Here So Far Away(66)
A chore list was posted on the refrigerator: scrub toilets and garbage bins, pull hair out of drain, and so on. All of it nasty, none of it for Matthew. But Dad quickly lost interest in monitoring the prisoner, which put me in his sight line too often and required him to get up to check my work. It was disturbing, how he hardly moved from his recliner at all. He wasn’t pretending to do his rehab exercises anymore.
On the third afternoon, I placed a pack of cigarettes beside him and slipped upstairs to my bed, staying there for the rest of the day and the next. And the next. And the next. I spread my textbooks and notebooks around so it would look like I’d been studying, which I did, but also to make it less obvious if I drifted off, which I did.
I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, including Rupert. My mother had told his daughter, Sarah, and the heritage society that I had mono or something and would be out for a couple of weeks, and Sarah said that she might have him into a nursing home by then. The thought of it made my chest burn hotter.
My eighteenth birthday passed without the cards or gifts that were put away until after my suspension, though Matty did smuggle me one from Sid that had a picture of Charlie Chaplin wearing an old-timey prisoner’s uniform (I bet Joshua Spring would pay you a conjugal visit.). Soon, I was no longer coming out of my room to push food around on my plate. Every time I crept back into my warm, safe cocoon after being forced out to use the bathroom, I was nearly giddy with gratitude. I would lie in bed for hours with my hand resting on the mattress in the space where Francis never was but I always wished he could be, and I would fall asleep that way.
When I woke up, that’s when it came rushing at me in waves. Had he died instantly? Or had he survived that long drop into the icy ravine and waited for help that didn’t come? Had he called out? For me? The thought of it was so intensely and ruthlessly and relentlessly painful that it felt like a long, silent howl.
In between were the dreams, some of them joyful and full of touch and scent, caresses and sweat and callused fingertips, but there were also the bed-like toboggans careening around trees and skirting crevices, and the recurring image of the lake stone lying among the debris at the bottom of the bay. I was so afraid Francis’s face would stop visiting me in my sleep and start slipping away. I didn’t have a single photograph of him, no letters, no ticket stubs or playbills or locks of hair or old T-shirts or any of those things that you were supposed to have and hold on to when you were in love.
Then one night, I couldn’t sleep anymore. We were having one of those surprise mid-April snowfalls, and as the hours passed and the snow piled up, the darkness pressing against my window grew blacker, scarier. I slipped down onto the floor to crawl under the bed, like I did when I was little, but it was crammed with all my kid things. Even if I pulled it all out, I wouldn’t be able to squeeze between the frame and the floor. Curled up on the rug, I began to panic. What was the point of being clever, or at least quick, if I couldn’t wriggle out of this one? Couldn’t talk my way out of it, couldn’t outrun it, and I no longer fit under the bed.
I heard Matthew’s slippered feet padding down the hallway, followed by the shooft of a piece of yellow construction paper sliding under my door. He’d scrawled: “Something for you on the front stoop.”
“Matty?”
The soft click of his bedroom latch.
My legs, once I got them under me, were like a newborn calf’s. Just walking down the hallway felt precarious, never mind the stairs. Matthew had turned out the lights behind him and I left them off. I didn’t want to wake up Mum, who was snoring in the guest room with the door half open, or alert Dad, watching TV in the family room, that I was up and available to fetch him things.
I eased the front door open, stepped lightly across the creaky porch, and opened that door too. On the stoop, nestled in a clump of snow, was a single rose in a glass bud vase. The yard was marked by two trails, one a deep track where the snow had been kicked up and tramped down, the other made of enormous footprints, spaced well apart and pointing toward the road, as though a giant had taken off at a run.
Thirty-Three
“Good morning, sunshine.” My mother was standing at the foot of my bed, wearing a forced-looking smile. “You know what would be fun, Georgie?” she said. “Let’s get you washed up right here!”
What? No. Weird.
I shook my head and it began to throb. I could feel my pulse in my face.
“Like a spa! Wouldn’t that be a—”
I’m thinking she said hoot, but she was already down the hallway.
I closed my eyes, drifting off for a moment, and when I opened them again she was sitting beside me on the bed, gently wiping my face with a warm washcloth. She’d placed a second one on the bedside table along with the water cup from the bathroom. “Your father would be so jealous if he knew you’re getting the royal treatment.”
Her expression turned grim as she swabbed my nose and chin, grimmer when she got to my lips. They seemed stuck to my teeth. “I’ll do it,” I tried to say, but my mouth was full of goo and crust.
“Shush-shush,” Mum said. “Spa, hospital, tomayto, tomahto.”
Slowly, she worked her way to the inside of my lips, ignoring my flinches and whimpers, and started wiping my teeth and gums. “Done,” she said, handing me the cup. “Swish some water around. You can spit it right back in.”