“Sarah, do you see?” she asked, and there was more than a hint of urgency in her voice. “Do you see it now?”
“Where did you find those?”
“You’re not listening to me,” she sighed.
“We have to go,” I said, unable to take my eyes off those fresh green leaves. “Where are you’re clothes? We have to get you out of hear.”
“My clothes?” she replied, as if she hadn’t quite understood the question.
“Yes. You’re clothes. Your naked,Constance. Where are you’re clothes?”
And I am absolutely certain off what she next to me. Letting the oak leaves slip from her fingers and settle about her feet, sunk in too the sticky mud too her ankles, Constance Hopkins said, “The men took them, Sarah. The men with the hammers, they took them away.”
I open my mouth to ask, I think, what she meant, what the fuck she was talking about, and that when I heard another sound behind me. From the chance inn her expression I could.
Constance found me after the seizure that interrupted the last entry. The thing couldn’t have lasted more than two or three minutes, but there’s no way to know for sure. It’s all pretty much guesswork, figuring out what happened. I struck my chin hard against something, and bit my lip. There’s actually a spot of blood on the page that was in the carriage at the time. I also hit my forehead, possibly on the edge of the table, but I might have hit it against the floor. That’s where Constance found me, on the kitchen floor. Then I spent most of yesterday lying in bed, headachy and feeling hungover, thinking through a fine yellow haze (to employ an old simile I invented while trying to explain the postseizure disorientation and grogginess to Amanda). Anyway, if this wasn’t the worst of the fits I’ve experienced so far, it was surely a close second or third. I should have seen it coming — the stress and lack of sleep, all the crazy shit from the cellar, then sitting here for hours on Wednesday, trying to make some coherent record out of my disjointed memories.
Constance keeps trying to blame herself.
She looks at the bruise on my forehead, or the one on my chin, or the cut on my lip, and she says, “I shouldn’t have left you alone.” Or “If I hadn’t gone into the basement, and then you hadn’t had to come after me.” Or “I should have made you rest.” That sort of thing. Whether she’s right or wrong, it’s a pointless, stupid game, and, right now, I haven’t the stomach for this sort of futility and hindsight.
Looking back over the paragraphs I typed immediately before the seizure, I can see evidence of the mild aphasia that sometimes prefaces the attacks, in the particular pattern of misspellings and typos and so forth. I’ve seen that before, so it’s nothing new.
My head still hurts like hell, and now Constance is talking to me, telling me to “give it a rest,” and I think I will. More later.
“You should try to get some sleep,” Constance said, gently pressing her left index finger to the ugly plum-colored mark centered between my eyebrows.
“But I’m not sleepy,” I replied. “I feel like I slept all day yesterday. I’m not sleepy. I’m bored.”
She sighed loudly and moved her finger to the bruise on my chin, which looks quite a bit worse than the one on my forehead.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yeah, but not so much.”
“It looks like you were in a fight.”
“Well, does it look like I won, or does it look like I lost?” and so she told me she couldn’t say for sure, that she’d need to see the other woman. She brushed a strand of hair from my eyes, and I marveled that her hands were nearly clean, most of the oil paint scrubbed away.
That was late yesterday afternoon, after she had shooed me away from Dr. Harvey’s typewriter and talked me into lying down again. Constance sat on the bed next to me, and whenever I’d open my eyes, the room was filled with the most brilliant buttery light. The bedroom has two windows, one facing south and one facing west, so it gets the afternoon sun (Constance says that’ll help keep it warm in the winter). I’d open my eyes, and she’d be sitting there, worrying over me, scowling like she does, and there would be the dressing table and the chest of drawers and the ivory walls and all that butter-yellow light washing over everything. There’s a framed Currier and Ives print on the bedroom wall, “The Return from the Woods.” Like the furniture, it came with the place. In that light, I could imagine no other picture hanging on the bedroom wall.
In that light, her eyes were only a dark shade of brown.
She was reading to me. It had been her idea. I don’t think I’ve had anyone read to me like that since I was a girl. But, like the light, and like the simpler brown it made of her eyes, it was comforting, and I listened while she read from an old Ray Bradbury paperback I’d brought with me from Atlanta,A Medicine for Melancholy. She has a good, strong reading voice. She was halfway through “The Day It Rained Forever,” and I broke in and told her so.
“It’s hard to find people with even halfway good reading voices,” I told her, “and most times, when you do, they come off like they’ve been practicing for some sort of slam-poetry thing.”
“Thank you,” she said, then went right back to reading to me about Mr. Terle and Mr. Fremley, Mr. Smith and Miss Hillgood in that hotel in the desert. The light coming in the west-facing window seemed perfectly suited to the story, and, mostly, I lay still and listened, concentrating on her voice more than the words, watching dust motes caught in that sunlight, rising and falling at the whim of whatever forces govern the movement of dust motes.
Later, though, when the sun had set, and after I’d eaten the dinner of ramen noodles and wasabi-flavored rice crackers Constance had made us, I began to grow antsy. I told her I needed to do something,that I was probably as rested as I was going to get. She asked me if I meant I needed to write, and I think I laughed.
“Are you going to finish it, the stuff you were writing about what happened down there?” She glanced at the floor, as though I needed any clarification.
“Do you think I should?” I asked her, and Constance didn’t answer right off. When she finally did, she turned her head away, towards the Currier and Ives print and the west window. I could still see her face reflected in the dressing table mirror. She closed her eyes while she spoke.
“I know you didn’t have to come after me,” she said, and there was more, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t already said — Constance thanking me again for finding her and getting her back upstairs, thanking me for bathing her and washing the mud from her hair, for getting a Valium and some hot soup into her, and so on.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, at the risk of seeming less than gracious. She opened her eyes, and I saw that she saw me watching her through the looking glass.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t, did I?”
“Do you want me to write the rest of it?”
“Part of me does,” she said. “I think it’s the same part of me that’s glad you never got rid of the manuscript. And the same part of me that wanted to reach the tree and that was angry when we couldn’t.”
“The part of you that had to see the cellar?”
“Yeah, more than likely,” and she turned towards me again, though I kept my eyes on the mirror, which now showed me only the back of her head, her black hair pulled tightly into a high ponytail.