A Stillness in Bethlehem(82)

This is a mess, Amanda told herself. Then she swung the car out onto Main Street and repeated what had become her mantra.

Things were going to have to get worse before they got better.





2


Candy George knew that what she had just done was only a temporary solution, but she didn’t have time for a permanent solution at the moment, and she had to have something. It had been one of the strangest days of the last three weeks, and the last three weeks had been the strangest of her life. It wasn’t that Reggie was getting particularly violent and particularly nasty. Reggie was always violent and nasty. Reggie was terrible, if the truth was to be known, and Candy was beginning to think the truth wasn’t as hidden as she’d originally thought. Of course, she knew that at least some people in town had to know that Reggie had hit her at least once. There was that time Sharon Morrissey had called in Franklin, and Franklin had come to the door and tried to talk to her. Candy wished he’d do that again, now, because now she would understand it better than she had. Back then, it had been like he’d been talking Latin. You can put him in jail. It’s against the law for him to do this to you. If you need help getting on your feet, I know some places you can go in Burlington. The man had looked to her like some kind of Martian. Put him in jail for what? Get on her feet how? And who cared what kind of laws they passed over in Montpelier? Candy really did wish Franklin would show up on her doorstep right this minute. She could use the help.

One of the reasons it had been such a strange three weeks was that Candy had not been able to sleep, in the usual sense, since it had started. For a while she had put this down to excitement. She was so happy to be in the play she just couldn’t calm down enough to drift off. This was a prime example of mental con job, and she knew it. She was excited to be in the play, all right, but that wasn’t why she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep because she was afraid to close her eyes. She was afraid to close her eyes because of how bad her dreams had gotten, and because she knew there were going to be worse ones to come. This was because her dreams were not dreams the way dreams were supposed to be anymore, meaning scenes her mind made up. There was nothing fictional about what she saw when she closed her eyes these days. There was the bedroom she had in the house she shared with her mother and stepfather. There was the set of curtains with the bluebird border swaying in the summer breeze. There were his hands getting bigger and bigger in the moonlight and the pain that never seemed to stop, never never, and only got worse if she cried or asked him to go away. She was eleven or twelve years old, she couldn’t remember which. He was huge and the black pupils seemed to take up all of his eyes. When he came near her, she found it impossible to breathe. That was when she got dizzy and started to look at the stains on the sheets, to contemplate them, to turn them into artwork. She lay flat on her stomach and made artwork out of the trailing blotches he had left the night before and willed the pain out, out of her body, out of her life, out of her mind, into the air.

When Reggie came home from lunch this afternoon, she was lying on the couch on her back, looking up at the ceiling and thinking. She was thinking the oddest thing, a thing that had never occurred to her before. She couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t occurred to her before. It seemed so obvious. She couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do with it now that she knew. All her life, she had secretly harbored the conviction that there was a secret out there, a special secret some people knew and once you knew it you were free, you could do anything you wanted to do, you did not have to be the person you were born to be. Now she had it, and it had stopped her cold. This was it, this was the secret of the universe, this was what she should have known all along.

    What he did to me was wrong.



A few minutes after she had reached this revelation, she had had another one, coming down on her like a light, and the voice it spoke to her in was Franklin Morrison’s.

    What Reggie is doing to me is wrong.



That was when Reggie had come in, home from work for lunch the way he never was, glaring and prancing and all wound up. She had known what he was after as soon as she set eyes on him.

He threw himself down in the big lounge chair and kicked himself back, so that he had his feet up and his head halfway to the floor. He’d glared at the sight of her on the couch as he walked in, but he hadn’t done anything about it. Maybe he was tired. Instead, he’d put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes and said, “Get me a beer, all right? I want a beer.”

A beer. Candy got up off the couch and looked down at him. Reggie never had a beer for lunch on a day when he was working. In that way he was better than both her father and her stepfather had been. He had that much control of his addictions. Maybe he was losing it now. She looked at his chin and the way the stubble along the underside of it was flaked with the soap he hadn’t rinsed off well enough this morning. She looked at his throat, which was young but damaged, creased already with too much getting high and too many Camels.