by Kyra Wilder
It might be better if you left now. You see, I’ve got to get ready. We’re both busy girls today.
* * *
Oh, it’s you. Could you pass me a glass of water? I’d get up, I meant to get up, hours ago. Only I’m just so tired right now. So tired I could fall right through the sheets.
I think I might go back to sleep now, but if you leave a glass of water on the table, I’ll know it was you that left it when I wake up.
When I wake up properly I mean, and am myself again, I’ll know that, that it was you that left the glass.
It’s just that right now I’m kind of carrying everything, all the shopping I mean, all the little things, and I can’t move, and I just wish, really wish it would all push me into the ground. See I’m thin now and my shoulder blades could dig out the dirt underneath me like shovels, it could all just push me under right now, like that.
Why don’t you go and leave me alone. I’m too tired just now. It’s all just right now in front of me and I can’t play or be solicitous.
* * *
A carrion crow sat on an oak.
Do you know that one? I hope you don’t, it’s terrible. Isn’t it a pity? It’s always the terrible things we can’t forget.
Visiting hours are two to four. See? I wrote that down, in my new journal. Do you like it? It was a present from the doctors.
They tell me I’m supposed to write things down. They say they want to help me but I have to help them first. They tell me that I should try to write things down if I can’t talk about them. It’s a tool you see, like the sticks that those monkeys stick down into ant hills, only it’s larger and has a pink cover.
But see? All I can write today is, Visiting hours are two to four. I suppose it’s because I’m trying to write down the truth and that’s as far as I can get.
Besides, I feel so calm today. Isn’t it a wonderful thing to sit calmly and perfectly still? I’m like a little white boat on a blue lake. Why rake it all up? All that mess? Why try to get at it? When I can keep my head above the water like this, when I can sit so still like this and let the minutes wash over me like a tide.
Maybe in the spring, I said. Maybe I could write then, when the trees start to bud, when they start to get on with things. When the birds come back, I can start by naming them one by one by one. In my diary I mean. Maybe I could scratch out the names of all the things that are getting on with it. Or maybe, then, I could write in my diary like a girl. The letters all soft bends and bounces. Maybe it all amounts to the same thing.
See? I have been given a list of prompts. I’m to answer them one by one until I find myself answering the questions that they want me to. Until the words I give them are the words they want. You see, I see how it goes. How they are playful maybe, or at least how they are playing a game with me. Anyway, I’m to give it to them at my next appointment and me wishing myself out of it doesn’t change anything a bit. And here I am up in my chair and bright and cheerful today and ready to go so I might as well start. Do you want to hear the first one? Here, I’ll read it out for you.
What is the thing you are not saying. No, I’m kidding. I can be a lot of fun at parties. Here it is, Name ten things you would like to say yes to. Oh, that’s terrible. There’s nothing to work with there. Shall we try another? The thing I am most worried about is . . . These questions have no life in them! None at all! Let’s try another, I feel happiest when . . . Or, I couldn’t live without . . .
No, I don’t think there’s anything to say. Maybe when the birds come back, maybe in the spring. Isn’t April the month for telling secrets? It’s too cold now anyway, any words I say will freeze before they leave my mouth. And I was feeling so well and wonderful.
Why does no one think to ask the important questions? I can’t understand. What about, What does the smell of an orange remind you of? Or they could have tried, Who was the last person who touched you? Who was the last person you touched? Who taught you to cut a chain of snowflakes from a single sheet of paper? If you had a boxwood hedge would you carve it into straight lines or would you let it grow wild. Do you believe the last three things you were told. Do you think there’s an art to opening locked doors. Do you believe in opening locked doors at all. Are we talking French doors or pocket doors or hinged doors or barn doors? What are the colours of the doors in your dreams. The doors you open and the doors that stay locked, how do you know the difference before you touch them. Ask me that, I could say, then maybe we could find something to talk about.
If we love someone enough they’ll come back to us only better. We only have to believe things enough to make them true.
You’re the only one who comes back you know. The universe is flying apart slowly and will never come back together, never ever again. The centres drop out of things all the time and we lose our favourite things and never find them. We’re farther away today than we ever were before from everything else. But when you leave, I can say see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. See? I can say see you tomorrow every day.
If I were to speak specifically though, if I were to let, say, the words fall like spiders out of my mouth, if I were to tell you something really terrible, would you come back? Would we still pretend to eat chocolates? Would you stand there next to me almost touching me, the way you do when you wipe out my little sink? Would you still? If I were to pull the terrible thing inch by inch, like a long blind eel, shrieking, out of my throat?
Everyone knows what they want me to say, everyone is waiting for me to say it. Don’t think I don’t know that. Don’t think I don’t understand that! Don’t think I don’t see it, them all standing around me with their bald featherless old vulture heads, waiting to dip their miserable beaks in underneath my ribs where I am raw and red and bloated.
What I’m trying to tell you is there’s only screaming all the way down my throat, and the thing they’re waiting for, it’s only noise, it’s only sound, it’s all there and I’m already saying it and I’m always saying it and it’s nothing, it’s nothing but noise.
Part Three
15
The apartment was quiet after M left, but it wasn’t an easy kind of quiet, more like the waiting and watching kind. The hitch that comes at the end of a long deep drawn-in breath. I wanted to go to the park. I wanted to spread out our picnic blanket and lie down on top of it and sleep until M was back and would be back in the apartment with us. I wanted to sleep until I wasn’t alone, however long that took.
I wanted to have the days made into something that could be gotten rid of, like curtains that turned out after all to be the wrong kind of grey. All the weeks then, all the days, leaving in May, coming in June, and curling down and deeper as July and August slid heavily over the top of us, could be returned, discreetly, and with the proper excuse. Wrong shade, I could have written on a company form. Not as advertised.
We were moving now though through the deepest part of August, and of course there was no and never any turning back. The air was thick with rain and heavy and hot with storms. I was like a sailor being pulled under the water along the bottom of a big old ship, each day was scraping above me, all the hours, each one of them, were barnacles tearing open my back. I ran over to E’s bed and shook her by the shoulder. Wake up, I said. Wake up! The day is coming whether we want it to or not! She opened her eyes and hugged me and I became real for a moment. We went to the park.
I packed up B and E and we jumped through the back window. We sat by the pump and I unpacked the little boxes with things inside to eat. Cucumbers and grapes. Crackers with seeds and crackers with no seeds. We sat for a long time before anyone else came but eventually Nell arrived and I realized then that I’d been waiting for her. She set her blanket down very close to mine even though the park was empty and there was plenty of space.
She unwound her wrap and plucked out the baby and set him down on the blanket, kicked off her shoes and lay down next to him, the baby, and next to me too in a way. Then she propped herself up a bit and turned to me and said
what could have been almost anything. Her turning to me, talking, after all the afternoons I’d been watching her, well, it was exhilarating. A bit like jumping into a cold lake. You can’t imagine it before it happens, the feeling. But there was no reply that I could make of course. I caught, I thought, the word for children and so I smiled a bit when she stopped talking. Her eyes told me she’d said something funny. She frowned and tried again and then I had to say, I’m sorry I don’t speak French. The words spilled all over the place like groceries from a ripped bag, and that was it I realized. That was as far as I could get. I was like a swimmer turning back to shore. I couldn’t go any further towards her. What had I been expecting to happen?
I called E back and packed us up and left. We had to get to the market anyway, we had to. I was going to cook a real dinner tonight and we would eat oranges for dessert that would be so sweet that we would remember them for ever. We would find oranges at the market that could not be gotten anywhere else.
I bought tomatoes and a bag of oranges. I bought two bottles of wine. Local stuff. Chasselas. E picked a bag of chocolates wrapped in the colours of the Swiss flag, and I thought why not? And I smiled at her and bought them. Why not why not why not. The shopping bags were heavy and the little plastic handles cut into my hands. I didn’t have the stroller so I carried B too and walked slowly down the street like an apple tree with everything just hanging off me. E laughed and skipped ahead and I made my face ready to smile, just in case she looked back at me but she didn’t, so I let my mouth sag because sometimes it just is what it is.
A tram pulled up and the doors opened and E ran ahead into the crowd screaming and laughing like I had done at the beach as a child chasing gulls. Well what difference was there anyway. We made it home and I hoisted us up through the window and I put away our food in all the places that I had determined were the right ones. Tomatoes on the counter and so on.
The apartment was dark though it was barely afternoon. I wheeled the shutters down on the back window anyway. The metal slats shrieked a little as they slipped into place and I thought I should really tell the rental company about this because soon the whole thing might rust up tight and trap us. I was thinking this, thinking, I should call them right now and tell them, when I saw something in the darkness, something that crept up behind the closing shutters, something like a face but also not, something with eyes made out of dust maybe, eyes that were so familiar and so strange. I blinked though and it was gone and I thought, something is wrong, but also I thought there’s no time for anything to be wrong, for anything not to be fine and exactly right.
Later, I put E to bed early, tucked her in tight. I pulled the sheet down on top of her and pushed it under the mattress inch by inch. She fell asleep while I did this, while I told her goodnight goodnight sweet dreams.
When E was little, I mean when she was a baby, before B was born, M was very good at singing her lullabies when she couldn’t sleep at night. Many nights, when she cried out, he went to her instead of me and picked her up and walked her gently in circles around and around and around her room. I would listen to them, her maybe crying a little, maybe beginning to calm down, him singing quietly. Just a handful of songs but over and over and over again. Promising her, I suppose, that everything was beautiful and nothing would ever end. It would have been easy to listen to that song I mean and think it was a promise like that.
I’ve never been a singer though, my voice, it always comes out in pieces. Scratchy. Not soothing, not what she needed, E I mean, when she cried. So, when I went to get her, I would whisper to her. I was too tired to think of much to say. Sometimes I told her that I was so tired that it felt like my bed was a foreign country. A homeland I could no longer properly imagine. The beds in our house, sometimes, I would whisper too, look like they will look after the apocalypse. Empty. Waiting for people who can never come back to them. Mostly though, I kept it simple. I would cut to the chase. I would whisper, We are the only people in the world.
We are the only people in the world, I would say to her. The only ones. The only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones the only ones
* * *
It was time next for B to go to bed, but he wasn’t ready. He couldn’t be put down. So I turned off all the lights in the apartment and walked with him in a little circle that took in all the rooms. Round and round the garden. Like two teddy bears. One step. Two step. Tickle you under there. Do you know that one? I said to him.
We whispered goodnight to all the things as we saw them. Over and over again we did. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails.
Goodnight kitchen, goodnight floor,
goodnight windows, goodnight door.
Goodnight rags and sprays and mops,
goodnight shutters, goodnight locks.
In my downy lullaby voice, I could say anything at all. His hair was so soft against my face. I could feel him and smell him in the dark so completely. There wasn’t a word for it really, what there was between him and me, it was something different, something total, something only for us.
There were things that I didn’t say goodnight to. Things that I refused to talk to him about, lullaby voice or no. I didn’t mention the whispering inside the walls. The slurp gurgle of the drains. The shadows that grew longer and longer, longer, really, than the flickering lights should have let them.
Finally B fell asleep, sagging all at once against me in the most horrible/wonderful, horridful, way and I set him down in his crib. This was what it was to be a good mother. My fingernails were dirty and too long but who was there to see me? So I reached down into his crib and brushed the hair off his forehead with my scab-crusted hands. I blew him kisses, one two three, for good luck and goodnight. Sweet dreams. See you in the morning. Shhhh.
I waited then, after I was done laying him down, for whatever had been gathering to come and get me, but the apartment was quiet and empty and the dust stayed only dust. I bagged up the trash in the kitchen, the bits of dinner that couldn’t be saved for another day, the peels and the rinds and the egg shells. I cinched it all up tight and put it in the guest room, against the wall on the far side of the room, away from the shopping bags, away from the eiderdown.
I dripped a little water onto the plant and turned it a quarter turn. It was looking sick, its tentacles were turning a pale waterlogged green as if they were drowning from the inside out. Perhaps I was doing everything wrong for it. I turned it another quarter turn and left. Well what else could I have done? It’s impossible, isn’t it? Always having to decide what will be saved.
Once I wiped down the counters there would be nothing else to do until morning. I could sit or stand or float or run around and around and around the rooms as long as I was quiet. For a while I scritch scratched the knives against the sharpening stone. The angle is so important, the exact angle of the blade against the stone. Three strokes on one side of the blade, three strokes on the other, one hand on the handle, the pads of index and middle fingers balanced at the tip. Scritching and scratching. Precision, concentration. Afterwards, test it. Feel how, with a sharp blade, a thing can be cut without resistance. Without any resistance at all.
There was a smell in the apartment, something nice, warm wax and wicks burning and when I left the kitchen to investigate I found the table all lit up with candles as if for a dinner party. In between the candles the table was strewn with matches of all sizes like confetti and something sunk in me then,
all cold like a heavy thing going fast through water. Something that just plunged right through me I mean, and I thought that I could see someone sitting at the far end of the table in a chair pulled out just for her. But of course it was all only smoke.
At some point I slept because I woke on the floor in the bedroom. The room was already hot and I was sweating because, I found, I was wearing my long brown coat all buttoned up from top to bottom. E came into the room, sleepy, and asked me about it, about the coat, why I was wearing it over my pyjamas and I said, thinking quickly, Well I thought today we’d stay in the apartment and play explorers. How does that sound? We can play all day together right here, I told her. Doesn’t that sound like great big buckets of fun?
The bruises on my face and arm were almost gone now but in the half-light of the apartment they could look on my skin like the leafy shadows of equatorial trees. We could pretend like the dusty socks that were accumulating on the floor were the eyes of crocodiles floating in a muddy river. We could pretend that the beds were flat-bottomed river boats gliding over all the things we couldn’t see. We wouldn’t have to leave the apartment. I wasn’t even really sure if I could get my hands to open the door.
I bolted both locks and did up the security chain. Feeling suddenly like there were eyes watching me, I covered over the peephole with tape. I put tape too over the face of the clock in the kitchen because we were alone alone alone and we could eat when we were hungry and sleep when we were tired and be as free as birds inside here where we already were. Where we would stay.
I made lemonade and spilled the sugar on the counter, all the little crystals tinkling like sand made out of glass or bones. There! I said triumphantly. Now the ants will come! But I felt, well a breath, or something like a breath, shiver down the back of my neck and I remembered those eyes made out of dust or something else and I cleaned up all the sugar and bit my knuckles quick for luck.
