The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [12]
After he’s gone, she pours herself a glass of wine but can’t drink it. Another job—why? She divorced Bill partly to get to the point where she could do this one. He would have liked her to remain the privileged suburbanite she’d been then, with too much money and no accomplishments except her ability to produce sons. It had helped for a while to take out her restlessness in wild hair, piercings, and a tattoo of a butterfly on her butt . . . and then it had gotten to a point where that sense of being caged had put her, literally, on the brink of violence and even madness.
She had divorced him so she would not go mad.
She wonders if Bill has any clue that it was Paisley—Paisley—who had helped her back then. Who had showed her she was not psychotic, just under stress; not evil, just upset. It was Paisley who had brought her back to herself. And in the most shocking way.
The memory of that makes her smile . . . until she remembers the tsunami of night, the disease that has been gathering inside Paisley like a storm.
Setting the empty wineglass in the sink, she turns out the light in the kitchen and goes upstairs. In her bedroom, she catches sight of herself in the mirror—a woman who wears her hair short now, whose piercings are gone except in her ears, whose embarrassing tattoo was long ago lasered off at considerable expense and pain . . . a woman who spent years doing nothing but going to school, raising children, and working. Now, finally, here she is, living the productive life she always wanted, useful in an intelligent way. Even Doug fits tidily into her plan, a man she met just as she was beginning to see through her tunnel of busyness to a time when her sons wouldn’t need her, when it would be important not to cling to them, or give the appearance of clinging. She has a social life, and she has a career. What right has Bill to suggest she needs more? She knows nurse-practitioners can do more than she’s doing now. Of course she does. She stays at this job Bill thinks is too dull for her because it is safe. Or was safe until her fingers began to feel what fingers can’t feel.
And after all, what do her fingers feel? What’s happening now might be an extension of the hypersensitivity she didn’t even realize was unusual, growing up, until it became clear that others didn’t share it. Unlike her friends in high school, she was utterly unable to borrow other girls’ sweaters or jewelry, and later, as a poverty-stricken nursing student, she’d been unable to buy used furniture for her apartment, even though used furniture was all she could afford. The vibrations emanating from other people’s possessions were too overwhelming, that sense of the bodies they’d touched or houses they’d been in, their whole history of joys and sorrows. Once, in an antique shop, after she’d shied away from a particular chest of drawers that gave off the very aura of doom, she’d learned from the owner that the chest had come from a bedroom where someone was murdered. The only used furniture in her house, even now, is the graceful Queen Anne dining room set her mother gave her, which has belonged to various relatives for three generations and gives off only a peaceful, familial air of contentment.
Who would have known that such an odd sensitivity would mature into this horror in her fingers? Or did it? There might be some other explanation entirely. Either way, this is an awful gift.
Julianne does not believe in psychics or fortune-telling. What has happened twice now makes no sense. It frightens her. She won’t be able to sleep, but she’s too muddled to think anymore. All she knows is, if she could give back the gift of prophecy in her fingers, she would. No one wants to touch a person’s flesh and feel their death.
Chapter 4
October 15
The day after the ribbons go up, Andrea Chess stands at her kitchen sink peeling potatoes while her daughter, Courtney, sits on a stool at their breakfast bar, arranging a variety of bottles, pumice stones, emery boards, and other nail