Authors: Susan Palwick
Mom, oblivious, glared at me. “Something must have been happening at the Hallorans’. Why did you come home so quickly?”
“Jane was upset and wanted to talk to her mother,” I said. “In private. So I left, all right?” Don’t admit you know anything: don’t, don’t. Tattling once was bad enough. You don’t even want to think about the questions he’ll ask you if you admit how much you know.
She clearly didn’t believe me. “Well, whatever happened, I’m sure we’ll hear about it at school tomorrow.”
My father snorted. “Surely you jest, dear one. It’s going to be all over town within an hour, the way those two were screaming at each other. It will probably make the front page of tomorrow’s paper.”
“At least Jane had the good grace to be upset privately,” Mom said. “Although the way her brute of a father talks, it’s no surprise that she’s never learned how to behave in public.”
My throat tightened. “It sounded to me like Tad behaved worse than Jane did.” My father’s fingers were caressing the inside of my elbow now, and I was getting tired of moving away from him. That was what he counted on, always: that I’d get tired and have to go to sleep, that I’d be as still and silent as Ginny’s grave when he came into my room at dawn, that I wouldn’t be conscious to listen to him breathing. Because otherwise there’d be blood and disinfectant and scorched skin, and my jaw wired together or my stomach stapled.
“What?” Mom turned to look at me, her face cold, and then let the drapes fall closed. In the moment before she relit the candles, my father’s finger traced the circle of one nipple in the old prompt for silence. My stomach tightened and heaved. I’d never be able to keep down Mom’s pot roast tonight, no matter how much she forced on me.
“It sounds to
me
as if nothing would have happened if Jane had behaved properly,” Mom said, once again lovely in the candlelight. She moved around the table, arranging gleaming silver at our three places. “She should know better than to go out half-dressed.”
That’s what I’d told Myrna, and Jane was going to kill me for it. I went to the sideboard and started collecting plates. Setting the table was a good excuse to get away from my father. “Yeah, well, it sounds like Tad should have known better, too. Jane doesn’t take anything from anybody, and everybody knows it.”
“You admire that girl entirely too much, Emma. This is the real world, remember? There’s no such thing as Superwoman. What’s Jane going to do—punch her way through life? This is a civilized society. You can’t live that way, and her parents are doing her a terrible disservice if they tell her that she can.”
“Are they?” My voice sounded strange to me, too high and far away, and I had to hold onto the plates very tightly so they wouldn’t slip out of my hands, “Mr. Halloran was defending her because she’s his daughter and he loves her. That’s what parents are supposed to do, isn’t it? Love their kids even if the kids do something wrong? Wouldn’t you two have done that much for Ginny?”
I’d known better than to suggest that they’d do anything similar for me, but Mom reached me around the table in five swift steps and drew her hand back as if she were going to slap me. I raised the plates as a shield, thinking, I can’t drop them. I can’t drop them. She’ll kill me if I drop them.
“Pamela!” My father was on his feet in an instant, catching hold of her wrist. “Stop it! Who’s acting like Jane now?”
Mom had never tried to hit me before. I couldn’t imagine her hitting anybody. I’d never seen her so mad; her face was a mask of white, condensed fury. “Ginny was not a slut!” she said, her voice shaking. “Ginny was a sweet little girl!”
“Jane’s not a slut either, Mom!” Her eyes narrowed, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing again. “Mom, look, that wasn’t what I meant anyway, really it wasn’t—”
“What did you mean, then?”
“I think what she meant,” my father said sharply, putting his free arm around her waist, “is that parents are blind when it comes to their children. This is certainly true of Tom Halloran, who can’t see little Jane’s healthy anatomy waving in the breeze for anyone to snatch at, and unfortunately it’s equally true of you where Ginny’s concerned—”
Mom’s face tightened. “Ginny wouldn’t have—”
“Hush, love.” He’d gone back to his soothing doctor voice. “No, of course she wouldn’t. She devoted her existence to being every bit as pure as you demanded of her, which is why she’s supping with the saints even as we speak—”
“What?” Mom had grown wild-eyed in the dancing candlelight. She tried to get away from my father, but he held her too tightly. “What are you saying? Are you blaming me that she died?”
“Oh, Pam! Of course not. I meant that she’s in heaven, that’s all. You’re the poetic one, aren’t you?”
“You think I killed her, don’t you? I know you do! You think it’s my fault, because I encouraged her when we went to the circus.”
The circus? I’d never been to a circus. Once when I was little I’d asked Mom about them and she’d told me they were stupid, grown people dressed in silly costumes pretending to be children. Even at the time, I’d wondered why silly costumes upset her so much.
“
You
think it’s your fault,” my father said calmly. “I’ve never blamed you, and neither has anyone else. Pam, it wasn’t anybody’s fault, unless you want to blame some bacteria. It just happened, and it was terrible, and we all wish we could undo it. But don’t take it out on the imperfect child, all right? She’s had a bad enough day, what with falling down the Hallorans’ front steps. Emma, are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Did your mother hurt you?”
“No.” You did. But he didn’t care about that. I was a pumpkin or a balloon, something that wasn’t conscious, something that just endured.
“I’m sorry,” Mom said stiffly. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you. I know you must be upset about Jane.”
“Forget it.”
“Honey—”
“I said forget it!” The way she said
honey
curdled my stomach. She hadn’t even looked at me when she said it.
“I think,” said my father, letting go of Mom’s waist, “that we should eat that pot roast now.”
“I can’t eat,” I told them, “I’m not hungry. I’m going to go up to my room and study.”
“Emma! You have to eat—”
“Why? I’m fat, remember? Missing one meal won’t kill me.”
“Nutrition,” my mother said, trying to smile.
“I don’t want any dinner! I’m not hungry! I feel sick, all right? Would you leave me alone?”
“Let her go,” my father said, and I fled up the stairs, favoring my sore knee. Behind me, I heard him say, “Pam, for God’s sake get rid of that thing.”
What thing? I crouched at the top of the stairs arid listened with ears fine-tuned by the breathing. I heard paper ripping, and he said matter-of-factly, “You’ve been brooding about this since last night. That’s what has you so keyed up.”
The poem? That had been the only paper on the table. Did he get to read Mom’s poetry? Maybe he helped her with the awful rhymes. What a joke. What rhymes with life, Stewart? Knife. What rhymes with love? Shove. What rhymes with trust? Lust.
The phone rang. Maybe it would be the hospital summoning my father back to work. I crouched in the darkness of the stairwell as he said, “You’d better answer that.”
“It’s probably for you.” Mom sounded hoarse, defeated, subdued.
“Answer the telephone,” he said quietly.
Mom could assume her sweet schoolteacher voice without thinking about it, and those were the tones that came from the kitchen. “Oh, Myrna. How are you? No, Emma’s fine. Just fine. And is
Jane
all right? Well, I’m certainly glad to hear
that
. No, she just skinned her knee; it’s nothing serious. That’s kind of you, but she’s already gone upstairs to study, and I’d rather she not be interrupted. Thank you for calling.”
My heart sank. The Hallorans had chewed out Tad’s father and now they were looking for me. “That busybody,” Mom said, and then let out a wail. “You burned it! Stewart—”
“Now, Pamela. Come on. I’m sure you had it memorized by now anyway.”
“You had no right!”
“All the right in the world. It was upsetting you.”
“It was also my property.”
“Pamela, my love, consider it a medical procedure. A cauterized wound. The work of a few seconds that prevents possible months of pain and infection.”
“I see,” she said coldly. “I know but matters of the house, and you, you know a thousand things. Is that it?”
“No, that’s not it. Pam, I’m sorry I upset you. Truly I am. But it’s better for you to get your mind onto something else.”
“It wasn’t yours to burn,” Mom said. She sounded hopeless again.
“What’s yours is mine. Isn’t that what our wedding vows said? Now look: I’ve already apologized for upsetting you. I don’t want to discuss this any more. Do you want me to go up and look at Emma?”
No
. I never should have said I wasn’t feeling well. But to my infinite relief, Mom answered, “Emma’s fine. She said she’s studying. Let’s eat our dinner. I’ll take a tray up to her later, if she wants one.”
There was no way in the world I’d be able to study now, and I’d cut off any chance of getting out of the house. Even if I managed to sneak out, where could I go? The lake wasn’t safe anymore and neither was the Hallorans’ house, and anywhere else I’d just keep picturing Ginny and wondering if I was crazy. Sleep: sleep was the only place left. Sleep would protect me at least until dawn, when nothing could.
Sleep now, then. I crawled between the clean sheets without even taking my filthy clothing off, but when I closed my eyes all I could see was the look on Jane’s face when I told her mother what she’d done. I thought I’d been telling the truth, but when Tom Halloran yelled at Mr. Ewmet, he might as well have been yelling at me. Maybe he had been. Maybe he’d known that I’d be able to hear him.
But I’d been right, hadn’t I? It wasn’t safe to dress like that. It wasn’t safe to go out in leaky boats with boys you hardly knew who were staring at you. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. She should have known better. She could have kept herself safe so easily: by wearing a sweatshirt and not going out in the boat, by keeping her eyes open, by using her common sense. It would have been so easy for her not to get into trouble and she’d ignored all the signals, and there was no easy way out for me at all. If wearing a sweatshirt would have stopped the breathing I’d have worn ten of them at once, but it didn’t matter. He’d just wait until I fell asleep and then he’d come into my bedroom and it would start all over again, no matter how many sweatshirts I had on.
I wanted to stop thinking about it, wanted to stop thinking about everything, but sleep was impossible, and there wasn’t anywhere else I could go. Or was there? Could I leave my body now, even though it wasn’t dawn?
I could, and I did. The sudden absence of pain was as welcome as the first cool dive into the lake on a hot summer’s day. Out of my body, I felt better than I ever had inside it.
I floated effortlessly to the ceiling and spun so it became the floor. Did I have to do that, though? Why? Why did I have to stand on anything, if I could fly? I did an experimental cartwheel—I couldn’t land wrong and get hurt, since all my nerve endings were down on the bed—and discovered that it was easy. So I did a back flip and a handstand. They probably wouldn’t have looked very graceful to anyone watching me, and even without a body I’d never do them as well as Ginny had, but they were a lot more fun than studying or being scared.
“Pretty good,” Ginny said behind me as I was in the middle of a somersault, and if I’d been in my body I’d have fallen on my head and split my skull open,
“No, really,” she said as I scrambled to turn around, “that’s not bad at all, for somebody who’s just starting out. You need more practice, that’s all.”
“What are you doing here?” She was still wearing her silly Snoopy pajamas, and when I yelled at her she picked up a piece of her hair and started chewing it. “I didn’t call you! I don’t want you here! You’re a hallucination!”
“You didn’t call me the first time, either.” She looked even more real than she had before; less fuzzy around the edges, somehow, as if whatever was showing this film of her—God? my imagination?—had adjusted the focus on the projector. “And I’m as real as you are. I told you that before.”
“You told me a lot of stuff. Not that any of it made any sense.”
She shrugged. “Well, maybe I have to come back until it makes sense. Anyhow, here I am.”
“Here you are. Why would anyone want to be
here
after being in heaven?”
She looked surprised. “I don’t know. This is where I lived. I was happy here, wasn’t I?”
“That’s what Mom says. You were happy here, but I’m not. Want to trade places?”
She shivered and shook her head, “Can’t do that. It’s not my body down there; it’s yours.”
“Yeah, it sure is. Would you want it if you had it? It’s ugly and clumsy, and right now it’s got blood all over it.”
Ginny looked at her feet. “You shouldn’t talk like that. You did that back flip pretty well, really you did. You’d get better if you practiced.”
“Sure,” I said, thinking of my conversation with Jane about Tennyson. I wondered if Ginny felt as embarrassed as I’d felt then.
What was I thinking? She couldn’t feel embarrassed; she couldn’t feel anything, any more than balloons or pumpkins could. She was dead, and I was imagining her. But I kept talking anyway, because she’d said something nice to me. “Not having to worry about gravity helps. So you remember gymnastics now, huh?”
“Gymnastics,” she said, and her face lit up the way it had when I’d said her name. “I remember a lot about gymnastics. I remember the uneven parallels: I used to get black and blue where I hit the bars, but the dismounts were like flying, and if you landed right it didn’t even hurt. And I remember the balance beam. I used to pretend that it was a high wire and I was performing at the circus.”
“The circus,” I said, disgusted again. Here she was talking about stuff I’d just heard; she must be my imagination. “You went there with Mom, didn’t you? She’s never taken me.”
“Yes,” Ginny said, but a shadow crossed her face. “She liked it. We both like the acrobats.” She shivered then, and chewed her hair again for a minute, and then said shyly, “Do you want me to show you how to do a triple somersault?”