Alligator - Lisa Moore [79]
Or she was crying because of a glimmer of self-doubt concerning the bulldozers. Maybe she’d been wrong about the bulldozers. Or she was crying because Frank had no idea how vulnerable he was. Frank’s innocence was jolting and sensual and she felt the need to destroy it as quickly as possible.
In the morning, while Frank slept, she quietly put on her socks and reached under the bedside table for her shoes. She had the first mural painting meeting for juvenile delinquents in a couple of hours and she was still a little drunk. Her hand brushed against a cobweb and then a fat white envelope that she pulled out and opened. There were twenty-five hundred-dollar bills inside it. She counted them, careful not to let the paper rustle.
She tucked the envelope down the front of her jeans, one sharp corner digging into her hip. She bent to pick up her shoes and the room swayed. She stood up fast, holding the shoes near her chest. The room was mildly swaying in circles. It lurched and settled down and behaved itself.
The deadbolt made a screech. Frank’s face was turned toward her and his eyelashes were very dark and he was engaged in a sleep full of trust. He was thoroughly spent and his cheeks were flushed and she thought of him as a solitary boy, more solitary than any young man she’d ever met.
He’d listened so intently while she talked during the night. She’d flopped onto his bed and it wobbled violently. She spanked the waterbed with both arms and felt the swells.
Once, I was nearly decapitated, she said brightly. She told Frank about being at the Confederation Building when she was seven or eight, one in a phalanx of overheated Brownies and Cubs, during an official occasion of some sort and an elderly gentleman, a former soldier in full regalia, had drawn a ceremonial sword, but it was too heavy for him and it came down over his shoulder and would have probably cut her head off cleanly — she was standing directly behind the old man in her little brown dress with all its splendid badges — except her mother, who had always been overprotective and doting, had pulled her out of its path.
I felt the swoosh, she told him. The breeze from the blade. She closed her eyes and imagined her seven-year-old head with its smart little Brownie tam still perched at an angle, rolling over the floor of the Confederation Building, Brownies everywhere stepping out of its path.
I think the mushrooms are kicking in, she’d whispered.
She opened the door very slowly, still clutching her shoes to her chest. The hinges yelped. She heard a slosh from the mattress behind her and froze, not even breathing, and then she was out in the hallway and down the stairs. She had put herself in peril, Colleen thought, and then retrieved herself from peril. She liked to see what she could get away with, how far she could go. This time you’ve gone too far, young lady. What she wanted was bacon and eggs. She didn’t put her shoes on until she was around the street corner.
She headed for The Bagel Café and the cruise ship was still docked in the harbour and she saw a party hat lying in the gutter. It was a cone of silver cardboard with a print of birthday cakes all over it. It was rolling back and forth in the breeze and the sun sent a white flare running down its side. It looked like a dunce cap and she was seized instantly with remorse for taking Frank’s money. A consuming self-hatred, a wish for instant annihilation, the sort of swoosh that would leave no trace. There seemed to be no getting beyond it. She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and the people in the cars