Chapter 5 #2
“If Ly feels that way, she’s free to tell us,” her brother stated. “The woman is poison.”
“Well, if Mrs. Alford is truly hateful, like she’s mean to puppies and she doesn’t eat brownies, then that’s one thing.
If you just don’t know her well or she rubs you the wrong way, then that’s a bad reason to hate someone.
You should try to understand them first,” I said, and both of them snorted in the exact same way.
“Fine,” I told them. “You can finish up this dinner while I change.” I left and walked upstairs to the bathroom I shared with Lyra, where she mostly forgot to flush the toilet.
Apparently, that hadn’t been something she’d been taught either, and as far as I could see, the list of things to learn was very long.
Flushing, clean language, eating normally, compassion, understanding…
she was only seven but she needed someone to tell her about those topics. Someone should have been, all along.
She didn’t need to hear conflicting opinions, though.
So far, every time I’d voiced an idea about her behavior, Silas shot me down, just like he’d done in the kitchen a moment ago.
Flushing the toilet? “Yeah, that’s gross, but she’s saving water.
” Refusing to eat the meals that he and I cooked—and then him preparing something else?
“How are you going to force her to like something? She’s already so little,” he had told me. “She’s gotta eat.”
What was my role? I supposed I was just an example of how Lyra could behave if she chose.
But she didn’t have to, because her brother wouldn’t force her and he wouldn’t even try to explain why it was a good idea.
How would she learn to act better if there were no instructions?
If people (my mother and father) hadn’t taken me firmly by the hand and led me down the right path, I wouldn’t have found it for myself.
I had needed to be told to wipe my nose on a tissue instead of my shirt.
I had needed to learn to brush my hair and to say “please” and “thank you.”
But that was between Silas and his sister.
Not me, because I wasn’t Octavia’s mother and I also wasn’t Lyra’s.
I didn’t want to take on that role for either of them, although they both needed it, but I had always thought that I’d be someone’s mom.
I had thought that Dax and I would have kids, and I had planned out their names just like I had planned our wedding.
I hadn’t done anything concrete for that event, though, because you couldn’t put down deposits unless you had a date.
And as for kids, I had considered becoming pregnant without the wedding, but I’d held back on that. Something had told me to wait and now…now I was glad. Kind of. I would have liked to have his baby, or at least, I would have liked to have my own baby.
“Camille?” A knock on the bathroom door accompanied Silas saying my name.
“I’m in the shower,” I called back.
“Can I come in and talk to you?”
“I’m in the shower!” I repeated, which meant nothing to him and these darn doors didn’t have locks.
“I’m not looking,” he said as he entered. “I don’t want Lyra to listen and she’s busy downstairs.”
“What part of ‘no’ do you not get?” I asked as I frantically tried to stretch the curtain to cover any gaps where he could see in.
“Did you say no? I thought you were telling me what was happening, why you couldn’t open the door.
I’m really not trying to sneak a peek,” he told me, and it was true that he hadn’t expressed any interest since I’d shown up here.
It had made me slightly nervous to think that we were sharing this house but he hadn’t looked at me twice, not in that way.
I heard the old toilet creak as he must have sat on its lid, and the shower curtain ruffled a little with his movement. This wasn’t a big bathroom so he was very close, and I held a washcloth over my breasts to shield them. “What do you want?” I asked.
“I wanted to say that I didn’t mean to contradict you about Lyra. I didn’t get your point at first, and that was why I argued. You’re right about jumping to conclusions about someone but actually, I know from experience that Mrs. Alford is a real—”
“Why don’t you practice saying something besides cusswords?
You know that your sister is repeating them at school.
” We had gone over the list of Lyra’s problems more specifically and he’d let me read emails from her teacher and principal the year before, when she’d been in first grade.
Her bad language was showing up in the classroom and on the playground, and they didn’t like it. Neither did I.
“I was going to say that Mrs. Alford is a real piece of work,” he told me. “She lives in that house with her grandson and they’re both…they’re both meanies. Is that better?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“Are you washing your hair?” I heard him inhale deeply. “Mmm,” he murmured.
“Are you sitting there smelling my shampoo?”
“I like the scent of it,” he said. “Is that what my sister is using, too?”
“I hope so. I hid the two-in-one stuff you had put in here because she needs separate conditioner, and then I pretended to talk on the phone to a friend about how to apply it.” I gave up on covering myself with the washcloth and started to rinse out my hair.
“You had to do that, since Lyra won’t listen if you say things to her directly.” Even with the water running over my ears, now I heard him sigh.
“It’s hard to listen to a stranger, and I know that from experience,” I answered. “I’m not holding anything against your sister but I do get irked at you. If you disagree about something I’m saying, come tell me quietly unless you really believe that it’s harmful.”
“Like you might be explaining how to hotwire a car. Yeah, I wouldn’t like that, not until she’s older.” I didn’t bother to respond and he sighed again. “I made a dumb joke but I understand what you’re getting at, ok? I understand that.”
“Good, because she’s already thinking that everything that comes out of my mouth is wrong, and that won’t get better if you keep reinforcing it.
” I smoothed the conditioner into the ends of my hair and then used my comb to gently separate it.
I had told my “friend on the phone” about how to do that, and the next morning, Lyra’s hair had looked a lot smoother and smaller.
“She showed up here four years ago, when she was three,” he said. “She was like a tornado, running around naked and breaking shit.”
“Naked?” I repeated, and looked down at myself. I started to quickly wash.
“Yeah, because she hardly had any clothes to wear. She ate with her hands, and I didn’t mind too much, but she’d never even tried to use forks and spoons before.”
“How did you get her to do that?” I rinsed my hair again.
“I showed her. You know, like, ‘Can you hold it here by the handle? Now can you put it in your mouth?’” I could see the shadow of his movement as if he was pantomiming that again. “I got her clothes and explained about having to wear them.”
“Ok, so now…what?” I asked. I turned off the water and put my arm around the shower curtain to feel for my towel. “You think that you’ve done enough, and she doesn’t need to learn anymore?”
“No!” he told me, and he sounded angry. “That was why I wanted you to be her mentor, so that she could keep learning.”
“Then why do you always stop me from teaching…where is the towel?”
“Here.” His hand brushed my arm as he handed it to me, and I shivered. “I’m not stopping you. Sometimes I feel like arguing, though. I don’t know why.”
I had patted myself off and wrapped the towel around my body, so I pulled back the curtain slightly so I could look him in the eye.
“I would guess that you feel like it’s just been the two of you for four years, and it was going ok even if you knew there were things to work on.
But now, here I am, intruding. That’s how she feels.
You were a team and I’m the interloper.”
“I asked you to move in,” Silas protested.
“Emotions aren’t rational,” I said. “I know that for sure.”
“Like you being smart, but crawling around after your ex-boyfriend whose personality traits are most similar to a mako shark,” he suggested.
“Crawl? I didn’t crawl! And how could someone crawl after a shark?”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I should have said ‘doggy paddle.’”
“Can you please leave so that I can step out of this bathtub?”
“Go ahead,” he offered.
“I’m only wearing a towel and there’s not enough space for two in this room. Please leave,” I said, and he did.
When I got dressed and came downstairs, they were both already eating. At least, he was, and Lyra was scraping carrots around her plate. “This makes my tummy hurt, Silas,” she announced. I could feel her looking at me but I sat down and focused on my own carrots, which tasted very good.
“You could try one,” he suggested.
“No.”
“Lyra, how do you think I got to be so big? I ate good food,” he told her. “I used to be the size of Flat Stanley.”
She laughed and I asked, “Who’s that?”
Silas started to tell me about a book but according to his sister, he was getting parts wrong.
They had read it together a long time ago and she magnanimously acknowledged that old people forgot stuff.
She took up the thread of storytelling and when he put a carrot onto his own fork and gave it to her, she ate it without noticing too much.
“I’d like to read that book,” I said. “Could you show it to me at the library?”
“How come you didn’t read it already?” she wondered. She picked up some chicken and ate it. She hadn’t used a fork, but she had chewed and swallowed without claiming that she thought it had been poisoned.
“I didn’t read a lot when I was your age,” I said. “I mostly watched TV.”
“We don’t have one.”