Turn of Mind - Alice LaPlante [61]
Yes, call it a game. Just tell me about your life. A day in the life. What you did yesterday, today, what you’ll do tomorrow. Even the boring stuff.
A silly game.
Humor me. You know how it is. You think you know someone, you take things for granted, you lose touch. So just talk to me.
What is there to tell? You know it all.
Pretend I don’t. Pretend I’m a stranger. Let’s start with the basics. How old are you?
Forty-five. Forty-six? At my age you don’t count so carefully anymore.
Married, of course.
To you.
Right. And how are the children these days?
Well, I already told you about Mark.
The charming, intelligent, delightful one. Yes.
My daughter is another matter altogether. She was a gregarious, outgoing child. But she’s closed down now. They say girls do. And that you get them back, eventually. But right now we’re in the middle of the dark years.
It’s a mother-daughter thing.
I suspect so.
I can promise you that it does work out.
You have psychic powers?
Something like that.
Well, that would be something to look forward to.
You say that so mournfully. Yet you have a very rich, very full life.
The forties are a hard decade for women. I’d be the first to admit it. Lost hair, lost bone density, lost fertility. The last gasp of a dying creature. I’m looking forward to getting on the other side. A rebirth.
That sounds like something Amanda would say.
It does, doesn’t it? Well, we’re close. You pick things up.
You were a formidable pair. When I was small, I thought all women were like you and Amanda. God help anyone who didn’t treat me the way you thought I should be treated! Avenging angels.
She is one of a kind.
She was, indeed. He pauses. Did the detective ask about her?
What detective?
A woman here earlier this week. Did she ask about Amanda’s enemies? Whether there was anyone that wished her harm?
Oh, lots of people did, I would imagine. How could they not? She is difficult. Like you just said, an avenging angel. That is her genius— spotting the carcass before it has begun to rot. She out-vultures the vultures.
A nice way to talk about your best friend.
She’d be the first to admit it. She senses weakness and goes in for the kill.
Whereas when you saw weakness you chose to heal.
I wouldn’t say that’s why I chose surgery. Not exactly.
Did you and she ever fight?
Once or twice. Almost breached our friendship. We would declare a truce almost immediately. The alternative was too horrifying to contemplate.
What would that horror have been, if a breach had occurred?
For me, loneliness. For her I can’t guess.
It sounds like an alliance rather than a friendship. Like the treaties between heads of state, each with powerful armies.
Yes, it was a bit like that. Too bad she doesn’t have children. We could have arranged marriages between our two houses.
Created a dynasty.
Exactly.
I have some other questions, but you look tired.
Perhaps. I had a long day of surgeries. One particularly difficult one. Not technically difficult. But it was a child with meningococcemia. We had to take off both his hands at the wrist.
I never did understand how you could do what you did.
The father was distraught. He kept asking, But what about the kitten? He loves the kitten. It turns out he wasn’t worried about eating, writing, or playing the piano, but about the child losing the soft feel of fur against a certain part of the body. Trying to reassure him that other areas of the epidermis were equally sensitive to the feel of fur didn’t do any good. We had to medicate him almost as much as his son.
Sometimes that’s how you grieve. In the small ways. Sometimes those are the only ways open to you.
I wouldn’t know.
Oh?
My losses have been minimal. Containable. Small enough that they don’t need to be broken down any further to be processed. Except when I lost my parents, of course. My dear father. My exasperating mother. There I managed to compartmentalize, to shut off the particular horrors that way.
You’re lucky, then.
I forgot your name.
Mark.
You look familiar.
Lots of people tell me that. I have that kind