Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

by Nancy Christie

  Her friend would come to see Mona at odd times of the day and they would make plans for Mona’s escape. One of the plans, later abandoned because it was too difficult to get explosives, involved blowing up the main entrance where the closed circuit monitors were stationed. Mona liked that plan, simply because she resented being watched every minute of the day or night. There was a thing called privacy, after all.

  There were other plans as well—Mona’s friend was a veritable storehouse of ideas. She, like Mona, had an excellent imagination. But so far they hadn’t settled on which strategy to use, which wasn’t helped by the fact that Mona’s friend (what was her name, anyway?) could only meet with her when no one was around—“when the coast was clear,” she would wisecrack. And it seemed like someone was always nearby—giving medicine, adjusting bedcovers, checking locks.

  Once, they were almost caught as they planned and plotted. But the jingle of the keys gave away the nurse’s arrival, and Mona’s friend disappeared before the door opened and they could be found out.

  When it wasn’t the nurses with their endless pills and potions, it was the doctors, hemming and hawing as they pried open her eyes and looked down her throat and touched her breasts “to listen to her heart,” they always said.

  And then there was Kate—mysterious Kate, ubiquitous Kate. She would come to see Mona at odd times of the day, under the pretense of caring how she was. Mona never knew when to expect her. If she did, she would do her best to hide—slide under the bed where dustballs tickled her nose, or lie in the cold porcelain tub with the mildewed shower curtain drawn around her.

  Mona had told her several times she wanted to be left alone, that she didn’t want or need to see her, to just stop coming in. And then Kate would pretend to cry and the nurses would shake their heads at Mona’s cruelty and later, when they gave her the nightly shot, the needle would go in with an extra hard push and the spot would be black and blue in the morning.

  Mona tried to explain that Kate was nothing to her—a stranger, in fact—but no one would listen. No one except Mona’s friend. But she had no authority over the doctors and nurses, and she was afraid to confront Kate. She said Kate would hurt her and make her go away.

  So it was left to Mona to weather these visits from Stranger Kate as best she could until the day she would be free of this place and return—return where? She never got that far in her plans. The drugs must have wiped parts of her memory clean because she wasn’t entirely sure where she was supposed to go once the brick building with barred windows and locked doors was safely behind her.

  She wanted to go home, but she didn’t know where home was, or if it was even still there. Kate talked about home a lot. She said when Mona was better she could come home.

  Mona hated when Kate said that. She hated everything Kate said, even the way she said Mona’s name. She always stumbled over it, making it sound like “mama” or some other such thing.

  “My name is Mona,” she had said the first time Kate mumbled, and repeated her name again, drawing out the syllables loudly, “MO—NA.”

  Kate had started crying then, and since that day, she had either avoided saying Mona’s name or choked over it, like it was a tough piece of meat she was forced to chew.

  “Here’s someone to see you.” The bright, determined voice of the nurse broke into Mona’s thoughts, and turning her head, she saw Kate trailing behind.

  Mona gave her a long look and then turned back to the television. It wasn’t on, but that wasn’t the point.

  “I’m busy,” she answered, watching the empty screen, but the nurse only walked away without comment, leaving Kate behind.

  “I brought you some cookies,” and Kate held out the container of oatmeal squares to Mona.

  Probably poisoned, Mona thought. “Well, I don’t want them. And I don’t want you,” she said more loudly. “Go away.”

  Rising from her chair, she threw the box of cookies Kate had pressed into her unwilling hands into a nearby trashcan before hastening down the hall toward her room.

  Let her cry her crocodile tears, Mona thought, glancing back once to see Kate with her face buried in a tissue. Soon, I’ll be free of this place. Soon, I’ll be able to go—but go where? Well, somewhere. Anywhere. All that matters is getting out of here.

  Almost stumbling over her loose slippers, Mona hurried into her room. Kate was still far down the hall—complaining, no doubt, about the cookies.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mona said aloud, pulling the covers from the bed and wrapping them around herself from head to toe, with only a tiny space for fresh air to enter. “She can’t get to me in here,” and she settled down to wait for her friend to come with the latest plan of escape.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When the nurse returned to the television room, she asked Kate in surprise, “Where did your mother go?”

  “I offered her the cookies,” Kate answered, “but she threw them away. The medicine doesn’t seem to be helping her at all. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever be better.”

  She wiped her eyes and then smiled bleakly. “I suppose I ought to try again. She went to her room. Should I—”

  “You should go home,” the nurse said firmly, patting Kate on the shoulder. “You’ve done the best you could. No daughter could have done more than you have.” Her voice was rough with sympathy and concern.

  Kate pressed her hand in gratitude. Sometimes, she thought, it meant so much—the simple kindness of strangers.

  Annabelle

  “My father was a painter,” Annabelle had said—was it at the second session or the third?—“and my mother would pose for him.”

  Annabelle remembered watching her father paint in the cold, clear light filtering into his studio. He used canvas and oils the way God had used clay, creating life from inanimate objects. The walls of the house were hung with his paintings—those his agent could not convince him to release—and everywhere Annabelle looked, her mother’s dark eyes would follow her, glowing on the canvas.

  Sometimes, after a long session in the studio, her mother would be pale and weak, barely able to stand, so colorless that one would think her a ghost. The portraits, by contrast, were pulsing with life. Annabelle had feared that her father was drawing the very lifeblood from her mother, leaving behind an empty shell.

  And yet, her mother gloried in the attention, willingly changing herself into any figure her husband desired, just to be able to stand there, caught by his passion, while he painted.

  His work sold quite well in galleries across the country, but even if it had not, her father would have continued to paint, and her mother to pose.

  And Annabelle-the-child would be standing, somewhere just outside their line of sight, watching. And waiting.

  “Did your father never paint you, Anna?” Jules’ question was spoken so softly in the darkened room that it almost seemed the words originated in Annabelle’s mind, and she answered them just to hear her own voice echoing in the darkness.

  Annabelle blushed, an ugly red stain against her pale skin. “He did not paint children,” she answered hesitantly, not adding that once she had asked—begged!—her father to paint her.

  She had been young, five or six, and perhaps a little jealous of the attention given her mother during those endless sessions in the studio. Just once, she wanted her father to look at her with the intensity he reserved for his wife—to fix her so clearly on the canvas that there was no possibility of her ceasing to exist.

  The promises she had made—“I won’t move! I won’t even breathe if you would just paint me!”—were all in vain. Her father had looked at her absently, his brush suspended in mid stroke, and Annabelle realized in that moment that he wasn’t at all certain who she was or why she was there in his studio.

  Her mother, with gentle, insistent fingers, had urged her reluctant daughter from the room, promising “another time, darling. You’re too young to be a model for your father’s art. He needs someone a little older, more knowledgeable. Y
ou are still unformed, innocent . . . too young. You must wait,” and then the door closed and Annabelle was left outside while her mother went back to pose for her husband.

  Sometimes, when Annabelle remembered that moment, she almost hated her mother. She had wanted her chance, and her mother wouldn’t let her have it. Perhaps she should have argued or cried. She didn’t want to wait. She wanted her father to see her now.

  But Annabelle was a good child, an obedient daughter. Her mother said she must wait. Therefore, she would wait. If not for her father, then someone else—some other man who would be drawn to her like a moth to a candle. It would happen. Her mother had promised.

  “But when?” and she was unaware she had spoken aloud until she saw Jules’ raised eyebrows and understood he had not been following her thoughts.

  “When will it happen? My mother,” she explained awkwardly, twisting her hands together until the knuckles gleamed whitely in the lamplight, “my mother promised me a lover . . . someone like my father. She said I was beautiful, that men would follow me wherever I went. She used to call me her own ‘lovely Annabelle’.

  “Sometimes she would lie with me and twist our long hair together into one long rope and you couldn’t tell, not really, which was my mother’s hair and which was mine. I was a pretty child then . . . ‘lovely Annabelle,’” and then she fell silent.

  Lovely Annabelle she once was, but Anna was what she had become—the long curls cut short, the golden strands darkened and dirty-looking, the blue eyes washed to some indeterminate shade of gray.

  There was no one left who remembered Annabelle, and no one who particularly cared about Anna. Although once, there had been a rose, sent by a man she hardly knew, who worked in the office next to hers.

  “He brought me a rose,” she said to Jules, “this man I didn’t know. And I thought perhaps this was what my mother meant . . . that this flower would be the beginning of passion for me.”

  It was a full-blown red rose, tears of moisture still trapped on paper-thin petals. He had laid it on her desk before she came into the office, and at first, she didn’t believe it was meant for her.

  She lifted the stem, heavy with the weight of the blossom, and caressed her lips with the silken, scarlet petals. And deep inside her, a fire began to smolder, bringing an unaccustomed warmth and color to her pale cheeks.

  “I put the rose in my water glass. I wanted it there, right in front of me, so I could see it while I worked”—typing endless meaningless reports about people she would never know.

  All morning long, she typed, and while she worked, she cast furtive glances at the flower, fearing it might disappear before her eyes.

  It didn’t, of course, but what did happen was, in its own way, infinitely worse. The petals began to curl and the color to fade (she had failed to add water to the glass—and was that omission accidental or intentional?) and by the end of the day, the rose had withered before her eyes—the promise of passion gone before she could respond to it.

  “Did the man come to see you?” Jules asked, leaning forward to see her more clearly. But Annabelle avoided his eyes.

  “I like this office,” she said instead. “It’s never very bright in here. Bright lights hurt my eyes. My father’s studio was bright . . . he said he needed light to see life more clearly. But sometimes it isn’t good to see too much. It can hurt you.”

  But the light never hurt her father’s eyes. And when Annabelle’s mother was there, posing for one of the hundred—thousand!—pictures her father painted, the white light was shot through with color, as if her mother were a prism, capturing the clear beam and transforming it into all the colors of the rainbow.

  “The man,” Jules persisted, and Annabelle frowned. Man? What man? Oh, the man with the rose—Annabelle never knew his name, and now couldn’t even recall his face or the color of his eyes or the shape of his mouth.

  “He came by my desk as he was leaving,” she answered finally, snatches of the long-ago conversation drifting through her memory like falling leaves.

  “The rose,” he had said hesitantly. “I hope you liked it. It’s called Illusion. It made me think of you.”

  Annabelle looked again at the flower, but saw in its place the armfuls of roses her mother would gather from the bushes surrounding the house—the crimson petaled Avon, the dark red Traviata and, her mother’s favorite, the floribunda called Black Ice. She would slip the stems into her hair, thrust them deep into the neckline of her delicate silk gown, and then embrace her husband until the flowers were crushed and bleeding against her flesh.

  The scent from those roses had filled the air, unlike this poor dead bloom, which had no scent, no life at all. Annabelle looked at the stranger—at his stooped shoulders and nails bitten to the quick—and couldn’t even imagine being embraced by him, enfolded by those thin arms or crushed against that bony chest.

  He is not a man like my father, she thought, remembering her father’s muscular arms, covered with dark hair curling with a life of their own. He is not a man at all, and in that moment, the stranger was lost.

  “The flower died,” she had said finally to the waiting man. (And why did he stay? Did he think she would want him?) With one thin finger, she tapped the bloom, and some of the petals drifted free from the heart.

  “You brought me a flower with no life at all,” and no longer seeing him, she methodically stripped off the rest of the petals.

  It wasn’t until there was a small pile of faded color in the center of her desk that she realized he had gone.

  Then, almost unaware of what she was doing, she pressed one of the thorns—sharp even in death—against her fingertip, harder, harder, until a bubble of red appeared and fell onto the petals.

  Annabelle wondered if someday she too would be so dried up that her blood would change like the color of the rose, from deep scarlet to a faded, brownish red.

  “How could he say a dying flower reminded him of me?” she asked Jules angrily. “How dare he tempt me with passion, only to offer death in the end?”

  Jules swiveled his chair away from the light on his desk, until he was nothing more than a darker shadow in the darkness.

  “Did you ever talk to him again?”

  Annabelle shook her head, almost amused by the question. Talk to him? Why should she? She never even saw him again—although she supposed in the days and weeks that followed he must have passed her desk half a hundred times.

  But he had ceased to exist for her. Her vision was taken up searching for the lover who was yet to come.

  “You know, Anna, I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.” Jules’ voice was sharp, cutting into her thoughts. “You want to be well again, don’t you?”

  “I was never sick,” she answered, obstinate as a child when confronted with an unpleasant thought. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Just because I want what my mother promised me . . . a man like my father . . . my father. . . .”

  Her words drifted off for a moment but she regained control.

  “Someday my lover will come for me.” Someday my prince will come—the words rose unbidden in her mind—from a fairy-tale perhaps? But her lover wasn’t a fairy tale prince or figment of her imagination. He was there, somewhere, waiting for her. She had only to be strong and hold on long enough and he would find her.

  And when he came, she would never be alone again.

  Her mother had found her lover—the only lover she had ever wanted or needed—and stayed with him, though the passion burned her very soul. Annabelle could be as strong as her mother, couldn’t she? Couldn’t she?

  “I think perhaps we should end this session,” said Jules, setting down the gold-tipped pen with which he made notes each week. “There isn’t much we can accomplish if you won’t talk. You must face up to the reality of the past so you can you plan for your future. It is all very well to hope, Anna, to dream a little. But even dreams” (and did he really think she was listening to him?) “have to be grounded in reality.”

&
nbsp; The small brass desk lamp threw his elongated shadow on the ivory walls. As the evening drew on, his shadow grew larger, more powerful while his words drifted around Annabelle like snow in December, cold and smothering.

  When Jules spoke so strongly, Annabelle was caught by his words, ensnared like a tiny bird by the movement of a deadly reptile. She couldn’t move if she wanted to. Sometimes she would even find herself gasping for breath as though she had lost the ability to expand and contract her lungs.

  Jules folded his hands—how strong they looked, clasped so firmly together—and fixed his eyes upon her.

  Annabelle glanced at him and then away, the coldness of his gaze chilling her soul. Yet perversely, she wanted to stay here in his office, where the lights burned so softly. She was safe here. There was an air of timelessness, as though the world had stopped to allow her to catch her breath and find her strength.

  And if Jules was cold to her—well, what of it? Her father had been cold; yet, when he focused that chilling, penetrating gaze on her mother, she ignited like a Roman candle, sparks shooting in every direction.

  “I want to talk,” she protested, but Jules shook his head.

  “Next week, Anna.” His words were less a promise than a price to be extracted from her—a pound of flesh each week until she was reduced to bone before his eyes. “When you come next week, we will talk together, you and I.

  “I can help you, Anna,” and the persuasiveness of his tone pulled at her. “If you work with me, we can uncover the truth. You want the truth, don’t you, Anna?”

  The truth—did she want the truth? What is truth? Pilate had asked, and whether he found the answer, no one ever said.

  Annabelle knew the truth, but no one wanted to believe her. They would rather believe their own version of the past—an ugly, untrue, hurtful version. But Annabelle knew better. Annabelle could remember.