Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [208]
Getting through the day is one thing, getting through the night is another. She can’t brush her teeth in her splendid double-sinked bathroom without sensing Mitch beside her, she can’t take a shower without looking to see if his damp footprints are on the floor. She can’t sleep in the middle of her raspberry-coloured bed, because, more than ever, more than when he was alive but elsewhere, he is almost there. But he’s not there. He’s missing. He’s a missing person. He’s gone off someplace where she can’t get at him.
She can’t sleep in her raspberry-coloured bed at all. She lies down, gets up, puts on her bathrobe, wanders downstairs to the kitchen where she burrows through the refrigerator; or she tiptoes along the upstairs hall, listening for the breathing of her children. She’s anxious about them now, more than ever, and they are anxious about her. Despite her efforts to reassure them, to tell them that she is fine and everything will be all right, she frightens them. She can tell.
It must be the flatness of her voice, her face naked of makeup and disguise. She drags a blanket around the house with her in case sleep might choose to appear. Sometimes she falls asleep on the floor, in the family room, with the television on for company. Sometimes she drinks, hoping to relax herself, conk herself out. Sometimes it works.
Dolores quits. She says she’s found another job, one with a pension plan, but Roz doesn’t think it’s that. It’s the bad luck; Dolores is afraid of catching it. Roz will replace her, find someone else; but later, when she can think. After she’s had some sleep.
She goes to the doctor, the GP, the same one she uses for the children’s coughs, and asks for some sleeping pills. Just to get her through this period, she says. The doctor is understanding, the pills are granted. She’s careful with them at first, but then they don’t work so well and she takes more. One evening she takes a handful of them, and a triple scotch; not out of any desire to die, she doesn’t want to do that, but out of simple irritation at being awake. She ends up on the kitchen floor.
It’s Larry who finds her, coming back from a friend’s. He phones the ambulance. He’s old now, older than he should be. He’s responsible.
Roz comes to, and finds herself being walked around between two large nurses. Where is she? In a hospital. How weak, how embarrassing, she didn’t intend to end up in such a place. “I need to go home,” she says. “I need to get some rest.”
“She’s coming out of it,” says the one on the left.
“You’ll be fine, dear,” says the other.
Roz has not been she or dear for a long time. There’s a flicker of humiliation. Then it subsides.
Roz floats up out of the fog. She can feel the bones of her skull, thin as a skin; inside them her brain is swollen and full of pulp. Her body is dark and vast as the sky, her nerves pinpricks of brightness: the stars, long strings of them, wavering like seaweed. She could drift, she could sink. Mitch would be there.
Then Charis is sitting beside her, beside her bed, holding her left hand. “Not yet,” says Charis. “You need to come back, it’s not your time. You still have things to do.”
When she’s herself, when she’s normal, Roz finds Charis an endearing nincompoop – let’s face it, a polymath she’s not – and mostly dismisses her gauzy metaphysics. Now, though, Charis reaches down with her other hand and takes hold of Roz’s foot, and Roz feels grief travelling through her like a wave, up through her body and along her arm and into her hand, and out into Charis’s hand, and out. Then she feels a tug, a pull, as if Charis is a long way away, on the shore, and has hold of something – something like a rope – and is hauling Roz in, out of the water, the water of the lake, where she has almost drowned.