Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [181]
“That sounds better than going back to Albany for sure.”
The next morning when Miss Green was in the bathroom and Sybil was making her bed, Connie darted in. “Here. Take this!” She pressed into Sybil’s palm the wadded-up money she had got from Dolly, less what she’d spent on phone calls, It came to thirty-one dollars and sixty-two cents.
Sybil sat down on the bed’s edge to stare. “What are you going to do? Why give me this?”
“Shhh. Hide it.”
“Don’t give up, Consuelo. Just because you couldn’t escape from your brother’s house!”
“Don’t ask what I’m going to do. Only, Wednesday, tomorrow, be ready to run. There’ll be a lot of confusion in the afternoon, when the doctors see me. Run then. Run and never let them get you again!”
Valente paused, stood in the hallway looking in. Connie left at once and went to make her own bed. At breakfast Sybil mouthed to her, “Consuelo, you frighten me. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up!”
“I’m not. For me this is war. I got to fight it the only way I see. To stop them. Don’t ask me more.” Her voice stuck in her throat. “I wish you a good life, Sybil. Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”
Tuesday night, in spite of the sleeping pills she lay awake, her eyes wearing themselves raw on dim shapes. She tossed, she thrust her head into the pillow, she counted and tried to blank her mind. Her thoughts ran round and round like dogs trapped behind a fence, to and fro until they had worn a bald track in her head.
She tried to open her mind to Luciente. In weary boredom, in fear of the next day, wanting a little something nice, she tried. Her mind was rusted shut. It would not open. She pushed on herself, she tried and tried. Sweat stood out on her forehead, sweat gathered under her arms and under her breasts. Once she almost felt something, a presence. That made her go on battering her mind. She lay panting as if she had run up a flight of steps. Please, she begged, please! What had been so easy was hard and painful, hard as dying. Dying into distance. Where there had been only air, something solid stood, solid as bone, as prison walls. But she went on. What else did she have to do this night? What else but touch her fears like the beads of a cold, oily rosary, again and again. She went on trying.
Finally she felt a brush of presence, hard, hard and heavy. Yet she could tell almost at once that this time the pain was coming from Luciente. No, the pain was from the terrible effort. Luciente too strained toward her. Together at last they forced weak contact.
“I feared you were dead,” she thought at Luciente.
“I feared they had done something … final to you. Tried … many times!”
“Bring me over!”
Luciente tried for a long time. “Very hard … need help. A moment. I’ll call Diana or Parra or Zuli … . Wait!”
Finally, roughly, she stood shaking in the meetinghouse. As on the nights of the feast and of Jackrabbit’s wake, many people circulated, but dressed now in ordinary clothes. Their voices were subdued.
Luciente hugged her tight. “How long! We missed you running hard. To reach you has been … like trying to walk through walls!”
“Yourself? How did you get out of the burning floater?”
“What?”
“At the front. With Hawk.”
Luciente peered into her face. “I don’t comprend. Hawk’s over there.” She pointed. “What stew is this of floaters and fronts?”
“We weren’t together at the front? Fighting?”
“Not in my life, Connie. Not in this continuum … . With that device in your brain, maybe you visioned it. You’ve been redded for visioning over the last months, grasp, from all this going over.”
“Pues … never mind. It felt so real … . How are you, Luciente?”
“I feel in you some large resolve. You plan some action?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, please. Just tell me about yourself. Bee. Dawn. How you are.”
“The Shaping controversy builds. I think we’ll call