Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [68]
Sally watches her daughter and worries. She knows what happens when you bottle up your sorrow, she knows what she’s done to herself, the walls she’s built, the tower she’s made, stone by stone. But they’re walls of grief, and the tower is drenched in a thousand tears, and that’s no protection; it will all fall to the ground with one touch. When she sees Kylie climb the stairs to her bedroom Sally senses another tower being built, a single stone perhaps, yet it’s enough to chill her. She tries to talk to Kylie, but each time she approaches her, Kylie runs from the room, slamming the door behind her.
“Can’t I have any privacy?” is what Kylie answers to almost any question Sally asks. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”
The mothers of other thirteen-year-old girls assure Sally such behavior is normal. Linda Bennett, next door, insists this adolescent gloom is temporary, even though her daughter, Jessie—whom Kylie has always avoided, describing her as a loser and a nerd—recently changed her name to Isabella and has pierced her navel and her nose. But Sally hasn’t expected to go through this with Kylie, who’s always been so open and good-natured. Thirteen with Antonia was no great shock, since she’d always been selfish and rude. Even Gillian didn’t go wild until high school, when the boys realized how beautiful she was, and Sally never gave herself permission to be moody and disrespectful. She didn’t think she had the luxury to talk back; as far as she knew, nothing was legal. The aunts didn’t have to keep her. They had every right to cast her out, and she wasn’t about to give them a reason to do so. At thirteen, Sally cooked dinner and washed the clothes and went to bed on time. She never thought about whether or not she had privacy or happiness or anything else. She never dared to.
Now, with Kylie, Sally holds herself back, but it isn’t easy to do. She keeps her mouth closed, and all her opinions and good advice to herself. She flinches when Kylie slams doors; she weeps to see her pain. Sometimes Sally listens outside her daughter’s bedroom, but Kylie no longer bothers to confide in Gillian. Even that would be a relief, but Kylie has pulled away from everyone. The most Sally can do is watch as Kylie’s isolation becomes a circle: the lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can’t begin to understand. This Sally knows better than most. She knows it late at night, when Gillian is at Ben Frye’s, and the moths tap against the window screens, and she feels so separated from the summer night that those screens might as well be stones.
It appears that Kylie will spend her whole summer alone in her room, serving time just as certainly as if she were in prison. July is ending with temperatures in the nineties, day in and day out. The heat has caused white spots to appear behind Kylie’s eyelids whenever she blinks. The spots become clouds, and the clouds rise high, and the only way to get rid of them is to do something. Quite suddenly she knows this. If she doesn’t do something, she could get stuck here. Other girls will continue, they’ll go on and have boyfriends and make mistakes, and she will be exactly the same, frozen. If she doesn’t make a move soon, they’re all going to pass her by and she’ll still be a child, afraid to leave her room, afraid to grow up.
At the end of the week, when the heat and humidity make it