Dark Water - Laura McNeal [45]
“Maybe silk isn’t the business for us,” I said, fingering the cocoon I liked best. It was actually two cocoons bound up together because the second silkworm to spin itself into a cottony tomb had lashed herself to an existing egg—that of her lover, I liked to think—as if to make sure she could find him when they woke up in totally different bodies.
I tried to slip away to brush my teeth, but she closed the computer, stood up, turned to me, and asked me warily, “Aren’t you going to tell me how it went with your father?” My mother had her hair pinned up and she was wearing a pair of dingy slippers with flannel pajama pants. Over the pants she wore a big chenille hooded sweater that made her look smaller and somehow younger. She’d been getting smaller over the past few months, anyway. She didn’t cook, so we didn’t eat much, and she’d started running again, something she’d never had time for when my father was around.
“What size are you now?” I asked.
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“He invited me to stay the weekend at his new condo in San Diego.”
“His what?”
I told her what I could remember about taxes and the ten thirty-one exchange.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. Of all the—” She stopped. She was a color I hadn’t seen before, a scary shade of wax. “Go outside, will you please?” she asked. “No. I’ll go outside. You stay here. Don’t follow me.”
I stayed where I was for a few seconds after she shut the door, and then I went to the lamp. I turned it off. I flipped the switch in the kitchen, too. In the darkness of the messy living room, I made my way to the window to make sure she was all right. In the moonlight you can see all sorts of things, and I saw my mother walking furiously under the avocado trees, kicking at the leaves so they flew up around her. I saw her hit one of the trees with the side of her fist and grab a branch and shake it really hard, as if she’d like to rip it from the trunk, but it was too big, so it barely moved. Lavar’s house wasn’t soundproof, so I heard every name she called him, and I heard her say the most painful thing of all, “Oh, I wish I’d never, ever been born.”
I should have gone outside and hugged her, as she would have hugged me, but for some reason I couldn’t. The child-me that had patted her cheeks and kissed her, where had she gone? I stayed still like the tree trunks until she wiped her cheeks and crossed her arms and started back up the front steps. Then I did the only thing I could do that I thought might make her feel better. I stretched out on the foldout couch that I hadn’t bothered for several days to fold up and I pulled the wrinkled sheets and blanket over every part of me, even my head, so that when she came in the house, she could pretend I was fast asleep and knew nothing at all about how he hurt her.
Twenty-seven
I dreamed I spun myself into a white chamber with no doors or windows using my own hair, which turned white as I pulled a single strand of it from my temple and moored myself to the white egg beside me that I thought contained Amiel, but when I broke free of the shell I’d waited in for what seemed like years, the white egg had a hole in it like the end of a kaleidoscope, and when I looked through it, I saw that he was dead.
The noise that I heard through the real cocoon of my blankets was my uncle pounding on the door, shouting at me to get dressed because we were getting donuts while they were still hot.
I struggled to the door and gave the first excuse I could think of, and the least probable. “I’m on a diet,” I said.
He laughed out loud. “We’ll get you the diet donut!” he said. “Where’s your mother? Tell her I’ll buy her a donut, too. You can either be thin or happy, right?”
I wondered how this applied to Frenchwomen. I shuffled to my mother’s room and considered the evidence, which mostly amounted to strewn clothes and sheets. I trudged back to the porch. “She must’ve gone running,” I said. I wished at that moment that I was running,