Broken Soup

by Jenny Valentine

  Harper was smiling when he turned to us. He said, “Your dad thinks you should go home and get some rest, eat some food. I said I’d take you.”

  “We’ve just been home,” I said. “What about him?”

  “He wants to stay here.” Harper shrugged. “He wants you to go.”

  “I’m not hungry and I’m not tired,” Stroma said.

  “God, I am,” I said. “Come on, Stroma. Let’s leave Mum and Dad on their own for once. You can have sweets.”

  “Any sweets?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Orange Tic Tacs?”

  “No way. You know you bounce off the walls when you have those. Anything but those.”

  Harper nudged her and winked and said to me, “You’ll be asleep, anyway. What do you care?”

  I phoned Bee when we got out onto the street.

  She said, “How are you?” before she even said hello.

  “I’m OK. She’s still here.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Step one anyway. Just because she didn’t…you know…doesn’t mean she’s any better.”

  “Anything you need, I’m here and so is Carl.”

  “Thanks, Bee. Thanks for Harper too. How did you do that?”

  “Oh, he wasn’t so hard to find.”

  “You’ve no idea how much better I felt just for seeing him.”

  “Of course I do,” Bee said. “That’s why I did it.”

  I went to bed in my mum’s room. I didn’t hear a thing—not Stroma (Sing-along Songs, apparently), not the phone (Dad), not the door (Mrs. Hardwick, “worried sick”). I was properly, properly out.

  It was dark when I opened my eyes and the house was dead quiet.

  Harper was reading in the sitting room. He looked up and smiled and put his book down and stretched. I watched him, with his perfect teeth and his dark eyes and his long body. I thought, How did I end up with this beautiful boy on my sofa?

  “Hey,” he said, and his voice turned into a yawn. I asked him where Stroma was. “Asleep.”

  “What’s the time?”

  He shrugged. “No idea. You want something? You hungry?”

  “No, it’s OK. I’m going to get a drink. Do you want one?”

  “Why don’t I get it?”

  “Because I’m up,” I said. “I’m awake now. Stay there.”

  It was 1:37. I wondered aloud about where Dad was, if he’d had any sleep yet and if I should go back and see him.

  “He called,” Harper said. “They gave him a bed and he’s staying the night. He’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t go there now.”

  “What did you two talk about before?” I asked him.

  “He said thanks for cleaning the bathroom, kind of.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I didn’t want you doing it. That it was easier for me. That he shouldn’t sweat about it.”

  “Is that what you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he know you’re here tonight?”

  “I told him I’d stay.”

  “And he was all right with that?”

  “Sure he was.”

  “How’d you manage that?” I said.

  “I told him I’d take care of you. I said I wanted to look after you because you’ve been looking after everyone else for too long.”

  He said it like it wasn’t much. He said it like he’d overheard it on the bus or seen it on TV. He had his arm stretched out along the top of the sofa and his legs under the table. I drank my water while he was talking. I drank the whole glass and then I kissed him on the mouth.

  He put his hands on my face while I kissed him, and then he smiled and said, “What was that for?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I told him.

  We slept in our clothes with one of Mum’s blankets on us. I didn’t think I could sleep any more, but I did. I woke up early, watched the light grow around the edges of the curtains, watched him. I didn’t want it to be tomorrow already.

  “You OK?” he said before I knew he was awake.

  I was thinking about the bathroom. I said I was afraid to go in there, even though I knew it was all gone. I said I wanted a shower. I said I felt like I did when I was nine and Jack told me there was a kidnapper in the attic. I used to run down the stairs too fast because I was sure there was someone behind me.

  “Go on,” he said. He stroked my arm with the back of his hand. “Get it over with. You’ll feel better.”

  The bathroom looked completely normal. The sun came through the blind in stripes and things were back to their usual color. The dust-coated rubber plant was unchanged by what it had seen, even if I wasn’t. I pulled the curtain across the bath and turned on the shower and my clothes made a pile on the floor. I washed my hair and I had the water a bit too hot. I stood with my face in the stream of it and Harper was right. I felt better.

  When I picked up my clothes, I heard the crunch of the letters in my pocket. I carried them downstairs with a towel around me and sat on my bed. I looked at the handwriting on the envelopes. I knew what pen Mum had used. One of the fancy felt-tips that she’d bought Stroma a few weeks before Jack went on his trip. When Mum was still a mum. It was the darkest green one in the package.

  I couldn’t open Stroma’s letter. It was none of my business what Mum chose to say to her when she thought she would say nothing again. I didn’t know if Mum was glad to not be dead. I didn’t want to know.

  And when I thought that, I knew I couldn’t read my letter either. How can you read someone’s dying words when they aren’t dead but they wish they were, and nothing you can do will keep them alive and you’re so angry with them you can’t even feel it yet? It didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t say good-bye forever and then hello again.

  I got dressed and I went downstairs and I gave them to Harper. I said, “Can you keep these, because I can’t.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Somewhere Stroma won’t find them. She really mustn’t find them. I don’t want to find them either.”

  “What are they?”

  “More letters from dead people,” I said.

  Twenty

  I went to the hospital on my own. I walked to the bus stop. It was cold and the sky was clear and the moon was still out in the morning sky, faint and white, like a cutout cloud. I wanted to get Dad a cup of coffee or something, but I only had enough money for the bus fare.

  He was up when I got there. Up and very stale in his bloodstains and his nearly beard. Mum was still sleeping. I persuaded him to go home and have a shower. He didn’t want to leave her; it was like he’d suddenly forgotten they’d been living apart over a year.

  “She’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll sit with her. Go on.”

  He kissed me on the top of my head. “I won’t be long.”

  I thought, Does he reckon I can’t manage without him? and then I remembered he might be right.

  Mum was gray like someone had painted her skin. She had dark shadows around her eyes, but at least when she opened them she said hello.

  I asked her how she was feeling, but she didn’t seem to know how to answer that. She wanted a sip of water.

  She said, “Did you read the letter?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Burn it,” Mum said to me. “Don’t read it. Burn it.”

  “Really? I can’t…”

  “Promise me,” she said. “I don’t want you to read it, Rowan.”

  I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t have written it, then. For a minute I wished I had read it. I was suddenly desperate to know what it said. It’s like that thing when someone says to you, “Don’t think of a red balloon,” and there it is in your head, straightaway, bobbing up and down in the air, uninvited.

  “I won’t read it,” I said, and I was wondering what the hell she might have put in it that was worse than what she’d done. “I hid Stroma’s already.”

  She closed her eyes and sank a little into her bed. She looked exhausted, even though she’
d just woken up. We sat there and it was quiet, except for the beeping of equipment and the voices in the hallway. Mum didn’t speak so I didn’t either. Sometimes she’d open her eyes and look at me and I’d smile. But she just closed them again, went back to the darkness behind them.

  I was scared and lonely and bored. I wanted Dad to come. Or Stroma even. I wanted to see Harper. I made a list in my head of the reasons Mum decided to try and die.

  Jack. Jack. Jack. Jack. Jack.

  I could almost hate him for taking her with him when he went. But that was her fault mainly.

  Me and Dad and Bee and Stroma, we missed him too. We wanted to turn time back and keep him with us. We longed to see him and hear his voice and enjoy the company of his moving, breathing body.

  But we also decided to carry on living. And she was the one making it hard.

  I wondered what would happen next, if Mum got better, if she ever got better, or if we’d be on suicide watch from now on. I didn’t want to take turns keeping her away from scissors and ropes and light sockets. I didn’t want to worry about her anymore.

  I watched a pulse ticking on the side of her head, the veins blue on her arms, the set of her mouth.

  I hardly knew her. Being alone with her was harder than being alone.

  I sat there twiddling my thumbs and thinking about my brother. I tried to remember things I hadn’t thought about in a while. Like the time we were watching Escape from Alcatraz and he said it was OK to look, so I turned back just in time to see Clint Eastwood lose his fingers with a meat cleaver.

  Or the time he and his friend Ben hid under my bed, listening to me playing boyfriend and girlfriend with my dolls, until they couldn’t keep their laughter in another second and ran, pointing and spluttering, from the room.

  Or the day my hamster, TinTin, died and he helped me make a shoe-box coffin and dig a grave. And how he didn’t laugh even though rigor mortis had set in and TinTin looked pretty ridiculous.

  I tried to imagine Jack aged twenty and thirty-five and sixty. I invented new memories. I wondered if Mum was lying there thinking about him too. If we had at least that much in common.

  When the nurses came past to fiddle with her drip or check her chart, they’d glance at me once and then pretend I wasn’t there. Maybe they didn’t know what to say to a kid whose mother just tried to top herself. Maybe they hadn’t signed up for that training course. Maybe they were just way too busy to be nice.

  For a minute I thought it might be me, turning see-through. It wasn’t only Mum who hardly noticed me in the room.

  But Dad could see me. He came in looking clean and shaved and still pretty sleepless. He picked up Mum’s hand and kissed it, and she kept on pretending to be asleep. I could see her eyelids tremble and flicker with the effort of it.

  “Everything OK?” he asked, crouching down by my chair, bouncing slightly on his ankles. He was trying so hard to be upbeat.

  I shrugged and nodded and picked at a bit of fray on the side of my jeans.

  “She been awake at all?”

  “Sort of,” I said, meaning She’s awake right now, but she’s trying to make us disappear.

  “Has Dr. Alvarez been?” I didn’t know who that was. I said a nurse had been around, and someone else who maybe wasn’t a nurse, but I wasn’t sure. “What did they say?”

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  I asked him how long Mum was going to be in the hospital. He said that was for Dr. Alvarez to decide. “Another day or two, I’d have thought. They probably need the bed after that.”

  I thought about all the future emergencies lining up to take Mum’s place. I thought about being in the house with her and her bandaged arms and her skin the color of pulped newspaper. I started to feel shaky, not so you could see, just on the inside.

  “What happens then?” I asked. “What are we supposed to do then?”

  Dad put his hands on my knees. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  I hate it when people say that, people who have absolutely no idea of what’s coming next. They turn you into an idiot for even asking.

  “What evidence are you basing that on, Dad?” I said, and my voice came out too high-pitched and too fast.

  “It’s all right, Rowan.”

  “No, it’s not. She’s not ready,” I said. “She’s going to go back to the house and sit in the dark and ignore us again and think about dying.”

  Mum shifted in her fake sleep, but she didn’t argue. Nor did Dad straightaway because right then Harper held the door open for Stroma and she kind of burst in, midsentence. I could hear the orange Tic Tacs shaking around in one of her pockets, then the door closed again on Harper out in the hall. I could see the shadow of him through the glass.

  At least Mum knew she couldn’t go on being asleep with Stroma in the building. She opened her eyes and actually smiled. Stroma took this as an invitation to climb on the bed. She lay with her feet touching the bottom and her head on Mum’s thighs.

  I got up. I was going to leave the room for a minute and get some air. I felt like someone was stealing all my oxygen.

  I was halfway to the door when Mum cleared her throat. She said, “I do want to get better.” Her voice was small and cracked and fragile.

  “Good girl,” Stroma said, patting her on the arm. “Good girl.”

  Harper wasn’t there anymore and I went downstairs in the elevator to find him. The doors were about to close when a family got in. Part of a family—a mum, slightly older than mine, and a boy about twenty-one, and a girl maybe Jack’s age. They were tear-streaked and swollen-eyed and still crying. The boy had sunglasses on and I couldn’t see his eyes, just the tremble in his mouth and his tears falling. I knew that I was watching the saddest day of their life. I didn’t even wonder about it, I knew without question. Someone they all loved had died. I was watching them and I couldn’t stop. I knew I should look at something else, like the floor or the walls, but I didn’t.

  And then something happened. As they walked into the elevator, each of them in their own island of grief and loss, they smiled at me. The woman first, then the daughter, then the boy, smiling at me, some staring nobody in an elevator, the same instant their hearts were actually breaking. I smiled back and I thought how incredible that was, that they would find the time to smile. There was goodness in the world still, even if you couldn’t always see it. Maybe that’s what Mum had forgotten, that even when you’d lost everything you thought there was to lose, somebody came along and gave you something for free.

  In the end they let Mum out on Saturday. I guess she promised them she’d behave, and they filled her up with happy pills and released her into the wild because they wanted the room.

  We missed the homecoming. That was Dad’s idea. He said it might be hard going. He said Mum might need some time. He said he’d stay.

  It was such a luxury, having someone else do the thinking.

  Harper took us to Bee and Carl’s, about as far away from the planet my family were on as you could get. Carl opened the door. He picked Stroma up with one hand and shook Harper’s hand with the other. Then he put his arm around me and kissed me on the side of the head.

  Stroma jumped down and skipped off to find Bee and Sonny.

  Carl said, “How’s your mum? How are you, all right?”

  “She’s not great,” I said. “She’s home. My dad’s there.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Getting looked after?” he said, smiling at Harper again, shaking his hand again, patting him on the back.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. About time.”

  “I just don’t know what to do now,” I said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take or whatever.”

  “Maybe you don’t get to know that for certain,” Carl said. “You can’t be in charge of what happens next.”

  “How’s Bee?”

  “She missed you. She’s been worrying.”

  Sonny crashed into Harper’s legs
in the corridor and Harper picked him up. “Hey, little fella,” he said, and they studied each other. Sonny was picking his nose.

  Bee came in the kitchen then and smiled her beautiful smile and hugged me.

  It was like a magic trick, to have a night like that on the edge of so much sadness.

  We made a puppet theater out of this enormous cardboard box Carl found by the garbage bins. We painted it outside on the walkway and Carl cut a square hole for the stage. Harper undid one of the seams and stood it upright so you could hide inside it. Bee stapled red fabric to the outside for curtains. She had loads of hand puppets and finger puppets and string puppets. Stroma laid them in rows on the sitting-room floor. She wanted to know all their names. Sonny kept walking off with them.

  We drew a backdrop (trees, grass, a couple of castles) on a roll of shelf paper and taped it behind the stage.

  The first show was supposed to be Sleeping Beauty, but it was more Stroma giggling inside a box than anything. Sonny was jumping up and down and the whole thing was shaking. Stroma’s sleeping princess trembled violently and kept disappearing out of sight. She poked her own head out of the side now and then, to show us how funny she thought the whole thing was.

  Then Carl and Harper did something about a wood-cutter and a crocodile. Sonny clapped and squealed from start to finish. We could see the tops of their heads because they were too big to hide properly. Stroma said they looked like hills.

  Later, Carl got Sonny and Stroma to help him make fruit salad. Stroma claimed to know all about it because she’d done it at school. “Except the knives weren’t sharp enough to cut anything,” she said, “only bananas. So Mrs. Hall did it all at break time and she chose me and Gabriel to help in the staff room with the teachers.”

  “So I’ll sit back and let you do all the work,” Carl said.

  Bee called after him, “Fingers!” and he put his head around the door and said, “Right you are.”

  It was the first time the three of us had been together properly—Harper, Bee, and me. I couldn’t help thinking it was Jack who pulled us all together, by doing nothing, by not being there.