Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [35]
She sighed and got up. She would go back to her own bedroom and read Nabokov or something to shut off her mind. Sleep wouldn’t be possible in that bed, either—least of all there—but the bedroom at least had a reading light. A book would make morning come sooner. She thought of how Cole used to rise at five A.M., even earlier in the summer, and how she used to dread the break of day with its tangle of work and choices. That dread was nothing, now, compared to the unbounded misery of a sleepless night. At this moment she would give her soul for daybreak.
She found her slippers and skated over the creaky floorboards, heading downstairs to look for the book she thought she’d left in the parlor. In her present state of mind, who knew? She could just as easily have left it in the refrigerator. Earlier today she’d poured the minister a glass of iced tea, stirred in the sugar, placed the sugar-bowl lid on the glass and set it back in the cupboard, then served Brother Leonard the sugar bowl. She hadn’t even noticed anything was amiss until Jewel silently got up to reverse the mistake.
She couldn’t face any of them after that. Only now, finally, did it seem safe to go down and look for her book. The kitchen had been quiet for a while. Her sisters-in-law must be asleep at their posts on the parlor and living-room couches.
But a fluttering white ascent startled her on the stairs: Jewel or Hannie-Mavis, one of the two, flying upstairs in her nightgown.
“I was coming to check on you. I heard you moving around.” Jewel, it was.
“Oh. I was just coming down to get a book.”
“You can’t be reading now, honey. You need to sleep.”
Lusa’s shoulders fell helplessly in the darkness. Tell Lazarus he needs to get up.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t.”
“I know. I brought you something to take. I got these from Dr. Gibben when Shel went away. I had the same thing.”
Went away. Jewel’s husband had left her three or four years ago, a fact so fully undeclared by the family that Lusa had fully forgotten it. And so, take what—poison? Lusa felt for Jewel’s hands, heard the clicking rattle of the little plastic bottle. Racked her useless brain for meaning. “Oh, a sleeping pill?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think I could.”
“They won’t hurt you any.”
“I hardly ever take anything, though. Not even aspirin for a headache. I’m kind of scared of pills. I almost feel like I’m scared of falling asleep right now, too. Does that seem silly?”
Jewel’s white nightgown hung from the peaks of its ruffled shoulders, suspended in the air like a moth or a ghost. Her voice came from the darkness above it. “I know. You want to just close your eyes on all of it, but at the same time you’re thinking there’s something you need to see, and you’ll miss it.”
“That’s right.” Lusa leaned forward in the darkness, amazed, wanting to touch the face she couldn’t see to make sure it was really Jewel. She couldn’t reconcile this wise compassion with the woman she knew. The empty vessel, as she had called her.
“After a while, you…I don’t know how to say it.” The voice paused, growing shy, and then Lusa could see in her mind’s eye that this was Jewel. “After a while you stop missing a man, you know, in a physical way. The Lord helps you forget.”
“Oh, God.” Lusa let out a whimper, recalling a body so heavy to her touch, so much like congealed fluid, that she had recoiled from it, just grazing the forehead with her lips before running away.
She sank onto the carpeted stair and began to sob. She couldn’t even feel embarrassed, didn’t have the energy. The white-winged apparition above her lowered itself down and hugged her tightly.
After a minute they let go of each other. “What am I saying?” Jewel cried softly. “You’re so young and pretty. You’ll marry