Clearer in the Night (7 page)

I wondered what they saw when they looked at our house. Not her friends, who all knew our story, but tourists, driving through to ooo and aaah at the neighborhood, the sheer New Englandness of it all. Did they see the pretty house with the flower beds laid out in precision and with deliberate care, the curtains that matched the shutters, and the grass neatly trimmed by the service every other week? Or did they see what I saw, an abandoned home which had not yet given up its occupants, the two women who’d rattled around like peas in a barrel, shackled together by ghosts, until one had finally decided to flee, and to hell with what happened to her companion in sorrow? I wondered if our story was so sad that it had bled into the paint yet. If the stones around the flowerbeds sang dirges to the dreams we’d lost.

We pulled into the driveway, and she stopped the car, turned off the engine, and then just sat. It felt awkward to get out of the car first, somehow, like starting to eat before your hostess, but after a full minute, I reached for the door handle.

“So that’s it?” she said.

“Sorry?”

“No explanation, at all. No telling me why it is that you ended up in the woods, by yourself, collapsed? Why you’ve been seeing someone and not telling me about it? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“No,” I lied, and pulled the door release.

“You owe me an explanation,” she said, boiling up out of the car, filled with more rage than I thought she had in her.

“I don’t owe you anything.” I wanted to clap my hands over my mouth as soon as the words were out, but that hadn’t ever done any good. She stared at me, her eyes wide with anger and something else, and I strode past her, head high, towards the front door. Which would have been a super effective gesture, if I’d grabbed my bag out of the car, and therefore had my keys. Talent, Cait. Real talent. The churning started up in my stomach again, and I thought I might be sick on the doorstep.

Mom took her time coming up the steps, her eyes crisp and cold. She’d used that look a million times over my teenage years to remind me of how much more she’d done for me than she was required to, of how much better my life was than that of the people she helped on a daily basis, how much more I had than so many other kids. Of how grateful I should be, and wasn’t. I tried to bear up under the glare, to meet her eyes and think of how while she’d always given me what I needed, she’d never given me what I wanted—encouragement, a kind touch, a hug that actually embraced. We’d been the anti-Gilmore Girls, operating in totally separate worlds, interacting only when we had no other choice.

“It’s a little too late to care,” I said, my voice drawn thin and tired, forced out by the poisonous snake twisting in the lowest parts of my belly. “You can’t just pretend that the last decade didn’t happen.”

She stumbled back for a moment, like I’d punched her in the solar plexus. Her eyes flickered shut, then opened wide. “You’re right,” she said. My turn to blink too fast, trying to figure out how I could have misheard. “Maybe I’d do things differently if I could do them over. But could we not talk about this on the front porch? People will talk.”

The crashing slam as the wall dropped into place was audible. I stayed stubbornly still in front of the door, and she sighed and reached past me with her keys to unlock it. As she got close, the smell of whiskey and expensive perfume made me gag. Something was stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t breathe past it, couldn’t even think. I shoved at her, trying to push her away so I wouldn’t yak on her shoes. Some part of my brain registered that she fell back not just a step or two, but almost lost her balance and fell to the ground. The rest of me was consumed with vomiting breakfast into the hedges. The smell of sick was overwhelming, burning my sinuses and my eyes, setting off a fresh round of gagging each time I thought I was done. The churning wouldn’t stop, the choking wouldn’t stop, and there was something wrong with my skin, everywhere, my skin was too tight, too small, I was going to split open, and all the dark poison I’d kept inside for all of my life was going to spill out and boil the world.

And then there was a cool hand on my forehead, and a soft sound in my ear. When had I started crying? She pulled me up, not caring that I was a mess, not caring that I was probably smearing stomach acid on her clothes, not caring that I was taller than her now, and when the hell had that happened, when had I gotten taller than her?

“Let’s get inside,” she said, “and get you cleaned up.”

I could still smell the alcohol on her, the awful perfume, but it wasn’t so overwhelming this time. “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

She pushed open the door, and let me inside first. The house was dark, much darker than it had been when I’d actually lived here. We’d always kept the house light and bright and tidy, if not spotlessly clean. But now, all the windows that I could see had heavy, dark curtains over them, and I felt even more than usual like I was stepping into a tomb. We were only missing the thick, sweet smell of incense.

Mom let out a nervous giggle behind me as she closed the door. “It was a long week,” she said. “We’ll get things straightened out in just a few minutes. Why don’t you go upstairs and take a shower? I’ll see what we have to eat.”

The thought of food should have made my stomach turn, after the episode on the front steps, but no. Food sounded wonderful. Heavenly. “Everything in the same place?”

“Yes,” she said. I watched her draw back the heavy curtains in the dining room. She winced at the sudden rush of light, even though we’d been outside just a few moments before. In the wash of sunshine, I could see clouds of dust motes swirling like glitter. Those curtains had been sitting still for a lot longer than a day or two. I headed up the stairs to the bathroom, and nearly fell face first into the stairs when I stepped on a slippery pile of paperwork. I cursed, and she came running, shoving her hands into my back, even though I’d already caught my balance. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I’ve been busy at work.”

She’d always been busy with something. Busy with work, busy at church, busy somewhere. She’d never left piles of paperwork on the stairs—as my eyes adjusted, I could see that it wasn’t just this riser, but the first five that had been pressed into service as filing drawers. There was a fine layer of grit over the paper. It had been here for weeks, at least.

I looked at Mom’s nervous smile. “Everything okay?” she said.

“Sure. Absolutely. I got dizzy for a second, but I’m fine. I’m going to go have a shower, I think. I feel like I passed out in the woods for days and woke up in a hospital.”

There was a time when she would have laughed at that. Not chortled, not belly-laughed, but I would have gotten more than this tremulous flexing of the lips. “Okay,” she said. I could smell whiskey again, even though I was four feet away from her, at least. God, what was happening here? What in the world was happening here?

My room looked the same as always. Well, no. It looked like it had always looked when I’d lived here. The articles from the local paper about track meets on the wall, the textbooks on the desk, the pictures of high school friends tucked into the ribbons strung across my bulletin board. The detritus of the popular, sporty girl I’d pretended to be was spread out before me, a showcase to the daughter my mom pretended to be proud of. I’d left it all behind, running away from but never towards, and it had been waiting for me all this time. Shannon had been in our apartment for three weeks before her mother called her to get the rest of her crap out, so that her mom could have a sewing room. My mother had apparently left my room untouched, waiting here for me to pick it up and spread it around my shoulders like a shroud. I sat down for a moment on my narrow twin bed, still draped in its soft gray comforter with pink and yellow roses. I couldn’t remember when I’d really belonged here. There had to have been a time. A moment when I’d looked around and decided that this was who I was.

Mom had been shocked at the things I left behind when I moved. My yearbooks, my trophies, my varsity letter from the theater department. I’d told her to keep it all, if it meant so much to her, and apparently she’d taken me at my word. The world had moved on, and left her and this room like a museum exhibit. Someday, someone was going to set this house on fire, and my mother would sit inside in her wedding dress and watch it burn around her. If she thought I’d cripple myself, trying to pull her out of the flames, she had another thought to think.

I stripped off my clothes and pulled clean things out of the backpack, then headed into the attached bathroom. I flipped on the light, bracing myself to see the ruin that had to be in my midsection. No one had said anything, no one had mentioned it, but it had happened. I remembered it. There had to be something. Some sort of physical proof.

I raised my eyes and stared at myself in the mirror. There was nothing. Nothing. My skin was soft and smooth. No, no, wait. I stared in the mirror, then gave up and curled over to see my own skin. There was a faint network of lines, no thicker than hairs, all over my stomach. They didn’t ripple my skin, or pull when I moved, and if no one knew, they could probably be mistaken for dry skin, but I could see them. Thank God, I could see them. My shoulders sagged in relief, and my eyes were wet and soft all of a sudden. I scrubbed them dry and took a deep, shuddering breath. Had long had I been holding my breath? For days?

I’d been torn apart and put back together, but it was real. It had happened. There was no question. I could see it. How it had happened, how I hadn’t died, I had no idea, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was not losing my mind. My skin felt loose and solid for the first time since I’d woken up.

I smelled like antiseptic and vomit. Not the best combination ever. I turned the shower on hot and stepped in. After flinching away for a moment, I accepted the burning spray. It wasn’t painful, not like it should have been. I could see my skin reddening, felt the scalding heat, but it felt so good to have the water sluicing down my skin that I didn’t fight. I turned and let the water run through my hair, down my body, soaking away the aches and pains and tension that had accumulated. I closed my eyes, and pretended that the rush of heat down the sides of my breasts and between my thighs was following the path of Wes’s hands and lips. I couldn’t contain the single soft moan that the water covered up. If I called him, I’d get to dance with him again.

And then there was a loud knock on the bathroom door, and I jumped and screamed like a little kid. My feet slipped out from under me, and I braced to keep from crashing down into the tub, but my hands caught on the shower bar at the last moment. I just hung there for a moment, getting my breath back. “Yeah?” I said finally, trying to avoid snapping.

“You were in here for a long time,” Mom said, pulling back the curtain. I yanked it closed again. “I came to see if you’d drowned.”

“Mom. It’s been ten minutes, tops.”

I could hear her shrug. “I was worried about you.” She was just short of actual whining.

“I’m fine,” I said. I forced my tone to be cheery and bright. I was going to sprain something if I wasn’t careful. “I just wanted to wash my hair. I’ll be out in a bit, okay?”

“Do you have everything you need? Shampoo? Razors? Conditioner?”

“It’s fine, Mom. I’ll be downstairs as soon as I’m done. Okay?”

“Sure,” she said, but it didn’t sound like she meant it, even a little bit.

I cleaned my hair slowly, luxuriating in the warmth and the soft caress of the water. When the water started to cool, I shut it off and stepped out, toweling off. Mom hadn’t closed the door, and when I glanced into my room, I saw her sitting on the bed, staring at the pictures I’d never taken down after high school. I hadn’t talked to a single person on that bulletin board since the summer after graduation. They hadn’t even been worth the effort of taking down their pictures, but she kept staring at them, as if they held some secret that she didn’t know about me. Or maybe she was just wondering what Sophie would have put on her walls, if Dad hadn’t driven the car into the lake. Yeah, that was more likely.

I resisted the urge to rush around and cover up; if she was going to stare at me naked, that was her weirdness, and I didn’t need to freak out about it.