“The nothing”

“The nothing” is Tessa’s name for the emotional emptiness that follows her discovery of her father Richard’s body and collides with the hurt of her relationship with Hardin. It is at once a defense against feelings she cannot bear and a condition she fears: numbness briefly gives her control, yet its hollowness becomes another form of pain. As anger and memory return, the expression marks not a clean escape from grief but a changing way of carrying it.

The Discovery and the Onset of Numbness

Tessa’s numbness begins in the immediate aftermath of finding a body on the bathroom floor. Before she can focus, she fears it may be the boy who left her; when her eyes adjust, she realizes it is not Hardin. The distinction brings only half a reprieve. The body is her father’s, and paramedics and police later confirm that he died alone in the apartment after injecting heroin. Bags of heroin in his jeans suggest that he intended to use over the weekend, and he had been dead for hours before Tessa found him.

The confirmation makes an already unbearable discovery official, but it does not make it comprehensible. Tessa remembers crying her father’s name and shaking him until his jaw fell open and the needle dropped from his arm with a small clink. She also remembers his hand jerking in hers, an involuntary spasm she cannot decide was real or a false hope made by her mind. When she checks his pulse again and finds nothing, the moment of possible return collapses into the sight of his dead eyes. The ordinary sound of the needle and the uncertainty surrounding the movement persist as fragments her mind keeps replaying.

Afterward, she is left sitting with her knees drawn to her chest, staring at a wall as the sun goes down. The stillness is not calm: sympathetic visitors try to move her, then gradually stop, leaving her alone in the oversized living room. Her father’s apartment becomes entangled with the loss in her thoughts. She sees its bookshelves and brick wall as a pleasing surface concealing evil, and imagines that never entering it would have spared her everything. In that grief-stricken accounting, the place and the death seem to have swallowed not only her father but the life she had before crossing its threshold.

Numbness as Shelter and Injury

The nothing soon becomes a way to shut out more than bereavement. Tessa’s mind moves between tender memories of Hardin and images of him damaging a wall and wearing another woman’s shirt; he slept with that woman only days earlier. Instead of registering the expected pain, Tessa feels blankness, and at first that absence seems like regained control. She tells herself she need not feel or remember what she does not want to face, and imagines that forgetting might prevent the memories from crippling her again.

That apparent relief is unstable. When Hardin tries to comfort her and apologize, she tells him to leave, insisting that he cannot come as a helper after hurting her so deeply. His touch briefly calms her, exposing how readily she remains emotionally responsive to him even as she tries to hold on to numbness. She describes herself as grieving two deaths: Richard’s and, in a different sense, the loss bound up with Hardin’s betrayal. The emptiness protects her from those competing injuries, but it does not resolve either one.

Tessa recognizes the contradiction directly: pain strips a person down, but being empty can hurt more than feeling pain. The nothing settles beneath her breastbone, a deep, vacant throb that she gradually grows used to. After a dream of a gentler Hardin, waking to the real one brings the emptiness back; when he reaches for her, his fingers seem to burn against her skin and she pulls away. The sensation makes her boundary physical even while her attachment remains difficult to escape.

Resistance, Anger, and the Wish to Live

In a cold shower, after the hot water runs out, Tessa considers the dark thoughts that arose while she was grieving. She later says that those thoughts were brief and that she overcame them on her own; the decision she can hold onto is that she wants to live. This does not mean the numbness has lifted. It means that, within it, she has identified a limit and a direction that belong to her rather than to Hardin or the demands of other people.

Her wish to become someone else is similarly ambivalent. The wall is easier to look at than Hardin’s green eyes, which once represented the time she hoped he would give her: another hour, week, or month, and eventually a permanent commitment. She wants to stop feeling that desperation and imagines becoming again the girl she was before college. Yet she also believes that girl is gone. The image of a former self remains an aspiration, not an assured return, and the sense of burning silently conveys how little the wish for reinvention can undo.

Numbness also gives way, intermittently, to anger. While walking with Zed, Tessa asks whether it is wrong to be angry at Richard for dying. Zed suggests that her father may not have known what he was doing, but she distinguishes between foreseeing his death and knowing the danger of bringing drugs into the apartment. She believes he knew death was possible and put getting high first, while still acknowledging that she loved him. Anger is painful and guilty, but it feels better than the blankness; naming it lets her speak a truth that affection alone could not contain.

Memory Without the Same Pain

Later, a mundane exchange about Frosted Flakes brings back a memory of Richard and Hardin bickering because Richard had eaten Hardin’s cereal. Tessa smiles and puts the memory aside. She no longer experiences thoughts of her father only as pain in her chest; she can also remember his humor and admire the positivity she came to know during the short time they had together.

That recollection does not erase the overdose, the shock of finding him, or the earlier rage. Instead, the cereal memory shows that the relationship continues in a changed form: an ordinary, shared comic moment can coexist with the knowledge of how Richard died. The movement from frozen attention to a sound that echoes in her mind, through emptiness and anger, and finally to a smile makes “The nothing” a shifting state rather than a final verdict on Tessa’s capacity to feel. Her grief changes its texture, allowing remembrance to become more than another injury.