Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [35]
Agatha never thought about Danny anymore.
“I have to pee,” Thomas whispered.
“What, again?”
He slid out of bed and hitched up his pajama bottoms. “It was too much grapefruit juice,” he said.
Agatha leaned against her pillow and folded her arms and watched him go. The cigarette smoke from the living room made her nose feel crinkly inside. Wasn’t it strange how dead butts smelled so dirty, but lighted cigarettes smelled exciting and promising.
Something nagged at her mind, a bothersome thought she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she noticed what she was hearing: the flushing of the toilet. Oh, no. She threw back her covers and started out of bed.
Too late, though. Thomas shrieked, “Mama! Mama!” and their mother cried, “Thomas?” Her bare feet came rushing down the hall. Her kimono made a crackling sound like fire.
Agatha decided to stay where she was.
“Oh, my God,” her mother said. “Oh, my Lord in heaven.”
She must be standing in the bathroom doorway. Her voice echoed off the tiles.
“What did you put down that toilet?” she asked.
“Nothing! I promise! I just flushed and the water poured everywhere!”
“Oh, my Lord above.”
Agatha wondered if the toilet was still running. She couldn’t hear it. She imagined the house flooding silently with the murky yellow water from Daphne’s diaper.
“Just go, will you?” their mother said. “Go back to bed and stay there. And don’t you dare use this toilet again till I can get hold of a plumber, hear?”
The word “plumber” sounded so knowledgeable. Yes, of course: there was a regular, normal person to take charge of this situation, and that meant it must happen to other people too. Agatha pulled her covers up. She watched Thomas enter the room and trudge to his own bed. He walked like an old man, huddled together across the back of his neck. He lay down and reached for Dulcimer and hugged her to his chest.
It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Maybe he had guessed the toilet was Agatha’s fault.
She said, “Thomas?”
No answer.
“Thomas, is the water still spilling over?”
“Doe,” he said, and the stopped-up sound of his voice told her he was crying.
“You want to come sleep in my bed?”
“Doe.”
In the hall she heard their mother’s bare feet heading toward her bedroom, and then a pause and then hard shoes clopping out again—or maybe boots. Something big and heavy. Clop-clop toward the kitchen, clop-clop back down the hall. The swabbing of a mop across the bathroom floor. Well, so. It would all be taken care of.
Agatha relaxed and let her eyes fall shut. She might even have slept a few minutes. She saw sleep-pictures floating behind her lids—a black cat hissing and then Ian rattling his dice and all at once flinging them into her face and causing her to start. Her eyes flew open. The lights were still on, and the radio was playing a Beatles song. Ice cubes clinked in a glass. The cloppy footsteps came down the hall, and there was her mother outlined in the doorway. From the ankles up she was thin and fragile, but on her feet she wore two huge shoes from Danny’s closet. She came over to Agatha’s bed, shuffling slightly so the shoes wouldn’t fall off. “Are you awake?” she whispered.
Agatha said, “Yes.”
She realized that Thomas must not be. His breathing had grown very slow.
Her mother sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand she held a glass of Coke and in the other her brown plastic pill bottle, uncapped. Probably that was what had rattled in the dream; not Ian’s dice after all. She tipped the bottle to her mouth and swallowed a pill and then took a sip of Coke. She said, “Do you believe this? Do you believe a person would just have to fend for herself in this world?”
“Won’t the plumber come help?” Agatha asked.
“Everything is resting on my shoulders.”
“Maybe Grandma Bedloe