Cackle(62)

Lynn.

She’s home.

And she’s standing in the window, staring at me. She’s been watching me. I don’t know for how long. Long enough.

I should be mortified. Right now I should be experiencing the excruciating sting of embarrassment. I’ve felt it for less.

And yet.

I face the window. I step forward so I can be fully illuminated, so my smile is not masked in shadow. I wave to the face behind the glass. To Lynn.

With a quick swish of the curtains, she’s gone, and the light goes off.

“Oops!” I say to myself. And to the moon, “Oh, well.”

I lay myself down in the grass, waiting to feel some belated humiliation.

It never arrives.

I revel in its absence. It’s liberating.

I laugh and laugh.





RALPH


The next morning, I head to Sophie’s first thing. I decide to stop in the Good Mug for coffee. I wait for Oskar to comment on the two coffees, on the fact that one of them is for Sophie, but he doesn’t. He does ask me if I’m feeling all right.

“I feel great,” I say. “Why?”

He shakes his head.

It’s nippy, and there’s a shimmering layer of frost on the ground, but it’s not bothering me at all. I like the way it makes me feel, how it reminds me of my body. You’re here, the cold says. It’s now.

I trot up to Sophie’s door and set the coffees down so I can knock twice. The door opens itself and I step inside. Sophie is at the top of the stairs wearing a long purple velvet robe with black fur trim.

“Pet,” she says, yawning, “good morning.”

“Am I too early?” I ask. “I have coffee.”

“I’m tired is all,” she says, descending the steps. “Thank you for the coffee. How was your date?”

I hand her the cup and she removes the lid to sip. She looks at me, her eyes bright and eager.

“You don’t know?” I ask her.

“Know what, darling?”

“About the date?”

“What do you mean?”

“We talked,” I say. “Last night. On the stall?”

I was so sure. I didn’t doubt for a second.

“The stall?” she asks.

“Are you messing with me?”

She leans back, puts a hand over her heart. “No, darling. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh,” I say. “I guess I had too much to drink or something. I could have sworn . . .”

“Tell me,” she says. “Come. Let’s sit.”

We sit on the stairs and drink our coffee as I give her a play-by-play of the night. I tell her about handsome, terrible, bland Pascal. I tell her about Dan and his repulsiveness. She scoffs.

“Some men are so foul you wouldn’t even bother to save their blood,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“Never mind,” she says. “Continue.”

I tell her about how the restaurant was tacky and the food was gross, about how I drank straight whiskey and escaped to the bathroom. I tell her about how I saw the graffiti, the message that I assumed was from her. The red ink.

She keeps shrugging and shaking her head like she had nothing to do with it, like she has no idea what I’m talking about. I’m not sure I believe her. Part of me hopes she’s lying, because the alternative is scary. Did I hallucinate? See what I wanted to see? Was I drunker than I realized?

I tell her about how I started to get sassy, but then realized it was futile.

And then I tell her about the bones.

She’s silent as I recount the story. She doesn’t sip. She doesn’t move. I don’t think she breathes.

“I laughed. I started laughing. It took me over. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, the funniest thing to ever happen. He was bleeding from his mouth, spitting out bones, and I was laughing. I laughed. The whole restaurant was staring.”

Last night, the laughter made me feel immortal, but in the yellow light of day, I feel ashamed of it. It was crazy to laugh. Why did I laugh? What was so funny?

“I thought maybe it was you,” I say. “Like the spider. I thought it was a curse.”

“It wasn’t me, pet,” she says, stroking my hand. “It was you.”

I have a flash of memory. Me spinning around and around, a swirl of trees, the house. The moon hovering above me. My feet numb. A mist like a silver aura delicate as lace. My voice. A strange song.

I remember how it felt. How I felt.

I conjure it. The feeling. The feeling of watching Dan spit bones from his wretched mouth. The feeling of dancing on the grass, in the moonlight. Of being seen by Lynn and not caring. Not caring at all.

I wasn’t myself. I’m not myself.

Or maybe . . . maybe I’m more myself than I’ve ever been.

“But how?” I ask. “How?”

Sophie puts a finger to her lips, a thought haunting her face.

“What?” I ask.

She smiles widely. “Nothing at all, my dear,” she says. “Let’s go out for breakfast. We can talk over pancakes.”

“You’re obsessed with pancakes.”

She shrugs. “What can I say? They are cake disguised as breakfast. I’ll go get dressed. How’d the dress work out, by the way?”