Alligator - Lisa Moore [20]
But her e-mails were hard-nosed and terse. No matter what new fear arose, Madeleine’s e-mail advice was the same and consisted of a single phrase: Drive on.
Beverly frequently wrote: I’m losing it. Just that.
The officers started up the concrete walk to the front door. The buzzer rang twice. Beverly had begun to believe in the inevitable. David’s aneurysm had been inevitable. More disaster was inevitable. She would have liked to have written Madeleine at just that moment: I’ve surrendered. Tell them not to shoot.
For four years there had been a physical ache that started in her solar plexus and pulsed through her whole body just as if she had been shot.
People think sadness is ephemeral and romantic, she wrote to Madeleine. On another occasion: People must think I’m an ice queen, carrying on as I do with ordinary life.
She didn’t know what people thought. She had thought nothing herself about sadness until she was penetrated with it.
Every sensual act since David’s death fell flat. More than once she’d noticed orange peels next to her lawn chair and realized she had already eaten the orange.
She found herself saying things to people she had already said. Two or three times she said the same thing.
People hesitated.
They tried to behave as if it were fresh, what she was saying, but it subdued them. They had a look. A certain numb look that made her feel like her slip was showing.
Beverly had told one of the secretaries at work about leather couches, she’d received a flyer. She had stopped by the coffee machine and the secretary was putting in the creamers. They were almost half-price, because the secretary had said about wanting a new couch, and this was a real opportunity, these couches, they were a find.
She went into her office, closing the door with her foot, and stood there surprised by how dark it had become. She heard the rest of the department faxing and printing and phoning each other from their cubicles — all the burgeoning, insipid vitality of the tourism sector where she had worked for the last twenty years — but behind her office door, alone, she was dazzlingly lost. The room was very dark in the middle of the afternoon. Every object grainy in the shadows, her fountain pen, the snow globe from Banff, her winter boots drying on a rubber mat, bent over each other, each object, indistinct, hardly there at all.
It was later than she thought.
It must be much later.
She usually left the overhead lights off, but in the time it had taken her to get a coffee, it had become dark and quiet. She felt disoriented; she hardly knew what year it was or how old she was.
She might have been twenty, flying down a hill on her bike, the wind making her squint. She remembered a skirt she had when she was twenty and brown knee socks and the wind billowing the skirt; she was going to see a boyfriend. She arrived at his house, Darren Jones, and he’d had a hose. She opened the latch on the garden gate, and a spray of water full of rainbow shimmer and spears of late-afternoon sunlight and a man she hardly knew — he was just a boy, she realizes in the darkened office — and she thought she was in love with him.
That wasn’t love, she said out loud.
She snapped on the overhead light and everything became hurtfully present and stark. She had been fifty-five then and already a widow. She went back out to tell her secretary about some leather couches that were on sale.
The wine tasted like what it was: homemade wine, too sweet, too strong. She had expected a visitation. The wine slammed into her.
The wind took the aluminum door from her and it crashed against the wrought-iron rail and it rang like a gong. The male officer asked if she was the mother of Colleen Clark. Beverly slumped against the door frame and her eyes rolled back in her head. The male officer caught her elbow before she hit the floor.
I have relinquished my hold, she imagined writing to Madeleine, once the officers had put her head between her knees at the dining-room table. The female officer unrolled the yoga mat that had been pushed against the wall and