Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [223]
Forget the ceremony. Forget the dignity. Turn tail.
Tony walks unsteadily towards the door. “Goodbye,” she says, as firmly as she can; but her voice, to her own ears, sounds like a squeak. She has a moment of panic with the lock. As she scuttles out she expects to hear a feral growling, the thud of a heavy body against the door. But there’s nothing.
She goes down in the elevator with the odd sensation that she’s going up, and meanders across the lobby as if drunk, bumping into the leather furniture. There’s a bunch of men checking in at the front desk. Overcoats, briefcases, must be a convention. In front of her looms the dried flower arrangement. She reaches out, watching her left hand reaching, she breaks off a stem. Something dyed purple. She makes for the doors, but finds herself at the wrong set, the ones facing the patio and the fountain. This is not the way out. She’s disoriented, turned around in space: the visual world looks jumbled. She likes to have things clearly sorted in her head, but they are far from sorted.
She stuffs her filched sprig into her tote bag and aims for the front door, and wavers through it, and is finally outside, breathing in the cold air. There was so much smoke up there. She shakes her head, trying to clear it. It’s as if she’s been asleep.
52
This is not how Tony tells it to Roz and Charis, exactly. She leaves out the part about the term paper, although she conscientiously includes all the other bad things Zenia said about her. She includes the gun, which has a certain serious weight, but leaves out the cordless drill, which does not. She includes her own ignominious retreat. At the end of her account she produces the purple branch, as evidence.
“I must have been a little crazy,” she says. “To think I could actually kill her.”
“Not so crazy,” says Roz. “To want to kill her, anyway. She does that to people. You were lucky to get out of there with both eyes, is what I think.”
Yes, thinks Tony, checking herself over. No obvious parts missing.
“Is the gun still in your purse?” Charis asks anxiously. She wouldn’t want such a dangerous object colliding with her aura.
“No,” says Tony. “I went home after that, I put it back.”
“Good plan,” says Roz. “Now you go, Charis. I’ll be last.”
Charis hesitates. “I don’t know whether I should tell all of it,” she says.
“Why not?” says Roz. “Tony did. I’m going to. Come on, we have no secrets!”
“Well,” says Charis, “there’s something in it you won’t like.”
“Heck, I probably won’t like any of it,” says Roz jovially. Her voice is a little too loud. Charis is reminded of the earlier Roz, the one who used to draw lipstick faces on her stomach and do the bump-and-grind, in the Common Room at McClung Hall. Maybe Roz is getting overexcited.
“It’s about Larry,” says Charis unhappily.
Roz sobers up immediately. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she says. “I’m a big girl.”
“Nobody is,” says Charis. “Not really.” She takes a deep breath.
After Zenia turned up at the Toxique that day, Charis spent about a week wondering what she should do. Or rather she knew what she should do, but she didn’t know how to go about doing it. Also she needed to fortify herself spiritually, because an encounter with Zenia would be no casual thing.
What she foresaw was the two of them locked in a stand-off. Zenia would be shooting out blood-red sparks of energy; her black hair would be crackling like burning fat, her eyeballs would be cerise, lit up from within like a cat’s in headlights. Charis on the other hand would be cool, upright, surrounded by a gentle glow. Around her would be drawn a circle of