Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [140]
The man sits up, his hand over his heart, gasping for air now himself. “There,” he says, as if he’s completed something: a task. “Shut up now, I didn’t hurt you. Shut up! You keep your dirty little mouth shut about this or I’ll kill you!” Then he groans, the way he does in the bathroom in the mornings. “Oh God, I don’t know what got into me!”
The small girl is rolling over onto her side. As Charis watches, she leans over and vomits onto the floor, onto the man’s feet. Charis knows why. It’s because that brown-green light is inside her body now, thick and sticky, like goose turds. It came out of Uncle Vern and went into Karen, and she has to get it out.
The door opens. Aunt Vi is standing there, in her nightgown. “What is it, what’s going on?” she says.
“I heard her in here,” says Uncle Vern. “She was calling – I think she’s got the stomach flu.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” says Aunt Vi. “You should’ve had sense enough to take her into the bathroom. I’ll get the floor cloth. Karen, are you going to do that again?”
Karen has no speech, because Charis has taken all the words with her. Karen opens her mouth, and Charis is sucked back, it’s as if she’s being vacuumed into their shared throat. “Yes,” she says.
After the third time Karen knows she is trapped. All she can do is split in two; all she can do is turn into Charis, and float out of her body and watch Karen, left behind with no words, flailing and sobbing. She will have to go on like this forever because Aunt Vi will never hear her, no matter what she says. She would like to take an axe and chop Uncle Vern’s head off, and Aunt Vi’s too, as if they were chickens; she would watch the grey smoke of their lives twist up out of them. But she knows she could never kill anything. She isn’t hard enough.
She takes the wishbone out of the hem of her curtain and closes her eyes, and holds both stems of the wishbone, and pulls. What she wishes for is her grandmother. Her grandmother is far away now, almost like a story she was told once; she can hardly believe she once lived at such a place as the farm, or even that there is such a place. But she wishes anyway, and when she opens her eyes her grandmother is there, coming right into her room through the closed door, wearing her overalls and frowning a little, and smiling also. She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There’s a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen’s, cool grains of dry rice. Then she’s like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she’s only a swirl in the air, and then she’s gone.
But some of her power stays there, in Karen’s hands. Her healing power, her killing power. Not enough to get Karen out of the trap, but enough to keep her alive. She looks at her hands and sees a trace of blue.
What she has to do is wait. She must wait like a stone, until it’s time. So this is what she does. As soon as Uncle Vern touches her she splits in two, and the rest of the time she waits.
Her grandmother is dead, or dead to this life, though Karen has seen