startles. Yes. The light. The clock. The carcass of cake. The smell of lemon disinfectant. The part of me that wants to be loved by a disembodied voice because bodies complicate it.

“I’m at the call center,” she says. “We take crisis calls overnight. We’re here to help.”

“Are you?” he says. Not a challenge. A child putting his palm into a stream to learn what water does.

“We can talk through options,” she says. “We can-”

“That’s not my question.” He exhales, a tiny fog into her ear. “What would you do if you wanted to die?”

The cursor blinks. Blink. Blink. Blink. She imagines it winking at her, mean and knowing. She could say the right thing. She could run the drill: crisis plan, safety steps, do you have a method, do you have a friend. The lines are stacked like clean towels in her mouth. She can feel their terry cloth.

But honesty is a pressure, a thumb pressing between her ribs. Tell the truth, it says, and she isn’t sure whose voice it is. Maybe it’s the worst part of her. Maybe it’s the best.

“I can’t tell you what to-” she starts.

“No!” The word closes a door. “Not what I should do. You. What would you do.”

Mara closes her eyes. The light drills through her lids, that sick fluorescent frequency that makes people look jaundiced. She sees last week’s tally: three thank yous, one I-needed-that, zero you-saved-me. She keeps score in a place she never admits exists. Every time she promises herself she’ll stop counting; every time the pen in her brain uncaps on its own.

If I wanted to die? The answer arrives bald and plain, a shorn animal shivering at the threshold. It disgusts her. It thrills her. I would go through with it. Being pulled back sounds like waking mid-surgery with everything open and no anesthetic. And I don’t want anyone else holding the deed to my relief.

“Be honest,” he says, like he’s already forgiving her or like he wants to be cruel.

“I’d go through with it,” she says. Her voice is very calm, like she’s setting a dish in a sink. “I think being saved might be worse.”

The sentence sits between them, heavy and raw and pink. She hates how satisfied her mouth feels, as if it’s been fed. She hates how the room goes very quiet, like it’s listening.

“Huh,” he says, and it’s almost a laugh. “That makes sense.”

“Wait-” she says, but the line goes clean.

She doesn’t breathe. She listens so hard she imagines she can hear dust settling on the windowsill. The vent inhales. The clock chews another ten seconds. Her heart knocks once, twice. Call back, she thinks, and immediately thinks, No. Policy. Protocol. The invisible supervisor in her skull shakes a head. We do not chase. We receive. She hates the word. She hates the way it fits her.

You did this, a voice says. It’s not fair. It is. The truth creaks inside her like an old step. You wanted to be honest; you wanted to be clean; you wanted to see what happened when you took the ribbon off the box.

On the F key, the frosting scab gives way under her thumbnail. She rubs it into a smear. It smells faintly of artificial vanilla, a sweetness trying to pretend at childhood. She thinks about touching it to her tongue. She wants to gag herself with it, to make the body refuse what the mouth took.

Across the room, someone laughs. Mara’s headset feels heavier, as if the foam is soaking up her words, storing them to grow mold later.

She should take the headset off. She should put it on the desk and step outside and let the night push its cold fingers into her collar. She should break the rules that protect her from herself.

Her hand lifts toward the console instead. Her thumb finds the button that readies the next call. She watches it like a stranger watches another stranger about to do something ugly in a subway station.

If I stop, she thinks, who am I? The question grates at her teeth. She can’t swallow it. She can’t spit it out.

“Next call,” Kyle murmurs from the other station, not looking at her. His coffee smells like burned almonds. He once told her she has a “calming presence.” She put that inside the tally too and hates that she remembers it.

She clears her throat. The sound feels like scraping a plate with a fork. She presses the button. She pins the smile to her voice. Sweet like icing.

“Thank you for calling,” she says, and the words are a recording that’s been left too close to a magnet. “This is Mara. I’m here to listen.”