Chapter 25 #2
“‘A mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.’”
“That another one of your quotes, huh? You’ve got one for just about every occasion.”
It’s a trite thing to say, and I immediately regret it. After all, it was me Maria had hurried to just an hour ago, banging on the cellar door and crying, It was all tangly hair!
I get up, walking over to the shelves that line the wall beside the windows.
There, collections of small trinkets are arranged: a Japanese coin with a square hole right through the middle, a single wood shaving in a perfect spiral.
The skull of a rabbit, turning brown with age.
I pick up a heavy lump of granite studded with quartz crystals.
“My mother gave it to me,” Maria tells me. “She said it had magical powers.”
Outside in the hallway that runs the length of the upstairs, a floorboard creaks. I catch a whiff of some sour smell, briny and rich. A pool of seawater in the back of a dank cave, where no light reaches.
“Maria, when you were in the bathroom, did you hear anything else? A voice, maybe?”
She shakes her head. She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe she’s right. Maybe all that time in the cellar with the irriguous, unsettled dark has tipped me over the edge. I think of Leprazine, of my trainers with no laces in.
I wait, but the only sound is the wind whispering through the eaves.
I put the skull carefully back down. Beside it, flattened to a perfect rectangle, are the two bright Wonderland gum wrappers I’d given her.
Apple and cherry. These are Maria’s treasures, I realize.
Her serving-knees. Sadness wells up in me.
“Do you remember being in hospital, Maria? You would have been very young.”
She shakes her head.
Undeterred, I press on. “My husband—my ex-husband, Joe—he had the same operation you did. It’s called a cleft lip. I’m only asking because—”
Another creak. I pick up the screwdriver from the desk and move slowly toward the door, peering through the crack out into the dingy hallway. I feel like there is a mainspring being tightly wound in my guts.
“Hazel?”
I hold up a hand. The hallway is empty. Cloudy glass lampshades throw out a weak electric light, flickering slightly as a gust of wind rattles the eaves.
Finally, I lower the screwdriver and turn to Maria, feeling itchy and out of sorts.
There are mushrooms growing in here, along the skirting-board. Thin and brown and moist.
“Can you show me where my bag is?”
She points toward the big wardrobe opposite the bed. It is very large, and made of old, dark wood. I open the double doors. Inside, a strong smell of mothballs and a heap of clothes and shoes piled almost as high as the rail.
“You know you’re supposed to hang these up, right?”
I laugh, but I’m uneasy. I know what I’m looking at. These are the belongings of the women he buried in the woods. Women who were just like me.
Lying on top of the pile is my battered old rucksack. Seeing it, so normal and solid and not of this place, makes me want to cry. I pull it out quickly, tipping the contents out onto the floor.
“Is it your phone you’re wanting?” Maria has moved over to the edge of the bed, peering at me. “Once they stop crying, they always ask for their phones.”
“Yeah, it’s my phone. Here, see?” I lift it up, trying to find a signal.
Maria watches me with her deeply hooded dark eyes, her face soft with sympathy. She knows that I won’t find a signal down here in the valley.
I check the battery. It’s on 7 percent. “Fuck,” I whisper. Strange to think something so essential to my everyday life has been so easily made redundant. “Useless lump of plastic. Might as well use it as a doorstop.”
I sit down heavily on Maria’s bed. There is a dread inside me that circles and circles and never rests. I realize it is almost certain that I’m going to die out here.
I put my head in my hands. I’m so tired and hungry I can barely think.
“Hazel?”
“I’m okay,” I tell her, looking up.
My eye falls on the little calendar on the bedside table. It’s old, from 2015, a Page-a-Day calendar that has been stuffed back into shape and presumably reused every year since. A new one every day, she’d said.
I pick up the quote for today. “‘Trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be,’” I read aloud. “Fucking hell.”
That’s when I start laughing, unable to help myself.
It’s a release of sorts, but just as it tapers off, I look at the quote and laugh harder, bent double, wheezing.
It’s shrill, almost helpless, the way my eyes fill with tears, the way I can’t quite catch a breath.
I lift my head and see Maria looking at me with confusion, and that does it, that just about finishes me off.
“This is ‘exactly where I’m meant to be,’” I tell her, gasping, and then I take a step backward and my foot slides on something lying there and I fall with a thud to the floor, knocking the air out of me.
I lie there breathless, staring at the ceiling, small laughs still bubbling out of me in gulps and snorts.
My hand gropes beneath me to see what I’d stepped on, and when I lift it up in front of me, I can’t help but start that hysterical laughing all over again. It’s the can of hair spray I’d bought in the chemist.
“Oh, this’ll come in handy!” I tell Maria, who gives me a wavering, doubtful smile. “It’s so important to keep my hair looking nice right now!”
I clutch the hair spray to my chest and laugh again. It feels like I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, even though none of this is funny, none of it at all. I’m still giggling as I turn my head and look directly under Maria’s bed.
My other sister is lying there. She opens her black, ruinous mouth and smiles.
“Maria.” I say her name very slowly and clearly. I’m not laughing anymore. All of that has been knocked from me like a douse of ice water. “You need to get out of here.”
My other sister laughs. It is the gurgling sound of water going down a drain. Her eyes are round lantern lights in the dark.