“I’ll sit here until you fall asleep then.”
Although it was far too early to go to bed for the night, Cathy began to drift off to sleep. There wouldn’t be any supper now anyway, and sleep would help her heal. If she were still red-eyed and swollen-faced in the morning, Adele would accuse her of trying to get attention.
Her breathing slowed. She sank deeper. Secret admirer? Admirer? Who...? Nobody admired her. The faces of classmates drifted past beneath her heavy eyelids. No. None of them. There were a few boys from St. Mike’s at the bus stop after school, but they never bothered with her. None of them would have sent her anything like that. No. Something must have gotten mixed up. She stretched her uninjured hand across the bedspread and slipped it into Angela’s. The last injury that she noticed before finally falling asleep was the throbbing in the roots of her teeth, just below the swelling.
CHAPTER 2
While Cathy drifted off to sleep, the fridge door opened, glass bottles knocked sharply against one another, the fridge closed. Then footsteps chuffed across the carpet and a moment later a metal door latch clicked sharply.
Occasionally, Adele remained hidden only for the remainder of the day and night, emerging the following morning, stepping back into her routine as if nothing had happened. “Porridge for breakfast, kids,” she’d call up the stairs if it were a school morning. But most often she withdrew for days, closeting herself in the master bedroom or the den or the guest room. Her fury, though, potent and palpable as her physical presence, seeped out beneath the door, smothering everything to stillness. Only the diligently ticking clocks dared to defy her.
During these times, her husband, Gerald Mugan, came and went like an automaton, speaking in whispers to Cathy and Richard, staying away at his work for as long as he could, coming home only to undress silently in the dark and crawl beneath a blanket on a couch if his bedroom was barred. Although he was nearly six feet tall, he appeared to be shorter because of his stooping posture. A door had fallen on him during the war, damaging several discs in his back. During damp weather, the old injury grew painful, causing him to stoop and walk with a curious rocking gate, shifting his weight from side to side. Cathy thought she noted lately that the stoop seemed less and less dependent upon the presence of dampness. His hair, which was dark as tar but streaked with a bit of grey, hung, much to his wife’s annoyance, straight down the front of his forehead unless it was creamed firmly into place. He had blue eyes, a fair Irish complexion, and round, protruding ears.
“Monkey” was what Adele called him.
“No slip-ups from you,” he’d whisper to Cathy as they passed in the hall. “I want this to blow over as quickly as possible.”
The silences didn’t seem to affect Cathy’s brother, Richard. Unlike his father, he behaved completely normally. As tall and lanky as a young, uninjured Gerald, he moved with a confident stride, coming and going as he always had—just as he pleased. His only concessions were that he didn’t speak much, beyond one-word greetings, and he didn’t play any music in his room. Like his father, he spent most of his time at his job, coming home hours after Robinson’s had closed, never mentioning to anyone where he had been.
Only Cathy was left behind—the beast-keeper, as she thought of herself—left to come and go from school by herself, to preserve the tomblike silence and her own safety by taking extraordinary care not to step on squeaking floorboards, by soundlessly opening and closing doors, by depressing the toilet handle only halfway so that the water trickled quietly rather than gushed into the bowl. She didn’t dare try to stay away like her brother or bring a friend home to use as a buffer between herself and her mother. In the past Adele had burst out of a room at the sound of a school companion’s voice and demanded to know who Minnie the Moocher was and didn’t she have her own home to go to after school since this wasn’t a damned orphanage.
Even the telephone, suddenly shattering the quiet, ringing repeatedly in the kitchen, could not be answered during the silences. Adele would not come out to talk to anyone, but she would roar out from behind her closed door to snatch away the receiver and smash it down onto the cradle if she heard Cathy talking to anyone. And so, while her father and brother stayed away, Cathy spent hours up in her room, waiting for time to pass, carefully and quietly turning the pages of her magazine collection, one ear cocked to the door for any sign that her mother was emerging.
Sometimes Cathy woke from a deep sleep to hear her mother moving about in the middle of the night. At first, not knowing what had woken her, Cathy would lie in her bed, puzzled. But then she would hear it again: the soft clack of a door closing, a light switch snapping on or off, the fridge door falling shut. Suddenly her room would fill with the aroma of fresh toast. In the morning there would be a crumb-covered plate and a knife, sticky with the residue of strawberry jam, sitting in the kitchen sink. But still no Adele.
In warm weather, Adele slipped out of the French doors in the dining room, taking her rage to the back corner of the yard, where she sat alone on the lawn swing. She stretched her stout legs across to the opposite seat and threw her head back towards the sky. You could see her from the dining room, a bone china teacup and saucer resting in her lap, sometimes an empty jar of olives abandoned on the seat beside her. She sat out there for hours, eyes closed, swinging, not responding to anything around her.
The swing stood beneath an old hawthorn tree, and during May, the small white circular petals of the tree’s flowers drifted down like confetti, settling over everything below. Adele would lie there, undisturbed, while hundreds of delicate petals collected in her teacup, in her lap, in the crooks of her folded chubby arms, on her eyelids, and in her bright red hair. Several times Cathy had looked out late in the evening and seen her mother sitting on the swing, her head tilted toward a dark or a moonlit sky, with the petals falling silently over her pyjamas and bathrobe.
“The Abominable Snow Mother,” she said quietly to Richard, who peered over her shoulder one evening.
“One too many adjectives, Cath,” he said, continuing down the hall.
On the evenings when she was home alone, caught in the grip of the stillness, Cathy took to eating bowls of puffed rice for dinner because the rice slid silently into the bowl and didn’t crunch when she chewed. She carried the bowls up to her room, where she sat on the foot of her bed. From there she looked out the window at the falling summer twilight, or the nearly impenetrable winter darkness, watching the road, waiting to spot the slow-blinking yellow turn signal of her father’s approaching car.
She always wished that there were some way to warn him, to tell him that tonight wasn’t a good night to come home, that it had happened again or that the silence from yesterday or the day before still hadn’t gone away. For years, she had imagined signalling to him somehow, warning him away. Hundreds of times, she had imagined exactly how the car would crawl past the end of the driveway without stopping, how the red tail lights would disappear into the dark.
But she never spoke to him about a secret signal. He would never risk being found working in league with her against Adele. Her father never resisted Adele. All her life, Cathy had witnessed her mother repeatedly beating him across the head and shoulders with one of the throw cushions from the living room couch, screeching at the top of her lungs that he was a fool and a failure. With each blow, brown and white chicken feathers jetted out of burst seams in the cushion, moving in curious contrast to the surrounding violence, gently drifting to resting spots atop silk lampshades and in the crannies in the ornate frame of the mirror that hung above the couch. Her father barely ever even raised a hand to shield himself. Instead, he simply removed his glasses and sat still, with his eyes lowered to the floor.
Cathy couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t want to run and wrap herself around her father’s head to spare him the blows.
