Alligator - Lisa Moore [28]
His own mother had left Valentin and his sister without a word and no way to support themselves when he was ten years old. They had gone without food for a day before his sister left the house to ask the neighbours for something to eat. Those kinds of collapses came in incremental stages; his mother had worried about natural disasters, earthquakes, floods. Some days she wouldn’t get out of bed and kept the curtains closed; they’d had very little money after his father died. He remembered waking up on the morning she had left, knowing something was wrong. He’d walked down the hall from his bedroom to hers, his fingers on the wall beside him. He stood for a long time in front of her bedroom door, unable to turn the knob, afraid of disturbing her. He felt someone watching his back and he turned and there was his sister in her nightgown and she was standing still, waiting. He turned the knob and gave the heavy door a push and there was his mother’s bed. She had made it and the sunlight from her bedroom window lay over the bed in a bright rectangle and the pillow squarely in the centre of bed beneath the headboard. A bird was singing outside. No object had been tipped over or smashed in the kitchen; his mother hadn’t taken anything but the clothes on her back. The house had boomed with her absence.
He had started to drop by Isobel’s regularly for tea when he was certain she was alone. He liked it when she offered him food. Her cupboards were full of pharmaceuticals and tinctures. Bunches of dried herbs were bound with thread and hung from the window frames. She didn’t eat much, and there were expensive cheeses and withered vegetables in the crispers. She was cool and firm with him, but she was also vulnerable. Sometimes when he arrived there were three or four loaves of hot homemade bread covered with checkered tea towels sitting on her kitchen table. She was compliant and self-absorbed, and she intrigued him. He began to realize she was taking lots of pills, and maybe her languid sexiness was nothing more than a doped funk. They’d seen each other throughout the winter and spring, mostly when he felt like it. She was starting to prepare for another shoot for the same film. She had become more focused over the last week, contained and distant.
Outside her kitchen the garden was brilliant green, sun filtering through the overgrown trees. The leaves had been eaten by the elm spanworms so the branches were naked. From the window he could see the spanworms hanging. It was the third consecutive summer of infestation and the trees would not last, they said. If it were his house he would have sprayed. He would have blasted the worms straight back to hell, where he imagined they had come from.
She was wearing a sheer, lime-coloured nightdress while she read the insurance statement. She had taken her foot out of one slipper and scratched the heel of her other foot with her bright red toenails. She put the slipper back on and turned the statement over, continuing to read. The sun from the window showed the lines around her eyes and he liked that she was much older than him. He’d guessed she was older but she would not say by how much. He knew she would never spray the worms.
I have my tomatoes to think of, she’d said when he told her to spray. She stood reading the statement from the insurance company and the toast smoked and he decided. He would burn down the house.
Last week they’d both gone out into the backyard after making love and they had stood beneath her mature maples and listened to the worms. It was a sultry evening, and Isobel stood with a shawl over her bare shoulders, staring up into the trees. It was a clicking noise, like the inner workings of a combination lock, all the wheels and dials and tumblers falling into place. Tiny