The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [108]
I hold her hips and she sits over me. She is older than me by two years and knows so much more. How to come sitting up. She spreads her legs and shows me, with a clinical cool, then bends over me while she is coming and begins to laugh. We begin to laugh at everything I’ve never done, and then we do it. She shows me how to start off light and slow, barely brushing each other, so when we come it will happen again, and again, and it will be endless between us. Just before nine o’clock I walk Nonette back to the ward, a bag of cookies in one hand.
“Do you think about, you know…” I finally ask her, at the door.
“Do I think about what?”
Nonette looks at me, her face bland and empty, smiling. She looks more and more like a girl in a ski commercial. Healthy. When she came that afternoon, she made me look into her eyes, deep with pleasured shock. Now her eyes are scary cheerleader eyes.
“Do I think about what?” she says again.
I look down at my feet in boots. About what is going to happen to us? I am dressed in jeans, a coat and sweater, like a normal person, like her. I don’t answer. It is a night so cold and dark the snow makes squeaking noises as it settles in drifts along the big, square yard. All night, the trees crack. You can hear them, the tall, black pines. I stand there as Nonette walks into the hospital, as the glass and steel doors shut behind her with the movie-ending sound of metal catching, holding fast. The locks are automatic, but, still, I try them once she disappears into the bright corridor.
“I’m going home next week,” she says one morning. “My parents said okay.”
Her parents? Why haven’t I ever seen them? A sudden burst of energy pulses from the center of my chest, grabbing all along my nerves. I clap my hands, fast, making sounds to divert the awful feeling, and then I wring them in the air, shedding the pain like drops of water.
Nonette looks at me and shakes her head, smiling. “Are you all right?”
I catch my breath, let it out slowly. “Have they been down to visit?”
“Sure. You work days. They drive down for dinner, then we visit in the early evening.”
“Next week, next week.”
My face stretches in a stupid smile and she twinkles back, into my eyes. Super cute! Popular! She’s not okay, I think. She’s crazier than I am if she can deny this. She must be. I tear my gaze away and feel my chest blaze. My ribs glow, hot, the bars of a grill, sending warm streaks washing to my feet. My thoughts spin a series of wild if questions. If she wasn’t crazy, if I was, if this was not out of the ordinary, if it couldn’t be helped, if I were wrong, if people could see, if this thing with her was a new thing, the first of many, if she left here, if it meant nothing, if she didn’t care at all about me. I step away from her. She has a lovely face, so gentle, a kind and pretty face. An American face. She is wearing a blue sweater, a plaid skirt, knee-high stockings, ultra-normal Midwest catalogue clothes.
“Come and see me?” My voice is miserable.
“Sure! I will!”
My throat half shuts and I gulp at air. I struggle to get a good, deep breath. The air hurts, flowing deep. I’m smoking way too much. She doesn’t mean it, of course she doesn’t, not now, not ever. I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for. I can hardly breathe for wanting her so terribly. I walk away with my hands shaking in the scratchy white cloth