She Came From Beyond!
Page 27
“I’m on vacation,” said Sab. “My grades are good.”
“Yes? You like your classes?”
“Yes. But I’m on vacation.”
“Yes. Any boys you like? Boys at school?”
“I don’t know,” said Sabrina.
“That’s wonderful. You look wonderful.”
“You don’t even have any idea where you are,” said Sabrina. She was breathing hard. It was cold in Joan’s room; I could see Sab’s breath.
Joan just smiled.
“I want you to say something to me,” said Sab. I put my hand on her shoulder. “I need for you to say something to me about my life.”
“Of course,” said Joan. “Anything.”
I watched Sabrina’s mouth moving. Maybe she was asking what mattered, whatever mattered. Maybe she was going to ask her mother why she’d done the things that she’d done, or why she’d left or why the chemicals in her brain were unbalanced or why it mattered that her mother was still her mother in the end. In the end, though, she started crying, a crying that started with a shaking and became a sobbing and she bent forward in her chair and wept. I crouched beside her. Joan, still sitting there on her bed, looked shocked, but really more shocked in a curious way, as though the things that were happening around her were happening too quickly for her to absorb.
“Hold your kid,” I said, and she blinked once and then nodded. She reached out a tentative hand toward Sab’s shoulder.
“No,” I said, “Hold her,” and I took the hand she was holding out and eased her gently to the floor until she was kneeling in front of Sabrina. She put stiff arms around her and Sabrina cried harder, and the harder Sabrina cried the tighter Joan held her.
“It’s okay,” said Joan, maybe another lie, who could tell. It was what Sabrina needed right then, though, and it was all one could ask from Joan, to kneel there and tell her kid that it was okay.
“I’m so tired!” wailed Sabrina, and we all felt it, we were all so tired. We all wanted to hibernate and forget, we all wanted to lie down in the snow, to be very cold and then very warm and then just to sleep. I wandered over to the window and looked out at the white blanketed parking lot, at my own little van, in the snow a humped, solid doghouse-looking thing, and I knew what I wanted right then: a bucket of fried chicken.
I wanted to bring a bucket of fried chicken home through the snow to my family.
“It will be all right,” said Joan, her hand stiff against Sabrina’s tiger hat.
I have always found that people who believe that it will be all right sleep better than people who don’t, so why would you fight it? Maybe you believe it enough and sleep and maybe somewhere in that there is happiness. And why would you fight that? Why would you fight that if you knew better all along?
It snowed all Christmas. Lisa and Dad called from Vacaville and during my conversation with my stepmother she mentioned that the koi pond had frozen over, and that if you looked closely you could see the orange bodies of the fish beneath the ice like a cluster of little hearts. Some would be lost, of course, she said. They would have to wait until the spring to see what had survived.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
UNDYING GRATITUDE TO THE SEVEN LITTLE RYANS AND PAM; TO MY awesome early reader, Rusty Barnes; to my savior, Sarah, and Allyson, the coolest girl in the world; to my darlings, Sue, Rachel, Helen, and Lisa; to my sweetheart web support, Tori; to Kelly, the first love of my life and confidante for all things pointless; for healthy cynicism from Nick Barnes; to Lara; to my brilliant photographer, James Yeater; to my dad, Richard Asuncion—had I had a more normal childhood, I certainly never would have had a career in the arts; to John and Molly Doyle for teaching me the meaning of the word neighbors; and, lastly, to my mother, Michele Asuncion, who never, ever, ever thought for a minute that it could be any other way.
NADINE DARLING’s short fiction has appeared in Night Train, Edifice Wrecked, Eyeshot, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Per Contra. She lives in Boston with her family. This is her first novel.
@darling_nadine
writernadinedarling.tumblr.com
Printed in United states Copyright © 2015 The Overlook Press
Jacket design by Constance Leonard
Author photgraph by Sue Miller
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