Chapter 25
Morning, again. I open my eyes and realize, with fathomless relief, that I made it through the entire night without waking up once. No nightmares. No insomnia. Just sleep.
A miracle: for the first time in days, I’m not crippled by terror. My thoughts are still jerky and loose-limbed, my mind humming along nervously, but the panic is softer now, less urgent. After three days of exposure to the light, my fear has grown a layer of peachy fuzz. I can hold it in one hand.
I can manage this.
A moment later, like clockwork, Maeve is in the doorway. “Mama?”
This time, I’m ready for her. I’m not afraid.
“Hello, darling,” I say lovingly. She lights up in response, leaps into bed, nuzzles her head into my neck.
Mamamamamamama, you’re back.
When Maeve and I walk into the kitchen, Mary is sitting at the table, stitching a piece of clothing. “Good morning,” I say brightly.
Mary stops sewing and looks at me, her expression frankly critical. “Good morning,” she says. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes.” I look around at the kitchen and feel a sudden rush of amazement. This is incredible. A feat of engineering. It truly feels like I’m living in the pioneer days!
I turn back to Mary. “Can I—shower?”
Mary looks at me for a long moment. Then she sets the fabric down.
Together we walk outside to one of the tin wash basins set by the porch stairs.
“Wait here and I’ll get the water,” Mary says.
It’s a brisk autumn morning. The sky is bottomless and blue.
You can feel it, the promise of winter in the air, but the sunlight cuts through and warms my skin.
In the distance, the cragged peaks of the mountains are so sharply vivid it feels like I could reach a finger out and prick myself on them. I feel suddenly and deeply alive.
I stand there by the washbasin while Mary pulls the nightgown over my head, then slowly unwraps my ankle bandage. The skin underneath is—well. From the quick glimpse I manage before casting my gaze just as quickly back up to the sky, it looks like a pair of lips have been sewn bloodily shut.
“Lean on me,” Mary instructs, and I do, a hand on her shoulder as she places a wooden children’s stool in the washbasin, then helps me hop awkwardly in.
I sit down on the stool. My bad foot stretches awkwardly out in front of me.
I stare firmly past it while Mary talks above me, a series of chiding little comments that are delivered in a gentle tone, how it’s very inconvenient for me to bathe on a separate schedule than the family, it’s so much less work when the boys are around to haul buckets of water from the well for all of them to use in one single go of it, and Maeve isn’t nearly as strong as her brothers, so we’ll have to be patient with her bringing back half-filled buckets of water every five minutes, really, the girl always finds a way to dilly-dally …
Beautiful day, beautiful day. I wince each time Mary pours a bucket of ice water over my head, but it doesn’t hurt.
It feels like waking up. Mary scrubs my skin with a misshapen bar of homemade soap, up my arms and down my legs, carefully around my mangled ankle, and then back up again, over my belly and breasts and then across my back.
She reaches every nook and cranny of my body, even the most private parts.
Before long, the spongy suds have turned the color of clay.
All the while, Mary talks. There’s so much work to be done today, so we must be efficient, we can use this water for laundry when we’re done, and then after that we can use the water again to mop the floors, and then we need to collect the eggs from the ladies, we should’ve already done that, so technically we’re behind for the day …
The rhythm of her voice is so comforting, I wish I could disappear inside it.
Instead, I start to cry. Mary doesn’t stop washing me, but she does become gentler with her scrubbing, saying there, there every few moments.
“This’ll make you feel better, Mama,” she says at one point.
Is it the first time she’s used that word?
I can’t recall. Regardless, it makes me cry harder.
“Don’t be sad, Mama,” Maeve says, when she sees me in the tin.
Oh, darling, I want to say, I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m crying because of how good it feels to be clean again.
Instead, I smile and say, “Hello, ladies!”
After I’m clean, Mary takes care of laundry while Maeve and I go get the eggs.
Together we make breakfast, Maeve monitoring the eggs over the fire while I try my hand at another bread boule to be eaten at lunch.
This one will be better, I tell myself, and as I watch my hands move of their own accord, I actually almost believe it.
When the boule is cooking above the fire and Mary has finished mopping the floor, we go to the barn. Usually Old Caleb milks the cow early each morning, and she isn’t our problem. But today, Mary says, he told her about an infection on the udders, so we have to check on her.
As Mary leads us into the barn toward the far stall, I pause by a farming scythe hanging on the wall. Next to the scythe, an iron ax, the kind used for splitting wood, and next to that, a sharp metal rake, which looks a little bit like a pitchfork.
A current of queasiness runs through me, and I swallow it. Props, I think to myself, willing the good cheer back through my limbs. That’s all they are. Tools for imagination.
The cow is standing totally still in the back stall when we arrive.
Mary shows me how to spread the ointment all over the udders, taking extra care in the places where the skin has grown red and irritated.
“Big girl,” I say quietly while I work, Mary watching behind me.
“Beautiful girl.” When I’m finished, I pet the cow’s nose, even though I know how stupid cows are.
They’re not like dogs, or horses. I used to hate spending any time around Sassafras, the way that four-legged lard monster would roll her tongue across my hair whenever I got too close to her head.
She’s like a golden retriever, Caleb would insist, to which I would say: If the retriever had brain damage, sure.
“Good girl,” I say to the cow. She stares at me with those black marble eyes, so spiritless she might as well be filled with stuffing.
After that chore is finished, Maeve asks if we can go look for wildflowers to make a crown. Mary hesitates—so much to do—then says, “Just a few minutes.”
We walk up the hill by the barn. At the top, Maeve crouch-walks around, looking for colorful buds, and finds none. Then she casts her gaze upward to the sky, which has started to speckle with clouds. “I see a bunny,” she says, pointing at one incoherent white wisp. “What do you see, Mary?”
“Hmmm,” Mary says patiently. “I see … a horse.”
“What do you see, Mama?”
I see, I see. What do I see? The loneliest landscape on the planet.
Fences in disrepair. The roof of the barn bowing dangerously.
The horse that is not my horse standing quietly in a paddock corner, not even his tail swishing, like a battery-operated game that is currently turned off.
It looks and feels like the end of the world.
Like Judgment Day came and went and took everyone but us.
It looks like Hell, I think happily, and then pause.
Hell.
Happy.
Shouldn’t Hell terrify me? Yes, I think it should. But I can’t seem to summon fear—or anger, now that I think about it, or even sadness. Those emotions are far away right now, behind a padlocked door down the longest of long hallways.
All I feel is—fine. I feel fine.
I cock my head at the thought. Why do I feel fine?
The tonic.
The tonic Mary gave me. That must be what’s making me feel this way.
Terrible, I think experimentally. How terrible of her to drug me.
But it doesn’t feel terrible. It feels incredible. Clear and cool and calm, the world around me sweetly blurry, like I’m floating face down in a river, eyes open underwater, staring at the muck and the grime, saying hello and then goodbye as I float mercifully past.
Thank God someone finally drugged me.
“Bunny,” I manage finally.
“I already said that,” Maeve says. “Something else, Mama! Something else!”
I play along, gaze traveling upward. What do I see?
I see a cloud that looks like my piece of shit pioneer husband when he’s standing over me, watching me scream.
Yeehaw! I see a cloud that looks like the kind of bread I’m capable of baking these days.
Lumpy lumpy lumpy. I see a cloud that looks very much like—what did Caleb become obsessed with, once we moved to the farm?
Chemtrails. Yes. I see a cloud that looks like a chemtrail, streaking across the far corners of the horizon.
“Nothing,” Mary says. “Mama sees nothing, and now we should go home.” She nudges me. “Right, Mama?”
“Right,” I echo, and smile at the girls. “Nothing.” Together we walk back down the hill toward the house.
Six hours later, I beam at my family. I cry out with joy, “Dinner is ready!”