Things Withered (24 page)

“Are you okay?”

Do I look different? Can you tell?

She nodded. “Yes, just a little . . .” it trailed off. She was exhausted again. No matter how she slept, she was still dead on her feet. She finished with the registration and went back to the apartment to fall into bed. She didn’t call Duggan. Or answer the phone when it rang.

Scrapbook moment: whenever Hilary’s mother noted something significant in their lives, she would say,
oh my a scrapbook moment, girls!
The summer previous, when Shara’s home had been tense and nervous and filled with sweaty fear, Shara had spent most of her days at Hil’s, beside the pool, drinking cosmos and sometimes secretly sneaking a cigarette out of Adonia’s stash in the kitchen under the recycling. The first time Adonia caught them, Hil gave her a side-eye and said
bitch please you’re not supposed to smoke here
and Adonia just went back into the kitchen. Later they agreed that having something on the housekeeper was a good thing, especially when Hil started sleeping with the guy who came to clean the pool. In Hil’s defence, it was practically the only guy they saw all summer.

Boredom and monotony had made them childish and they spent a lot of time looking for the old croquet set, their *NSYNC playing cards for 21, the Spin Magic. They found hardly any of the things they looked for, but they delighted in talking about them, spent whole days doing it. They’d been floating in the pool on their childhood blow-up rafts, Hil’s shaped like a shark, Shara on the turtle. Hil’s mom had come out of the house and said—

Scrapbook moment!
And snapped a photo.

Scrapbook moment: Playing Miss California when they were about ten, California being the apex of glamour to them at ten, and deciding that Shara came in second and Hil first because it was a beauty contest, after all.
You’re the smart one,
Hilary had said. Shara agreed. Hilary could be the pretty one if she wanted. At ten, being the smart one was better.

Scrapbook moment: Kevin Murdock kissing Shara at riding, behind the tack shed, and Hilary finding them
he’s supposed to be mine
she said, her delicate features twisted into a transparent expression of anger and surprise, at the injustice of it.
I liked him! Cheater cheater—

More than before, Shara understood that look now, the wide-eyed shock, the fish pout speechlessness, the
unfairness
of trounced expectations.

The Canadian Shield Award for instance, in Botany.

Shara was the smart one.

Scrapbook moment: in the arc between overhead and Hil’s skull, when the Mac was on its trajectory, too late to stop, Hil had looked dubiously at Shara and said what sounded like
seriously?

The memories flickered through Shara’s memory like a slide show, the Mac, the pool, *NSYNC 21, Uno, the flare of blood, Hilary’s eyes wide open staring up into the canopy of Red Mulberry, leaves stuck to her pale skin—

The pictures flickered and flipped over, fading while Shara fell asleep, now and then scratching absently at a place on her body, her lower back, the soft inside of her thighs, under her arms.

She fell asleep, woke up and fell back to sleep, fitful, noise filtering up into the bedroom from other rooms, the street, feet crunching on leaves, something rustling low in the brush. Sounds.

In the night Shara dreamed she opened her eyes and over her head was purple morning light dappled unevenly and the room smelled very bad, like something dropped and left to spoil, until a breeze blew gently over her and carried the smell away. Hilary’s eyes, wide open, stared down at her.

“Something’s wrong with my arm,” she told the big nurse. There were two nurses, a big one and a little one. The big one wore a name tag. It said University Medical Staff. But the place where her name would be was blank.

“A sprain? Is there swelling?” She reached out and took Shara’s left arm gingerly in her hands. She was surprisingly gentle for a large woman, and the surprise of that made Shara feel like crying.

“It’s like a rash, I guess,” Shara said. She raised her arm up over her head to expose her tricep to the woman. “Here.” She ran her hand over the place on her arm where it was so itchy—
one
of the places where it itched, the itch driving her mad—and where it was discoloured.

The nurse squinted and leaned over the counter. She tried to get close and lost patience.

“Come around this side of the counter, please,” she said. Shara did. She ran the back of her hand over the flesh that was itchy. The skin felt clammy, maybe even soft, with a scent that reminded her of something.

(pleasant
scrapbook memory
of hikes and camping and the underside of the dock at Providence Bay)

“Don’t scratch,” came the auto-response from the nurse.

The big nurse looked at her arm. Peered, stared, stroked, prodded, examined and finally stood back and shook her head. She reached into a cupboard and took out a container of wet wipes, yanking one out.

“Lemme see this—” again she was very gentle and looked to Shara once for confirmation that it didn’t hurt as she lightly stroked the afflicted underside of her arm with the wipe. It was cool and soothing.

The nurse held it out to show Shara.

“It’s green,” she said. They looked at it. It was. Green.

“It itches,” Shara said. The nurse shrugged and Shara had to go into the little room to wait for the doctor.

Hilary’s dad called on the third day. Shara had forgotten that this might happen, her mind on other things

The flies, for instance. The apartment was full of flies.

She stared at the call display number, their name coming up not as J. Peale, her dad, or even E & J. Peale, but the jaunty “The Peales.” Of course they were jaunty. Why wouldn’t they be? They were also jovial, cheerful and self-satisfied, any number of kindly, happy adjectives.

Why wouldn’t they be?

Scrapbook memory: Shara went home from Hilary’s house every few days, but only because she had to. On one of those days, she went home and found her mother crying in the kitchen, standing at the new island, the reno so new the range top had yet to be used. Her mother only cooked a couple of times a week. They’d all gotten used to eating out.

What’s going on?
she asked her mother. She had to say something, even if they weren’t really a talky-touchy family like the Peales, always all over each other. The woman was right there, though, crying. She had to say something.

Her mother didn’t look at her, but she took her hands off her face. Her face was tearstained. She turned away. Gave her head a little shake.

Shara,
Daddy can’t pay tuition for next year. You’ll have to get a job or transfer to another school, okay? All the words were strung together like a lyric.

And then she went outside through the living room. The patio door squealed open and then shut again. Just like that.

She didn’t answer the call from The Peales, but stood there and listened to the message, staring at Hilary’s luggage, still piled in front of the bed, as if waiting for her to come and unpack. This would be what she said, if someone asked her.

“Hi Hilsy-Punkin, it’s Daddy. Just checking in, we haven’t heard from you and your cell is off. I know you’re busy sweetheart but just give Mommy and me—”

And so on.

The rash spread along her left side. Shara turned slightly to her right and tried to see it all in the small bathroom mirror, foggy from her shower.

The doctor had gently and carefully talked to her about hygiene before sending her back to the apartment with a sample-sized bottle of hand sanitizer. He told her not to let herself get so preoccupied with school that she forgot to shower and scooted her off with a firm expression and a wave of his hand.

It was moss. Ordinary moss. Garden-variety moss—pardon the pun—
bryophyta.

That had been a few days earlier. She’d showered and used the sanitizer. Like he’d said.

The moss ran from the soft underside of her arm, down her left side, slightly less in the slope of her waistline, but spreading in a jagged circle over her hip on to the rise of her buttock. It continued down the length of her leg, although she couldn’t see it in the mirror, she could see it by looking down. She did not look down just then.

It still had a greenish tinge to it, but if she took a rag and wiped at it, the green came off on the rag and underneath the skin was mottled and discoloured. If she ran her hand over it, it felt soft, spongy.

A fly buzzed around her head, landing and flying off when she swatted at it disinterestedly.

The apartment was full of them. It was the smell.

Donald waved her down in the hall. At very last second Shara thought she would run away, pretend she hadn’t seen him, but she was too slow. He grinned, an armload of books leading the way through the scores of students on their way to classes.

“Hey!” he called, waving, but he knew she’d seen him.

She smiled wanly.

Today he wore a suit jacket, something from the secondhand store, she thought, because the lapels were wider than was fashionable. His shirt underneath was crispy-looking, purely white against his pink skin. He was very fair.

“Hi,” he said, out of breath. “I thought I might see you in this wing.”

She smiled and swallowed. Her mouth and throat seemed full of fluid. “Oh,” she said. Again she was at a loss. “Donald,” she added.

“Yeah. You remember. I wanted to ask you if you felt like going to the First Days Fair tonight. I want to hear Gibby Chuck play—he used to play for Dizzy Gillespie, back in the day. You like jazz?” He looked at her. Her hair was uncombed and she was wearing dirty jeans and a sweater that had been on the floor for . . . how long? She might have slept in it. She couldn’t seem to keep track of things. Her mother used to say such episodes were because her head was “full of flowers,” like that scene from Bambi with the skunk. It wasn’t far off, this time.

She kept thinking about the woods.

“I don’t know,” she said. She’d just had a terrible dream.

“I think you would. You wanna go?” She didn’t answer.

He said, “The band is new. This is their first tour—”

Hilary had been in her dream.

They had been in the woods. It must have been just at dawn because she remembered the birds were loud, braying, swooping around her head. Hilary would speak, her voice oddly coming from all angles, above, across the big rock, from far away; but Shara wouldn’t look at her.

Hilary only said one thing in the whole dream.

Look at me, Shar. Look at me.

“You look like you could use a night out—” Donald said. He stood close and she could feel his body heat. He seemed to vibrate with vitality. She would have liked to lean in and melt against him, extract some of his chlorophyll.

“I have to see my advisor,” Shara said. The last message had been for her.
Miss Troit, I expect to see you at 2 pm, and this time your absence indicates—

“Okay . . . but you’ll go?”

Look at me, Shar.

“All right.”

“Good.” The two of them stood in the hall while the numbers dwindled around them. He stood over her, taller by a foot and a half, his dark hair dangled in his eyes when he looked down at her. His eyes were blue. He was so pleased. She tried to imagine how that would feel. To be pleased.

Shara ached to scratch, all over, but worst between her legs, around her eyes, in the deepest part of her ears, where the itching rash had become something unbearable, something practically living. This morning she had stuck a Q-tip deep in her ear and rubbed it around furiously, hard. It had come out green. It was not Donald’s presence that kept her from scratching, but rather an agreement with herself that she was not going to give in to it again.

Green. It had come out green and she recognized the smell.

His mouth was his best feature. His lips were plump and bow-shaped like a baby’s.

She’d seen a program on television the other night—a back to school thing with all kinds of experts—and they said student stress was at epidemic levels and caused all kinds of illness, from headaches and rashes to cancer and yeast infections.

It was the stress.

Maybe it was a yeast infection. She imagined tiny grains of yeast multiplying, into so many millions of grains that it was a moving, shifting mass.

“Are you okay?”

“I have a headache.” She almost said yeast infection.

“You look a little tired.”

“I’m under stress,” she said. Her stomach rolled uncomfortably. She put her hand over her mouth, ducking her head forward. Her hair spilled over her face.

He reached out and gently-so-gently, pushed it back. She looked up at him and he was smiling softly at her, with affection and interest.

“Maybe you should crash for an hour, like before I pick you up. I’ll pick you up at seven, good?”

She gave him the address, conflicted. Confused by his attention. She had a sudden new feeling in the pit of stomach, heated raw feeling of panic. Like she’d misunderstood the whole lesson and now there was the exam. Where had he been last semester?
I’m not the pretty one.

Now I’m the pretty one
and
the smart one.

She started to go to Duggan’s meeting, but gave up about halfway to the office.

Shara was tired all the time, but didn’t sleep. The phone rang so much now, and it wasn’t just the Peales. There were other calls, mysterious calls from Out Of Area and Private Number. She didn’t answer those. Hil had family everywhere. Everyone was calling Hil.

Her own mom called one night.
Shara it’s your mother. Pick up the phone. Shar? Fine. Diana hasn’t heard from Hilary either. You two are up to something. Someone give someone a call.

She fretted about that for a long time.

(Scrapbook moment: her mother screaming at her that it wasn’t just about her, they were all suffering over daddy’s economic turn-around—

not Hilary she wasn’t
)

No matter what she did, the apartment smelled. It was gassy. She was gassy, her stomach stretching over bloated organs. She took Tums but nothing helped for long. Flies had laid eggs somewhere, she suspected, because no matter how many she killed, or shooed out the window, there were always more. They buzzed, so close to her, so close to her ears. The sound of madness she was sure.