Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [97]
“Just don’t!” She was out the door in a rush.
I took a drink of cold coffee and watched Jo. Her eyes were red-veined and her hair hung limp. She shook her head. “I hate her, I swear I do,” she said.
I looked away. “None of us have ever much liked each other,” I said.
Jo lit another cigarette and rubbed under her eyes. “You an’t that bad.” She pulled out a Kleenex, dampened it with a little of my black coffee, and wiped carefully under each eye. “Not now anyway. You were mean as a snake when you were little.”
“That was you.”
Jo’s hand stopped. An angry glare came into her eyes, but instead of shouting, she laughed. I hesitated and she pushed her hair back and laughed some more.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose it was. Yeah.” She nodded, the laughter softening to a smile. “You just stayed gone all the time.”
“Saved my life.” I laced my fingers together on the table, remembering all those interminable black nights, Jo pinching me awake and the two of us hauling Arlene into the backyard to hide behind the garage. Bleak days, shame omnipresent as fear, and by the time I was twelve, I stayed gone every minute I could.
“You were the smart one.” Jo looked toward the door. I watched how her eyes focused on the jamb where his hand had rested.
“You were smart, I was fast, and Arlene learned to suck ass so hard she swallowed her own soul.”
I kept quiet. There was nothing to say to that.
“I dreamed you killed him.” Mama’s voice was rough, shaped around the tube in her nose.
“How?” I kept my voice impartial, relaxed. This was not what I wanted to talk about, but it was easier when Mama talked. I hated the hours when she just lay there staring up at the ceiling with awful anticipation on her face.
“All kinds of ways.” Mama waved the hand that wasn’t strapped down for the IV. She looked over at me slyly.
“You know I used to dream about it all the time. Dreamed it for years. Mostly it was you, but sometimes Jo would do it. Every once in a while it would be Arlene.”
She paused, closed her eyes, and breathed for a while.
“I’d wake up just terrified, but sometimes almost glad. Relieved to have it over and done, I think. Bad times I would get up and walk around awhile, remind myself what was real, what wasn’t. Listen to him snore awhile, then go make sure you girls were all right.”
She looked at me with dulled eyes. I couldn’t think what to say.
“Don’t do it,” she whispered.
I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. I watched Mama’s shadowy face. Her expression stunned me. Her mouth was drawn up in a big painful smile, not at all sincere.
“Did you want to kill him?”
I turned away from the black window, expecting Jo. But it was Arlene, her eyes huge with smeared mascara.
“Sure,” I told her. “Still do.”
She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“But you won’t.”
“Probably not.”
We stood still. I waited.
“I didn’t think like that.” She spoke slowly. “Like you and Jo. You two were always fighting. I felt like I had to be the peace-maker. And I . . .” She paused, bringing her hands up in the air as if she were lifting something.
“I just didn’t want to be a hateful person. I wanted it to be all right. I wanted us all to love each other.” She dropped her hands. “Now you just hate me. You and Jo, you hate me worse than him.”
“No.” I spoke in a whisper. “Never. It’s hard sometimes to believe, I know. But I love you. Always have. Even when you made me so mad.”
She looked at me. When she spoke, her voice was tiny. “I used to dream about it,” she whispered. “Not killing him, but him dying. Him being dead.”
I smiled at her. “Easier that way,” I said.
Arlene nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”
That evening Mavis stopped me in the hall. She had a stack of papers in one hand and an expression that bordered on outrage. “This an’t been signed,” she said. Her hand shook the papers. I looked at them as she stepped in close to me. She pulled one off the bottom.
“This is from Mrs. Crawford, that woman was in the room next to your mama. Look at this. Look at it close.”
The printing was dark and bold. “Do not resuscitate.