Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [136]
Her mother receives the kiss passively. Karen steps back. There is no red light around her mother now. Only a faint mauve-brown shimmer.
In the car on the way home, Karen sits between Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern instead of in the back where she usually sits. Aunt Vi wipes at her eyes. Uncle Vern asks Karen if she wants an ice cream cone. She says no thank you, and he pats her knee.
“I felt so bad, my own little sister; but I had to do it,” Aunt Vi says, on the phone. “It was the third time, and what could I do? I don’t know where she got them! Lucky the empty bottle was right there beside her so at least we could tell the doctor what she took. It’s just a wonder we were in time. Something in her voice, I guess; well, it’s not like I hadn’t heard it before! When we got there she was out cold. She had bruises on her mouth for weeks, they had to pry it open to get the hose down, and today it was like you wouldn’t of known her. I don’t know – shock treatments, I guess. If that doesn’t work, they’ll have to do an operation.” She says operation in that solemn voice, the voice she uses for saying grace, as if it’s a holy word. She wants it, this operation, Karen can tell. If her mother has an operation, some of that holiness will rub off on Aunt Vi.
Karen went to school, where she said little and did not make friends. She was not teased either, she was mostly ignored. She knew how to do that, make herself invisible. All she had to do was to suck in the light around her body; it was like sucking in her breath. When the teacher looked at her the look went right through, to whoever was sitting behind her. This way Karen hardly needed to be in the classroom at all. She let her hands do whatever was required: long rows of a’s and b’s, neat columns of numbers. She got gold stars for neatness. Her paper snowflake and her paper tulip were among the ten pinned up on the corkboard.
Every week, then every two weeks, then every three, she went with her aunt and uncle to visit her mother. Her mother was in a different hospital now. “Your mother is very ill,” Aunt Vi told her, but Karen didn’t need to be told. She could see the illness spreading on her mother’s skin, like the hairs on arms, gone out of control; like filaments of lightning, only very small and slow. Like grey mould spreading through bread. When her mother was veined through and through like that, then she would die. Nobody could stop her, because that was what she wanted to do.
Karen thought about using her wishbone but she knew it wouldn’t be any good. To make a wish work you had to really want it, and she didn’t want this woman to stay alive. If she could have had her mother back the way she was before, during the good times, yes. But she knew this was impossible. There wasn’t enough of that mother left. So she kept the wishbone in the hem of the curtain, checking once in a while to make sure it was still there.
Karen sat in her room. Sometimes she banged her head softly against the wall, so she wouldn’t have to think. Or she looked out the window a lot. Or she looked out the window at school. What she looked at was the sky. She thought about the summer. Maybe next summer her aunt and uncle would go on a vacation and she could be back at her grandmother’s farm, gathering the eggs, picking yellow beans in the sun.
On her eighth birthday Karen has a cake. Aunt Vi has baked it, and put sugar roses on it from the store, and eight candles. She asks Karen if she wants to have a little friend over, but Karen says no. So they eat the birthday dinner by themselves, the three of them, Oh Lord, bless this food to our use, Amen, and there are tuna and egg salad sandwiches, and peanut butter