Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [231]
Then she is over behind the flowered drapes, near the door to the balcony, outside her own body, watching. The body stands there. Someone else is in charge of it now. It’s Karen. Charis can see her, a dark core, a shadow, with long raggedy hair, grown big now, grown huge. She’s been waiting all the time, all these years, for a moment like this, a moment when she could get back into Charis’s body and use it to murder. She moves Charis’s hands towards Zenia, her hands that flicker with a blue light; she is irresistibly strong, she rushes at Zenia like a silent wind, she pushes her backwards, right through the balcony door, and broken glass scatters like ice. Zenia is purple and red and flashing like jewels but she is no match for shadowy Karen. She lifts Zenia up – Zenia is light, she’s hollow, she’s riddled with disease and rotten, she’s insubstantial as paper – and throws her over the balcony railing; she watches her flutter down, down from the tower, and hit the edge of the fountain, and burst like an old squash. Hidden behind the flowered drapes, Charis calls plaintively: No! No! Not bloodshed, not the dogs eating the pieces in the courtyard, she doesn’t want that. Does she?
“Anyway, it’s all ancient history,” says Zenia conversationally. Charis is back in her own body, she’s in control of it, she’s moving it towards the door. Nothing has happened after all. Surely nothing has happened. She turns and looks at Zenia. Black lines are radiating out from her, like the filaments of a spider web. No. Black lines are converging on her, targeting her; soon she will be ensnarled. In the centre of them her soul flutters, a pale moth. She does have a soul after all.
Charis gathers up all her strength, all her inner light; she calls on it for what she has to do, because it will take a lot of effort. Whatever Zenia has done, however evil she has been, she needs help. She needs help from Charis, on the spiritual plane.
Charis’s mouth opens. “I forgive you,” is what she hears herself saying.
Zenia laughs angrily. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “Why should I give a flying fuck whether you forgive me or not? Stuff your forgiveness! Get a man! Get a life!”
Charis sees her life the way Zenia must see it: an empty cardboard box, overturned by the side of the road, with nobody in it. Nobody worth mentioning. This is somehow the most hurtful thing of all.
She invokes her amethyst geode, closes her eyes, sees crystal. “I have a life,” she says. She straightens her shoulders and turns the doorknob, holding back tears.
Not until she is walking unsteadily across the lobby towards the front door does it cross Charis’s mind that maybe Zenia was lying. Maybe she was lying about Billy, about the chickens, about everything. She has lied to Charis before, and just as convincingly. Why wouldn’t she be doing it now?
53
Roz leans sideways and gives Charis a one-armed hug. “Of course she was lying,” she says. “Billy wouldn’t say such a thing.” What does she know from Billy? Not a shred, she never met him, but she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because what does it cost, and anyway she wants to lighten things up. “Zenia’s just malicious. She says stuff like that just for the heck of it. She only wanted to bother you.”
“But why?” says Charis, on the verge of tears. “Why would she, why did she say that? She was so negative. It really hurt. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s okay, babe,” says Roz, giving Charis another squeeze. “The heck with her! We won’t invite her to our birthday parties, will we?”
“For heaven’s sake,” says Tony, because Roz always goes too far and Tony is finding this scene much too infantile for her taste. “This is critical!”
“Yes,” says Roz, getting a grip, “I know it is.”
“I do have a life,” says Charis, blinking wet eyes.
“You have a rich inner life,” says Tony