Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [84]
I am up on the main path now; the lights from the houses are nearer, above me, on either side of me. I can hardly keep my eyes open. I’m not even walking straight. But my feet keep on moving, one in front of the other.
Up ahead is the street. As I reach it I see my mother, walking very fast. Her coat isn’t done up, she has no scarf on her head, her overshoes flap, half fastened. When she sees me she begins to run. I stop still, watching her running figure with the coat flying out on either side and the unwieldy overshoes, as if she’s just some other person I’m watching, someone in a race. She comes up to me under a streetlamp and I see her eyes, large and gleaming with wet, and her hair dusted with sleet. She has no mittens on. She throws her arms around me, and as she does this the Virgin Mary is suddenly gone. Pain and cold shoot back into me. I start to shiver violently.
“I fell in,” I say. “I was getting my hat.” My voice sounds thick, the words mumbled. Something is wrong with my tongue.
My mother does not say, Where have you been? or Why are you so late? She says, “Where are your overshoes?” They are down in the ravine, covering over with snow. I have forgotten them, and my hat as well.
“It fell over the bridge,” I say. I need to get this lie over with as soon as possible. Telling the truth about Cordelia is still unthinkable for me.
My mother takes off her coat and wraps it around me. Her mouth is tight, her face is frightened and angry at the same time. It’s the look she used to have when we would cut ourselves, a long time ago, up north. She puts her arm under my armpit and hurries me along. My feet hurt at every step. I wonder if I will be punished for going down into the ravine.
When we reach the house my mother peels off my soggy half-frozen clothes and puts me into a lukewarm bath. She looks carefully at my fingers and toes, my nose, my ear lobes. “Where were Grace and Cordelia?” she asks me. “Did they see you fall in?”
“No,” I say. “They weren’t there.”
I can tell she’s thinking about phoning their mothers no matter what I do, but I am too tired to care. “A lady helped me,’ I say.
“What lady?” says my mother, but I know better than to tell her. If I say who it really was I won’t be believed. “Just a lady,” I say.
My mother says I’m lucky I don’t have severe frostbite. I know about frostbite: your fingers and toes fall off, as punishment for drink. She feeds me a cup of milky tea and puts me into bed with a hot water bottle and flannelette sheets, and spreads two extra blankets on top. I am still shivering. My father has come home and I hear them talking in low, anxious voices out in the hallway. Then my father comes in and puts his hand on my forehead, and fades to a shadow.
I dream I’m running along the street outside the school. I’ve done something wrong. It’s autumn, the leaves are burning. A lot of people are chasing after me. They’re shouting.
An invisible hand takes mine, pulls upward. There are steps into the air and I go up them. No one else can see where the steps are. Now I’m standing in the air, out of reach above the upturned faces. They’re still shouting but I can no longer hear them. Their mouths close and open silently, like the mouths of fish.
I am kept home from school for two days. The first day I lie in bed, floating in the glassy delicate clarity of fever. By the second day I am thinking about what happened. I can remember Cordelia throwing my blue knitted hat over the bridge, I remember falling through the ice and then my mother running toward me with her sleety hair. All these things