The Children (11 page)

She clutched the front of Everett's T-shirt and said, sobbing, “I'm fine. My eyes are just—burning a little. I can't go to the hospital. I won't go. If you call the ambulance, I'll send them away.” She coughed, and then said, “I'm fine. It was hard to breathe at first. I don't need to go. Everett, listen to me, now. Nobody can make me go to the hospital without my consent.”

“Okay, okay, Sal,” Everett said. “Just take it easy.”

Sally pushed her face into his chest. She was a little hysterical. Joan gave me a look, the old
there goes crazy Sally
look. I glared at her.

“Did you get any of the spray in your mouth, Sal?” Everett asked. “Because if your nose and throat are inflamed, you could have trouble breathing.”

“No, no, no,” Sally said into his chest. “It's just my eyes. They already feel better.”

“But sweetie, you could have permanent damage,” Joan said.

“Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you blinded me,” Sally shot back.

“I thought she was an intruder,” Joan explained to Everett.

“I
am
an intruder. It's what you think of me. You
knew
it was me. You
knew
it was me. She wants me to go to the hospital, Everett. It's what she wants. She wants me gone.”

I stood behind Sally and put my arms around her. “We know, Sally. We know you're fine. It was all a big misunderstanding. Right, Joan?”

“Yes, yes, sweetie. I thought you were the cleaning man. I thought you were a criminal.”

“Sally, I'll go with you to the hospital,” Everett interjected. “They'll just look at your eyes and your throat. You're right, they can't make you stay. I'll bring you back here after, but you really should go. If you got any spray in your throat, you can swell up. You could have trouble breathing.”

“I don't think it's in my throat,” she whispered.

“Your voice doesn't sound so good, Sal,” I said.

“No,” Sally said. “I know what you're thinking, all of you. I'm fine. Everett, I'll sleep with Lottie. If I have trouble breathing, she can call you. I'm just going to stay here with Lottie. If it gets hard for me to breathe, she'll call you and you can take me to the hospital. It's … I'm already fine.”

Joan said, “It was so stupid of me. I feel awful.”

“I know, Joan,” said Sally, forcing a little smile at our mother. “I know you didn't do it on purpose.” She clutched Everett's hand. “I'm fine. I know she didn't try to hurt me. I know what happened. It wasn't on purpose. Just—it was all an accident. I know what's going on. I know it was an accident.”

Sally slept with me in Aunt Nan's room. Joan gave her some cold cream to wipe the streaks of mascara off her face, and when she came into the bedroom, she did look much better, though her eyes were still swollen. She stood in front of the dresser, examining them in the mirror.

“My face is going to be covered in blisters,” she said.

I sat up in my bed so I could see her face. “I don't know,” I said, “I think it's going to peel a little, but I don't think you'll have blisters.”

“I hope not.”

“Do you have to go back on Monday?” I asked. “I think it'll be cleared up by Monday.”

Sally wandered over to the other bed and pulled back the covers.

“I'm not really sure if I'm going back,” she said. “Do you have any weed?”

“No,” I said. “I almost never smoke anymore, but when I do, it's with Everett. He might still be up.” I leaned over to look out the window.

“No,” Sally said. “Don't let him see you looking over there.”

“Honey, he can't see me. He wouldn't be looking up here, anyway.”

“He might be. I wish Joan hadn't called him,” Sally said.

“It's fine,” I said. “Don't worry. If you want, I could run over there and see if he has a joint or something. Have you been having trouble sleeping?”

“Yeah, a little. I took a sleeping pill, but they never work anymore. I just thought smoking would help take the edge off. I haven't been sleeping well at all, actually.”

“Sally, let me just run over to Everett's.”

“No.”

When Sally got sick the first time, when she was at Juilliard, it started with her not being able to sleep. She didn't sleep for days and then everything became distorted in her mind. It happened again a couple years later, and she ended up in the hospital for over a month.

“No, I'm fine,” she repeated. “Tell me some funny stories. Tell me what Joan's been up to lately.”

She was lying on her side, facing me. She kept touching her eyes with her hands.

“I don't think you should keep touching your face, Sal,” I said.

“I can't help it,” she said, and I saw that her eyes kept filling with tears and that she was trying to wipe them away.

“Are your eyes tearing because they hurt, or are you sad?”

“I don't know. Just tell me some stories.”

So I told her about poor Mildred and Mr. Clean. She smiled when I told her about Laurel's crazy life-hack ideas. She wiped away streams of tears with her palms.

“What's wrong, Sal?”

“I don't know.”

“I thought you were doing better.”

“I was. I just feel like I'm about to have a sad turn again. And, well, I actually was just replaced as first violinist. I'm not working. I came up here to stay for a while.”

“That's great. I mean, I wish I could pretend that I'm sad, about your job and everything, but I'm happy you're staying. You've been wanting to do your own composing, anyway. Now you'll have time. It's the summer; we'll have a great summer.”

Sally put her arm over her eyes. She didn't want me to see her tears.

“Let's try to go to sleep,” I said.

“Okay.”

I switched off the light and we just lay there for a few minutes in the dark.

“Lottie, I still have that thing where I'm afraid of being the only one awake,” Sally said.

“Do you really? Still?”

“Yes. Not if I'm alone. If I'm in my apartment alone, I'm fine. It's just when I'm with somebody else, I get anxious if they go to sleep first. Will you stay awake until I'm asleep?”

“I'll try.”

“Remember how Whit used to make us read
Robinson Crusoe
? Remember how he made us memorize parts whenever we said we were bored or couldn't sleep?” Sally asked. The sleeping pill was starting to work. Her voice sounded far away.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“I miss Whit,” Sally said.

“I know. Me, too,” I said.

“‘I learned,'” Sally whispered, “‘to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side…' What was the rest of it? Something about ‘secret comforts'?”

“I don't remember,” I said.

“‘All our discontents'—that's it, Lottie, remember? ‘All our discontents about what we WANT…' Remember the way he always shouted the word
want
?”

I smiled in the dark.

Sally continued: “‘All our discontents about what we WANT…'”

I said the rest of the words with her, and, like her, I imitated Whit by lowering my voice and emphasizing the last word: “‘appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we HAVE.'”

“Why
Robinson Crusoe
?” I said. “Why didn't he make us memorize poems or Shakespeare or something useful?”

“You know, when I was in the hospital, I had a therapist I saw every day,” Sally said. Her voice was fading.

“Yeah?” I said.

“She wanted to talk to me about Whit all the time. I mean,
all
the time. She asked me why I didn't like to talk about him, and I said, ‘Whit's not my father.' I don't know why she kept wanting me to focus on that.”

“I guess maybe it was because it wasn't long after he died that you started feeling so bad again,” I said. “I guess she thought there was some sort of connection.”

“She used to say, ‘You're allowed to miss him, Sally. You're allowed to mourn him.'”

“Shhhh,” I said. “Let's go to sleep.”

“But the weird thing was, she also said, ‘You're allowed to be angry at him.… You're allowed to hate him.'”

“Why?” I asked. “Why would she say a thing like that?”

“I don't know,” Sally said. “Whit was great to us. He was great to everybody. Everybody loved him, I told her that. And he fucking cared about us, unlike our own father.”

(Our father is still alive. He's a former actor, former addict. Now, apparently, he's a “sober coach.” We haven't seen him in years. He's never sent our mother a dime.)

“I always told her how great Whit was,” Sally said. “I think she kept forgetting. She kept forgetting how much we cared about him.”

“Let's go to sleep,” I whispered.

“She didn't get how much we loved him. I can say that now. I don't know why I couldn't while he was alive. I don't know why it's so embarrassing. I loved him like a father.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Why would I be angry? Why would I hate him?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't go to sleep before me.”

“I won't,” I said.

 

NINE

I never look at a clock when I wake up in Aunt Nan's room because of the precise way the sun inches across my quilt and later creeps up the wall with each passing hour. You absorb time, over time, if you stay in the same place long enough. I've slept in this bed for over twenty-five years—outlasting the darkness of childhood nights (is there anything darker?). Then, later, drifting through the long dream of adolescence with its strange new flesh, warm odors, and tingling awkwardness. So I knew it was close to 10:15 when I awoke the next morning because of where the sun's pallid stripe was draped across the lower corner of my bed. Sally's bed was empty. I figured she had gone out for a walk, but when I sat down at my computer, I saw the e-mail.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: I'm at Everett's. Come have breakfast with us!!!

That was it. No message, just a few words in the subject line and all those exclamation points. I ran down the back stairs, then out the laundry room door so that Joan wouldn't see me. I pushed open Everett's door and went inside. I could hear Sally talking at a rapid clip. I didn't like the tempo of her voice, not at all.

Everett was sitting on his bed. Sally was on the floor beside him, kneeling next to a pile of books. She was dressed in the skirt and blouse from the night before. She was yanking books from the bookshelf and examining their covers as she ranted.

“I know you must have it, because I went through all the books Joan donated to the library and it wasn't in them and Joan said Whit gave you a lot of old books.”

“What are you looking for, Sal?” I asked.

She just kept tossing books around. Everett turned and gave me a sad look. He was tired. How long had Sally been here?

“Sal?” I said. “What's the book about?”

“It's a book about Plato. I was trying to explain to Ev about ‘The Allegory of the Cave.' Tell him how obsessed Whit was with it, Charlotte. The man was fucking obsessed. Where the hell is that book?”

“Sally,” said Everett. “Let's get something to eat, then maybe you'll feel like sleeping.”

“Absolutely obsessed with it,” Sally continued. “I think you learn about it in college philosophy classes. It's Plato. He could've learned about it at Holden, I don't know. How are we supposed to know? We went to public school. We didn't study Plato. But it's basically this. Ev, listen—there are these people. They live in a cave. They're shackled in such a way that they always face one wall of the cave. I guess they're kneeling there on the ground or something, you know, all chained together. And they're Greek, like Plato; this whole thing happened in Greece.”

Sally carried on with how the cave people spent their lives staring at images moving across the wall in front of them.

“The thing is,” Sally said, “these cave people? They think the things they see are real. They'll see a rabbit bouncing by and they'll go, ‘Hey, there's that rabbit again.' Then an urn goes gliding in front of them and somebody's like, ‘Look, there's the urn. I bet the frog comes next.' Then, if the frog is next, they think that guy who predicted it is some kind of fucking genius. They don't say, ‘Maybe that's just a picture of a rabbit.' Or ‘There's the shadow of an urn.' They think this stuff they're seeing is real. Do you see what I'm saying, Everett?”

Everett yawned and nodded.

There was more. “One of the cave guys is able to leave the cave. I don't know why he can leave when all the others can't leave. It's not important. Well, on his way out, this guy notices that behind the place where they've all been kneeling, shackled, their whole lives, there's a fire, and in front of the fire, there's a wall, and between the fire and the wall—”

Everett put his head in his hands.

“I know,” Sally said, “it's confusing. Just try to envision it.”

Between the fire and the wall, she explained, people are crouching and they're holding these stick puppets above them, moving them along the wall, and it's
the shadows
of these puppets that the people of the cave have been watching all their lives.

“They're not real. See, Everett?”

“Yup, not real,” Everett said. Sally was standing on her tiptoes, pulling books off the top shelves. Everett nudged me and mouthed, “All night long.”

“Sal?” I said.

“So the guy who's leaving the cave, he's like, ‘Okay, what the fuck is that?' But he just walks past the whole puppet show setup, climbs out of the cave, and then he's almost blinded by the sun. I mean, imagine you're in a dark cave all your life, then one day you walk outside and—BAM! The sun. Right in your fucking eyes. You'd be fucking blind. So he can't see at first, and he actually wants to go back to the cave because the light outside is so harsh, but slowly his eyes adjust and he sees that there's a sun and stars and a moon and that he's standing on real ground and there are real things all around him. Real trees, rabbits, frogs—”