Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Gino helped himself to a cough drop and said nothing. After Luis left, he squinted at her, asking in his hoarse voice, “You work here one time?”

“Yeah, five years ago. For a while.”

“You remember where things are? Okay. You take what he said to the loading dock. I’ll look it over good for him. Listen, we got nowhite flies in here. We got the cleanest greenhouse in New Jersey.” He spat into a bright handkerchief that reminded her of Luciente. “I got two thousand things to do besides worry about the boss’s party. So you pick out the plants and I look them over when you finish. Okay. If you want to run away with no coat, it’s sixteen degrees out there and you’re crazy for sure. So you better just go to work. You’ll never get past the gate anyhow unless you can fly.”

She picked out smart‑looking plants, the ones with the shiniest leaves, the most graceful drooping foliage, the showiest flowers, the most exotic fruit. As best she could, she hauled them to the locked doors of the loading dock. A couple of times she had to yell for help, till Gino reluctantly assigned her five minutes from one of the other overworked, underpaid greenhouse employees. The pesticides had used to make her sick. She had worked long hours till her back ached and never stopped aching day and night, and it had taken her so long to come and go on public transportation she had had no time to spend with her own child. All for two dollars an hour and bad headaches. The poisons could kill if she breathed them, if they only touched her skin. Even when she wore a face mask, they got to her.

Snow was beginning, swirls of small flakes idling in the air and sticking in the crotches of bare trees in their rows outside. The only thing she could find was a smock of thin cotton, but she put that on. So she’d catch a cold! Her coat was locked up in Luis’s office, but she’d go as she was. She moved slowly, ever so casually toward the door. But as she stepped outside, Richie called to her, “Where do you think you’re going?” Again and again she waited and made a move, but always Gino or Luis or Richie was watching.

On impulse she walked back into the shed where poisons were stored. The cabinet was locked, but she looked behind the door and the key was still on its hook there. Like a joke, she had always thought, like having a safe and writing the combination on the wall. She unlocked the cabinet A few of the poisons were new to her. There were the fungicides they used: zineb, Captan, sulfur. The pesticides: Sevin, malathion, Kelthane. Some came ready‑mixed and some were powder or oil. Parathion: that was the most deadly in the nursery in the old days. Gino had warned her about wearing the gloves with all of them, but the girls told stories about people dying just from touching parathion. She had never used it She was not allowed to. But she had seen Gino using that oil.

She grabbed up a small bottle and filled it with the brown oil, her hand trembling. Slowly she poured it holding her breath. Perhaps even coming this close might kill her, but then they were going to kill her anyhow. But this was a weapon, a powerful weapon that came from the same place as the electrodes and the Thorazine and the dialytrode. One of the weapons of the powerful, of those who controlled. Nobody was allowed to possess this poison without a license. She was stealing some of their power in this little bottle. She put the big container back where it had been, locked the cabinet; then she thought better and opened it again and wiped everything with the hem of her dress. Fingerprints. Then she backed out, putting the bottle in the pocket of the smock, until she should get a chance to put it in her old plastic purse.

Quickly she went back to work, choosing plants. Her hands kept trembling. She wondered if she was dying of poison. Perhaps the shaking of her hands was the first stage of poisoning. Perhaps handling the bottle could kill her. She felt the brown oil radiating a sinister influence all around it.

Never had she done such a thing, grabbed at power, at a weapon. She did not intend to go Skip’s way. Yes, she had stolen a weapon. War, she thought again. She would fight back. But her hands trembled and trembled and she found her knees buckling till she could hardly focus on the plant before her, large and leathery, almost as big as herself, whose name she had forgotten.

Supper consisted of leftovers. Adele toyed with her food, smiling again. “Did you have a good day? Oh, too bad. Yes. Um. Of course, yes, he’s getting old. Mummm.”

Connie looked hard at Luis. When she went to the kitchen to fetch the coffee and dessert, she could pour some of the poison into the coffee. It was brown and oily. It would work well in coffee. For all the meanness he had laid on her all the years of her life, for Dolly, for Carmel. Her purse lay within reach. She could do it.

Luis was laughing at his own joke, his head tilting way back. As he laughed, for a moment out of control, almost boyish, she saw in him that older brother she hated to remember she had adored. Up to the age of ten, she had adored Luis with her whole heart. He had seemed to her that prince, that peacock wonder he always remained to their mother. He could fight, he could talk his way in and out of trouble, he could speak English better than any of them, he could stand up for her if he wanted. Yes, Luis the street kid she had adored. Luis the young hoodlum had touched her heart and set a mold on it. Something of what she had loved in Martin, something of what she had loved in Claud: the grace, the anger, the sore pride, the refusal to swallow insult. The army had changed Luis. When he had come back, he had contempt for the rest of them. His anger and unruly pride had been channeled into a desire to get ahead, to grab money, to succeed like an Anglo.

Who knew what being poor and being brown would have done to Martin if he had lived? Perhaps he would have hardened like Luis. She could not believe that of his tenderness, yet she could remember Luis at fourteen stealing a bright scarf from the dime store for her to wear Easter Sunday, laughing as he pulled it from the leather jacket no one knew how he had come by. How beautiful he had seemed, the glint of teeth in his brown face, his eyes burning with anger or joy, the arrogant overacted thrust of his shoulders. Jesъs had been scared he would go bad, they would lose him to the streets. None of them had guessed they would lose him to the Anglos, entirely.

After supper she steamed a label off a fancy herbal shampoo in the bathroom and pasted it on her bottle. When the bottle dried, the label stuck. She would take it back to the hospital with her alongside a shoebox of old cosmetics Adele gave her–lipsticks in frosted colors no longer fashionable, the wrong shade of eye shadow, a half‑finished jar of cold cream containing oil of the palm. Adele also gave her a beige cardigan with embroidered flowers, shrunk in the wash, a pair of panty hose, and a pile of old Vogues and New Yorkers. It reminded her of the sort of things people gave you when you cleaned for them. She did not get to taste the dishes she had cooked for the party, but she discovered from the scale in the bathroom off the master bedroom that she had managed to gain four pounds from Wednesday night to Saturday noon. She did not mind. How I spent my vacation: I ate.

As she sat in Luis’s big white Eldorado idling sluggishly through heavy traffic, she realized several weeks had passed since she’d gone over. Was Luciente dead? She could not bear to think so. She was the one who was dead. She could not catch anymore. She was hardening herself as Luis had done to himself, but not for money. To succeed in her war. To fight back. She closed her eyes and saw her weapon, disguised as shampoo.

NINETEEN

That Monday Acker announced that Alice and Captain Cream were to be released Friday to welfare hotels. Alvin was taken away to be operated on, along with Orville. Sybil, Miss Green, and Connie were given yet another battery of physical and psychological tests and scheduled for meetings with the doctors on Wednesday.

“It means we’ll be done next,” Sybil said out of the side of her mouth as they stood in line for the meds.

“It means that’s what theywant,” Connie said.

She and Sybil waited for an opportunity to do their laundry at the same time. Then she asked Sybil, “If you had a chance, would you be ready to try?”

Sybil nodded. “Tina tried in a laundry cart. I’ve been thinking–is there any way to start a fire?”

“You think you could make it outside?”

“I’m ready to try, Consuelo. I cannot permit them to operate on me if I have any way to stop them. It’s a kind of death.”

“Don’t go back home. I know you never lived anyplace else, but you’re in a … circle there where they keep getting rid of you.”

“The volunteer Mary Ellen I mentioned to you? Her friend gave her a newspaper, a newspaper just for women, that had an article about witches. Real covens that worship Wica! Imagine that, Consuelo. With an address. If I got … out, I thought I might seek their aid.”

“That sounds better than going back to Albany for sure.”

The next morning when Miss Green was in the bathroom and Sybil was making her bed, Connie darted in. “Here. Take this!” She pressed into Sybil’s palm the wadded‑up money she had got from Dolly, less what she’d spent on phone calls, It came to thirty‑one dollars and sixty‑two cents.

Sybil sat down on the bed’s edge to stare. “What are you going to do? Why give me this?”

“Shhh. Hide it.”

“Don’t give up, Consuelo. Just because you couldn’t escape from your brother’s house!”

“Don’t ask what I’m going to do. Only, Wednesday, tomorrow, be ready to run. There’ll be a lot of confusion in the afternoon, when the doctors see me. Run then. Run and never let them get you again!”

Valente paused, stood in the hallway looking in. Connie left at once and went to make her own bed. At breakfast Sybil mouthed to her, “Consuelo, you frighten me. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up!”

“I’m not. For me this is war. I got to fight it the only way I see. To stop them. Don’t ask me more.” Her voice stuck in her throat. “I wish you a good life, Sybil. Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”

Tuesday night, in spite of the sleeping pills she lay awake, her eyes wearing themselves raw on dim shapes. She tossed, she thrust her head into the pillow, she counted and tried to blank her mind. Her thoughts ran round and round like dogs trapped behind a fence, to and fro until they had worn a bald track in her head.

She tried to open her mind to Luciente. In weary boredom, in fear of the next day, wanting a little something nice, she tried. Her mind was rusted shut. It would not open. She pushed on herself, she tried and tried. Sweat stood out on her forehead, sweat gathered under her arms and under her breasts. Once she almost felt something, a presence. That made her go on battering her mind. She lay panting as if she had run up a flight of steps. Please, she begged, please! What had been so easy was hard and painful, hard as dying. Dying into distance. Where there had been only air, something solid stood, solid as bone, as prison walls. But she went on. What else did she have to do this night? What else but touch her fears like the beads of a cold, oily rosary, again and again. She went on trying.

Finally she felt a brush of presence, hard, hard and heavy. Yet she could tell almost at once that this time the pain was coming from Luciente. No, the pain was from the terrible effort. Luciente too strained toward her. Together at last they forced weak contact.

“I feared you were dead,” she thought at Luciente.

“I feared they had done something … final to you. Tried … many times!”

“Bring me over!”

Luciente tried for a long time. “Very hard … need help. A moment. I’ll call Diana or Parra or Zuli … . Wait!”

Finally, roughly, she stood shaking in the meetinghouse. As on the nights of the feast and of Jackrabbit’s wake, many people circulated, but dressed now in ordinary clothes. Their voices were subdued.

Luciente hugged her tight. “How long! We missed you running hard. To reach you has been … like trying to walk through walls!”

“Yourself? How did you get out of the burning floater?”

“What?”

“At the front. With Hawk.”

Luciente peered into her face. “I don’t comprend. Hawk’s over there.” She pointed. “What stew is this of floaters and fronts?”

“We weren’t together at the front? Fighting?”

“Not in my life, Connie. Not in this continuum … . With that device in your brain, maybe you visioned it. You’ve been redded for visioning over the last months, grasp, from all this going over.”

“Pues … never mind. It felt so real … . How are you, Luciente?”

“I feel in you some large resolve. You plan some action?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, please. Just tell me about yourself. Bee. Dawn. How you are.”

“The Shaping controversy builds. I think we’ll call a grandcil this March to decide it. I’ve been arguing myself empty. It’s one choice to breed carrots for our uses–especially leaving wild and variant gene pools intact. Is another to breed ourselves for some uses or imagined uses! For all we know, a new ice age comes and we might better breed for furriness than mathematical ability! I speechify! Pass it.” Luciente hugged her again. “I feared never to see you. Hard bringing you over. We’re fading contact.”

“How is Bee?”

“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.”

“He’s teaching a class?”

“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games … . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Connie blossom, but it’s not right to destroy, we just can’t do it. We’ve been feeling a class society where most labor, others control, and some enjoy. We had prisons, police, spies, armies, torture, bosses, hunger–oh, it’s been fascinating. Now we’re discussing to know better before they go on.”

“Is this a feast?” She stared at the people wandering through the room and out into the square, stopping to examine objects laid out, watching holies, arguing over graphs and exhibits.

“No, no, a memorial. Nothing to celebrate, fasure. In winter we make time for studying, communing. Often villages send out a traveling group who go around till they get worn with being on the road … . We’ve been chewing on–Bee, Otter, White Oak, me–going around with a skit on Shaping. This troupe is from Garibaldi on Mystic, where they make pasta, computer poppers, and breed grapevines. A beautiful place, Otter says. When person was eighteen, stayed a month during harvest working and coupling with Vittorio, who’s with the troupe. Otter is crazy with pleasure to see per again … .” They were strolling among the booths, hand in hand. Bee was using a very small holi projector which produced one moment a box of a children’s breakfast cereal from her own time called Sweetee Pyes and the next an image of braceros picking lettuce. He looked at once so serious, frowning at the Sweetee Pyes and rumbling deep in his chest, and at the same time so fine, with the delicate tattoo of the bee rippling on his arm, she lost track of what Luciente was telling her.

Hawk came dodging toward them. She greeted Connie and then burst out, “Luciente! I’ve fixed. It’s time to travel. I’m going on with this troupe. Bolt’s coming with me.”

Luciente put her hands on Hawk’s slight shoulders. “Do they agree?”

Hawk quivered with excitement. “They say we can learn the parts of two people who want to go home. I’ll learn Italian and get to see villages, and when I find one that warms me, I’ll stay on and work.”

“When do you go?”

“Thursday morning. Tomorrow they’re doing an opera. They say I sing well enough for the chorus, if I start working on the music.”

Connie remembered Hawk setting out for her week in the woods. “How are you going to travel?”

“By dipper. Then, when we’re further south, by bike.”

“Do you own a bike?”

“Own? Like I dropped a rock on my own foot?”

“A bike that’s yours.”

Hawk scratched her ear. “Any bike not in use, I can use. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to everybody!” Hawk stood on one foot. “You think Bee would like my painting of per? It’s not … top good, but it has a lot of colors in it.”

“How not?” Luciente kissed her cheek. “If person should be so blind as not to want it, I want it.”

“I’m in velvet we’re done with taboo so I can say goodbye properly to my mothers … . Don’t tell Bee I’m going–I want to tell myself, hold?”

“Hold” Luciente shook her hand and Hawk skipped off.

“I love winter,” Luciente said as they strolled on. “Eating and getting fat and going tobogganing and ice skimming. Talking and talking and talking. I’m redding Chinese, sweetness, fifteen hours a week till even Bee picks up from hearing it so much. Also our base, we’re monitoring last year’s results from all over. And I play in a new mojai group every Friday night, last Friday we went on almost till morning. Mojai is music like this … .” Luciente began beating out a complicated rhythm over rhythm with two hands on the edge of a table.

“Shh, Luciente!” Morningstar rebuked her. “We’re listening.”

“I blather.” Luciente drew Connie away. “Such hardness in your mind tonight makes me babble more than usual. I fear for you.”

“But it was you, your people, who taught me I’m fighting a war.”

“Then fight well, Connie!” They walked out into the cold clean brisk air. Luciente paused to grab a jacket and drape it over Connie’s shoulders. Big disks of snow came tilting and turning down where already several inches lay thick, rounding all corners and softening straight lines, an expanse of white across the square marked only by the tracks of children playing.

Luciente touched her shoulder. “You want to ask if I still mourn … .”

“I wouldn’t ask!”

“I know. But you want to feel how I am. Yes, I mourn. But I work too. It hurts, but I can’t let the pain bind me … . Diana has helped. Otter has helped. Bee has carried me! … I want no new lover and I dread spring … . But look!” Luciente waved her hand at a snowball battle swirling around the statue of a funny bird dancing on one foot and a barricade of benches. Briefly Dawn ran through a pool of light, whooping and waving.

Lazy flakes drifted onto the arm of the borrowed jacket. “Luciente, do you think it’s always wrong to kill?”

“We live by eating living beings, whether vegetable or animal. Without chlorophyll in our skins, we have no choice.” Luciente caught flakes on her outstretched palm.

“I mean to kill a person.”

“How can I face something so abstract?”

“To kill someone with power over me. Who means to do me in.”

“Power isviolence. When did it get destroyed peacefully? We all fight when we’re back to the wall–or to tear down a wall. You know we kill people who choose twice to hurt others. We don’t think it’s right to kill them. Only convenient. Nobody wants to stand guard over another.”

“In my time people are willing to stand guard. It’s a living. I guess maybe it’s power, too.”

“You brood on killing someone, my friend?”

She nodded, disentangling herself from Luciente to clutch her hands together before her breasts. She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world. Luciente was speaking, but under the rush of her blood, the words mumbled like stones in the bed of a river. Slowly people drifted from the meetinghouse and began taking shovels, brooms from sheds along the square and the paths. The shovels clanged against the stone, the wood scraped. The night began to fill with laughter and the sounds of shoveling. The children stopped their fight and began to clear the snow. In red pants and a dark blue parka, Dawn was wielding a broom, coming along behind Otter, whose broad single braid bounced rhythmically on her back. Bee was clearing snow from the path toward the fooder, as Hawk came running and sliding to work beside him. Her breath came out in white plumes as she talked and talked full speed to him.

She could hear Luciente speaking but she could no longer distinguish the words in the roar of her blood. Only dimly she could hear the scrape of metal on stone. Lips moved as if people were singing. Dawn looked over her padded shoulder at them. Dawn smiled and waved and began to sweep very hard with the broom, showing off, casting up a fine white dust. Flakes rested lightly on her black dome of hair, the hood of the parka cast back. One flake sat for a moment on the end of her delicate, sensuously curved nose, snow on her beautiful Mayan nose where Connie imagined that she pressed a quick kiss.

She lay flat on her bed, out of breath as if she had been dropped from a height.

“What is it?” Tina sat up, awake. “You okay?”

“Yes …”

“You cried out. What happened–you have a bad dream?”

“A good one. Tina, I dreamed of my daughter, safe, happy, in another place.” She could still see Angelina’s face ruddy with playing, her small arms fat in the parka feverishly wielding the broom, while the snowflake melted on her nose. “If only they had left me something!” she whispered. Still trembling, she thought, If only they had left me Martin, or Claud, or Angelina, if they had even left me Dolly and Nita, I would have minded my own business. I’d have bowed my head and kept down. I was not born and raised to fight battles, but to be modest and gentle and still. Only one person to love. Just one little corner of loving of my own. For that love I’d have borne it all and I’d never have fought back. I would have obeyed. I would have agreed that I’m sick, that I’m sick to be poor and sick to be sick and sick to be hungry and sick to be lonely and sick to be robbed and used. But you were so greedy, so cruel! One of them, just one, you could have left me! But I have nothing. Why shouldn’t I strike back?

Yet her hands shook with fear. She lay cold and trembling, all the night.

“This operation is designed to help you,” Dr. Morgan said. “To enable us to return you to society. You’ll be able to hold a job.”

“I feel a lot better. Why do I need this operation now? I went home to my brother’s Thanksgiving. I worked real hard there. I’ve been good and cooperative on the ward.”

“You’ve been better before, Connie,” Acker said. Today Miss Moynihan was not sitting at his side but across the room next to her boss, Dr. Morgan. She and Acker did not catch each other’s gaze. Her gray eyes were bloodshot and underscored by dark tissue. She had been crying; she had not been sleeping. Patty passed her a note and she shook her head bitterly, drawing herself tighter. Acker seemed more nervous than usual. He had a dark area on his left cheek, like a bruise. Who had hit him? Miss Moynihan or one of her brothers? “We know that you can’t help what you do. It’s as though you experienced a shorting out of circuits that causes you to move into an episode of uncontrollable rage.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong in months. I’m much better. Why do I need this operation right now, when I’m doing fine?”

“You’ve had periods of calm before,” Dr. Redding pointed out. His fingers were propped together like steeples over his empty cup. “Long periods. But they always end the same way. Don’t they, Connie?”

“It isn’t the same. Really, please, it isn’t! Look, I did something I’m ashamed for, my daughter. But I’ve paid for that again and again! Forever. How can I be uncontrollable? You been controlling me.”

“You don’t want to hurt someone close to you again, do you, Connie? You have a recurrent disease, like someone who has a recurrent malaria,” Acker said, looking pleased with himself. He glanced at Dr. Redding for approval, but Redding was talking in Dr. Argent’s ear. Both of diem had been turning over the pages of a proposal of some sort, and Argent was going down the budget line by line, making little notes to the side.

“But maybe the other thing worked. Maybe I don’t need an operation!”

“We have a permission from the brother, don’t we?” Redding asked Patty.

She made a little sitting curtsy toward a file on the table. “Yes, Doctor.”

Dr. Argent put down the proposal, took the pipe from his mouth, and fixed Connie with a twinkly smile. “Mrs. Ramos, you’re frightened by the idea of an operation. Isn’t that right?”

“Sure, I’m afraid! I’m okay now, Doctor. Look at the ward notes.”

“Your mother died after an operation. Didn’t she, Mrs. Ramos?”

Ay de mн, he was playing a psychiatrist game. She would have to say yes. “Doctor, can I get myself a cup of coffee, please? I feel a little confused, a little sleepy. I didn’t sleep so well last night on account of worrying about this.” She stood up, but remained balanced over her chair. “Please, Doctor, can I get myself a cup of coffee?”

Argent raised a silvery eyebrow, his interest fading. “You’ve often been a little confused, haven’t you, Mrs. Ramos?” He picked up the proposal again, reaching for his pen.

“You can have your coffee as you leave. We’re almost done with you,” Dr. Redding said, stretching his long legs under the table. “We can all use a coffee break. This is the last of them, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Patty said, consulting her calendar.

“Connie, we understand that you’re frightened. Society is also afraid of you–with more reason, wouldn’t you say? This operation is less complicated than the one you underwent in October. Now, you agreed you’re better for that operation.” Redding spoke fast, the words speeding into her. “You’ll be the better for this surgical procedure also. Then, like Alice, you’ll be released. Surely you don’t want to spend your life in a mental institution?”

“But last time I got better and they let me out without any operation!”

“And here you are again. Aren’t you? Your brother … what’s his name?”

“Lewis Camacho,” Patty read. “From Bound Brook, New Jersey.”

“Your brother … er … in New Jersey … Mr. Coman‑chee? … has signed the permission. The procedure will be carried out Monday. In a month you’ll be released. Consider that, Connie, and you’ll realize your fears are as irrational and as much a part of the pattern of your illness behavior as your hostile episodes. Okay, let’s break!”

The staff leaned back in their chairs and turned to each other as Connie got up, all except Miss Moynihan, who brushed past her in a hurry. Her face was twisted and she raced toward the staff ladies’ bathroom. Tony had been standing outside, sneaking a smoke, wrapped in a plastic bag of music from his transistor radio. “They done with you?” he asked.

“I don’t know!” She held up her hands. “I don’t understand what they’re doing. You ask them. They keep talking about my brother Luis. I don’t understand what they want me to do.”

“Wait here. Just hold on.” Tony stuck his head into the room, where she saw past him the doctors pushing back their chairs and beginning to rise, small knots of conversation forming. Argent and Redding had their heads together over the proposal, plotting. Morgan hovered, ignored and nervous. Redding nodded briskly at the little notes. Five thousand more chimpanzees? Prisoners? Women on welfare? They had disposed of her. “They said I could have some coffee,” she said out loud, and moved at once into the alcove where the doctors’ big shiny coffee machine stood. Quickly she dumped the contents of the old pot, emptied a premeasured packet into the filter, and pressed the Brew button. Then she fished the bottle from her purse and dripped the oily liquid into the glass pot as the coffee began to fill it. She hoped they would realize this was fresh coffee, and not discard it to make more.

When Tony came out the water was still pouring down. “Come on, Ramos. They’re done with you. Leave the doctors’ coffee alone, don’t mess up now. You can get a cup on the patients’ side.”

“They don’t want me anymore?” She blinked confusion.

“What do you think, they need all day to make up their minds about you? They’re big‑shot doctors. That Redding, he had his picture in Time.Patty showed me, she keeps a scrap‑book on him. Dr. Argent, he goes up to Washington to testify before Congress to set them straight on things. You don’t think they got all day to waste making up their minds about what to do with you!”

She washed her hands in the bathroom, she washed them again and again. “I just killed six people,” she said to the mirror, but she washed her hands because she was terrified of the poison. “I murdered them dead. Because theyare the violence‑prone. Theirs is the money and the power, theirs the poisons that slow the mind and dull the heart. Theirs are the powers of life and death. I killed them. Because it is war.” Her hands shook like a willow branch used by dowsers in Texas, a willow branch pulled by water deep in the ground. “I’m a dead woman now too. I know it. But I did fight them. I’m not ashamed. I tried.”

She broke the bottle under running water without touching it and washed the pieces down the shower. They’d most likely find them, but it was the best she could think up. Then she washed her hands a last time and went in search of Sybil. When she found her in the lounge she said to her only, “Soon!” Sybil looked into her face. A tear formed and hung in her eye. Then she looked down and said nothing, alert, ingathered, ready. Connie went to her room. As she passed Valente, knitting, the attendant nodded to her.

She thought of Luciente, but she could no longer reach over. She could no longer catch. She had annealed her mind and she was not a receptive woman. She had hardened. But she thought of Mattapoisett.

For Skip, for Alice, for Tina, for Captain Cream and Orville, for Claud, for you who will be born from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war. At least once I fought and won.

After a while she heard the commotion and they came with stretchers–four. Dr. Morgan was trying to cut down on coffee, and Miss Moynihan was being sick in the staff bathroom. I am not sorry, she thought, her heard pounding terribly, and she sat on her bed, waiting.