The Fall of Never(61)

For the next couple days, Kelly spent her time either with Gabriel Farmer or at her sister’s bedside. With Gabriel—Gabe, he liked to be called now—she felt a certain homey quality, a certain welcoming that she did not feel around her parents or inside the walls of her parents’ house. He was quiet and passive in his own sociable way, yet he seemed an attentive listener.

Though Becky still had not woken from unconsciousness, the young girl’s complexion gradually began to return to its normal color, and the bruises and scrapes that sheathed her body had started to fade. In the two weeks Kelly had been at the compound, she saw Becky’s doctor twice. He was an anticlimactic fellow with an enormous brow and quicksilver eyes which lingered just a second too long on the mouth of any person he watched talk. Both times, Kelly watched this Doctor Cavanaugh shuffle into the house, shake nonexistent rain off his overcoat, and nod deferentially at her parents (both of whom seemed not only accustomed to the small doctor’s aversion to conversation but more than willing to follow suit). In Becky’s bedroom, Doctor Cavanaugh huddled over Becky’s slumbering form like a troll looking to steal her breath. He carried with him a small leather satchel, and from it he produced a series of instruments with which he examined the sleeping girl. Cavanaugh checked her blood-pressure, her pupils, her respiration—all with the perfunctory efficiency of an electrical engineer. Kelly’s parents stood behind the little doctor the entire time, their eyes glazed, their faces slack and void of expression. It was like they were here because they knew they should be, not because they actually wanted to be, Kelly realized as she stood leaning in the bedroom doorway. And to her amazement, her parents didn’t ask the doctor a single question, didn’t express an ounce of concern. Their detachment from the situation infuriated Kelly. It evoked images of institutional Christmases where there would be a single wrapped gift at the foot of her bed—a gift from Glenda, she knew, despite what was written on the card; the meals in the enormous, sterile dining room where her parents sat like stone gargoyles at either end of the massive, hand-carved table. Even as a child she had wanted to stand up and scream at them, wanted to burst into a fit and start flinging silverware around the room—anything to break the monotony, and to generate some hint of emotional reaction from her parents.

“What’s going on?” she asked on Doctor Cavanaugh’s second visit. He looked up at her, neither startled nor expectedly, his eyes immense and swimming behind the lenses of his glasses. He stared at her with the curiosity of a caged bird. Her parents turned toward her as well, her mother’s lips pressed whitely together, her father practically staring straight through her.

“I’m sorry?” Cavanaugh said.

“What’s going on here?” she repeated. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Ma’am,” Cavanaugh began.

“This is Kelly, our other daughter,” her mother said, as if in apology.

“She’s still not awake,” Kelly said. “Why isn’t my sister awake yet?”

“Your sister’s in a coma,” Cavanaugh said.

“So what do we do?”

“We do nothing,” Cavanaugh said. “There’s nothing. We wait. She’ll awake when she’s ready.”

But that wasn’t good enough. Just looking at the girl lying there, her body so unreceptive, Kelly wanted to burst into tears. “What else do you know?”

“What else?” Cavanaugh repeated. “Ma’am, your sister is unconscious. She needs rest. That’s all we can give her—rest.”

“And why does everyone seem so damned satisfied with that?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and stormed out into the hallway.

I’m sorry, Becky. I can’t help but feel that I deserted you. And it’s true—I hadn’t really even thought of you in so long, and that’s not fair. Maybe I dreamed about you, but what good did that do? Look at you now.

Not for the first time, she tried to understand why her parents had ever bothered to have children. The gap between their ages could suggest that they’d both been unplanned (or at least Becky could have been, she supposed), but still…did it make any sense? She tried to summon the image of her parents making love and found it impossible to do. Their reservations were too great, their personal walls too high. It would be like two robots simulating copulation.

She rushed through the downstairs foyer and through the front door, stepping into several inches of snow. The icy wind attacked her out of nowhere. In an instant, her eyes watered and blurred. It took her several seconds before she realized she was sobbing.

It was something about this place—this house, this compound—that weakened her, drained her. She’d suspected this as a child or, rather, sensed it (it was something too great and too aesthetic to mold into linear thought at such a young age), and knew it all the more as an adult. There was that lingering suffocation about her—the sensation of tight arms wrapping themselves around her body and slowly squeezing out her life. And despite her fear of the institution, there had been some relief there as well when she’d gone away as a child, as if a small part of her had actually realized that she’d finally been pulled from the nightmare.

The loneliness and despair that had consumed her childhood suddenly rushed back to her in one thick, frozen wave, nearly knocking her to the ground. Sobbing, she skirted around the side of the house and traversed along the frozen ridge. From this standpoint, she could see clear across the snow-covered valley and straight out above the town of Spires in the distance. It’s snowing in autumn, she thought absently. It’s the middle of fall.