come on.”
I pull the green towel off the hook and wrap myself in it before unlocking the door.
Mae pushes past me to the toilet and starts peeing as soon as she sits down.
“Your lips are blue,” she says.
They are. Like I just ate a blue Popsicle. I stretch my lips out over my teeth and look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“You look like someone just thawed you out of a glacier,” Mae says as she wipes and flushes. I move aside and let her wash her hands.
“Jesus.” She touches my arm.
I shrug her hand off. I don’t need to get into it with her.
“Edie, what are you doing? Stop torturing yourself.”
Why should I? Saints whipped their backs raw then wore shirts made of thorns to punish themselves. Cold water is nothing. Cold water is pathetic. But I don’t say this because Mae doesn’t like other people’s feelings. Whenever Mom would get upset you could just see it in Mae’s face, her shutting down. And that’s the last thing I need. Better to be calm, to move slow, then she’ll come back with me.
“Don’t be stupid, Spooks. We ran out of hot water,” I lie, then clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.
MAE
Anybody who’s read Dad’s novels could feel the intensity of his obsession with my mother. Obsession like that never really goes away, not when it’s connected to one’s fundamental sense of self. He never said anything about Mom’s letters, but I’m sure he heard her whistle as loudly as Edie and I did, that piercing sound that made Edie come running and made me dig in my heels. How did her letters have this power over us? I don’t know. The desperation was in the negative space of everything she wrote.
Before that spring, I’d never read any of Dad’s books. It had never even occurred to me to track them down at a library or bookstore because until we came to live with him, he hadn’t existed for me. But in New York, I started reading his books ravenously. I devoured Cassandra’s Calling. I read his novels before bed. I wanted to have the rhythms of the sentences inside of me, so that I could dream about them. In my sleep though, all the characters were Mom. Sometimes Mom would turn into a strong wind and pull me somewhere, or sometimes she would jump on my back and try to wrestle me down to the ground. I barely ever saw her face. Sometimes—and these dreams were always the scariest—I myself would turn into Mom, and then I would be on someone else’s back, or turning into a wind.
EDITH (1997)
Mae’s lamp casts large shadows on the wall as she reads in bed. Her fingers rustle the pages of her book. Cronus is lying on my feet, keeping them warm.
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