The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [119]
The band finished a song, the crowd cheered. The hacky sack players gave up and wandered back toward the stage and Cordy drifted after them, pulled in their wake. The field was massive, hemmed in on each side by tidy municipal fencing, and inside its boundaries a teeming rush of people, so many bodies in motion. Witness this army of such mass and charge.
In that field was her past, a blur of sight and sound, a flood of experiences all designed to keep out the world, not to embrace it. Inside her body was her future, her family, all that would hold her in. Her stomach twisted slightly in guilt as she thought of us back home, wondering where she was, assuming the worst, assuming the truth.
But if she went back right now—if she could find someone to drive her all night—maybe we’d forgive. Maybe we’d forget. Maybe we’d understand.
Maybe we’d believe that this time the change was for real.
Cordy rushed back to the tent to get her things.
She couldn’t have known that at that moment we were hardly thinking of her at all.
TWENTY
When Bean got home after work, our father was standing at the front door like a dog begging to be let out. He and our mother had long ago begun a tradition of pre-prandial walks, the most our mother could ever be expected to adhere to a schedule. He might come home from the office late in the afternoon and she would leave her dinner preparations (and us, once we were old enough), and the two of them would wander the sidewalks of the town. And despite the fact that our mother could no longer participate, he persisted in this tradition.
“Your mother’s resting,” he said, by way of greeting, and walked out of the door into the cooling evening.
But when Bean walked upstairs to change, she heard a strange gasping sound coming from our parents’ room. Her heels spun gunshots as she ran to their door and opened it. Our mother was definitely not resting. She was bent strangely, as though she had been interrupted while getting off the bed, her back arched, one leg stretched out, hovering above the floor. She lay on one bent arm that was shaking with the effort, and her eyes were wild as her other hand reached for Bean.
“Mom!” Bean shouted, rushing toward her. “What the hell is going on?” She was looking for blood, for vomit, for anything, but all she could hear was the dangerous rasp of our mother’s breathing, and all she could see was the jerking, flailing motions of her limbs. Bean pushed her back against the pillows, tugging the bent arm out from under her. Our mother gasped for breath and tried to sit up again.
“Jesus,” Bean said. “Rose!” she screamed. Her voice echoed in the empty house. She opened her mouth to call for Rose again, and then realized her error. Rose wasn’t here. Rose wasn’t going to rescue her. Not this time.
She grabbed the phone off the table and dialed. Our mother’s breathing had slowed, but was still rough and wheezing, her eyes wide, the circles beneath them dark against her shockingly white skin.
“I need an ambulance!” Bean shouted into the phone when someone answered. She ran to the window and shoved it open. “Daddy!” she shouted. He couldn’t have walked that far. And then she shouted again, half into the phone and half into the night, as our mother shook behind her, “I need an ambulance!”
Bean was completely furious.
How was it possible that Rose was not here right now? This was absolutely 100 percent Rose’s kind of emergency. This was completely the place where Rose would shine. Where she could climb right up on her martyr’s cross and talk about how she’d saved our mother’s