Читать книгу The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing to Do With Fire - Allison Titus - Страница 26

Vivian ran water in the bathroom sink. The mirror above the sink was old, bent her reflection in some places and flattened it in others. She looked half normal and half far away regardless of where she stood. The breeze cleaved through the cracked window and rattled the glass against its frame, the rush of cold mixing with the dry radiator heat. Six names in the morning paper and three matched her initials exactly, VMF + VMF + VMF, which meant nine. She buttoned her sweater up to the neck, a flutter in the mirror that caught her attention. That working of button into buttonhole; the steadiness and precision of it. Her hands in the mirror looked like her mother’s, the long fingers, wide knuckles, the pale wrist against shirt cuff. Whatever it is that contains illness, or makes illness unable to be contained anymore, and makes the tremors start—you could see it in the hands first, in the way they faltered or grasped, because hands give the body away. They become dumb, stutter, slow. What if it was hereditary? She was terrified that it might be hereditary. If she could solve the cause of it, maybe she could bilk the onset, because her mother hadn’t always been crazy. After her carnival childhood, she’d left her parents, left the road, got emancipated, and went to high school. She graduated, moved to Berlin. Her visa expired; she returned to the states. She gave birth to Vivian and Seth when she was twenty-five, a single mother.

And Vivian remembered ordinary years. Regular stories, regular days at the park, regular Band-Aids, regular birthday cakes. Vague years of ordinary dinners, ordinary arguments, ordinary jobs. She was a secretary, a maid, a grocery store cake decorator; sometimes she kept two jobs at once, sometimes three.

Everything had been average and everything had been unremarkable, for all those days. Vivian and Seth had spent their childhood in a series of putty-colored apartments with interchangeable floor plans. The drab walls held gummy stains, indeterminate smudges like eraser scuff. They stayed in the apartment on Three Pines Terrace the longest. Three Pines Terrace with the thin walls and the single deadbolt latch, where the mail got delivered to a central community mailroom, which was the basement of the rental office. One time when she went to the mailroom, she was maybe twelve, Vivian had barged in on the maintenance officer having sex with the woman who always stood in front of the corner market, the one where you could play lotto and use food stamps to get beer. There was an old, slouch-cushioned armchair pushed up to the wall. Ratty carpet barely covered the concrete floor.