Читать книгу Looking Backward in Darkness - Kathryn Ptacek - Страница 7

MI CASA

Anita Rodríguez stared out the window, but could see nothing but her reflection, almost watery in the glass. Dark hair pulled back severely, dark skin, dark eyes...dark, dark, dark...everything was so dark.

And darkness had come prematurely to the northern New Mexico mountains, blanketing everything with a wintry breath that even now puffed against the house, trying to get in.

She saw no other lights outside. How could she? The house was so far away from others that it might well have been the only one in the county.

Shivering, she turned away, the old lace curtain fluttering back into place. Anita hitched her shawl up around her shoulders, then settled on a low bench and picked up the book she had been trying to read for the past hour. She was still on page one.

Tears blurred her eyes, and swallowing rapidly, noisily, she studied the large room, almost Spartan in its simplicity. Whitewash covering the adobe brick walls, the room contained only a few pieces of furniture: the plain bench, a chair with a high leather back, an immense double-doored wooden cabinet dating from the colonial Spanish days, and a weathered table with a carved santo atop it. The floor displayed a Southwestern pattern of inlaid Mexican tiles in vivid turquoise and salmon and canary and beige. Two doors: one to the outside, one to the rest of the house. Light came from the pierced tin wall sconces, once holding candles but now electrified, and the horno, the rounded fireplace in the corner, where pinõn logs crackled as they burned. From the hallway she heard the steady ticking of a clock. The doorframes and windowsills, inside and out, were painted blue.

To guard against evil spirits, or so the tradition claimed.

But tonight nothing would keep the spirits—the remembrances—out of the house. The pungent fragrance of the burning piñón alone was enough to make her cry, without all the memories crowding her tonight.

Softly the clock chimed, and she recalled the day her father had presented it to her mother. He had saved all year for it, this tenth anniversary gift, and he was so proud of the beautiful walnut veneer grandfather clock with its silver embossing. And her mother’s eyes had welled with tears and—no.

Why had she come back?

To escape?

Hardly.

Yet that was the precise reason Jerry had urged her to return home—to get away. Her mother had finally entered a nursing home, and Anita had wept long hours since, even though she knew there had been no choice.

“It’s not really your decision any longer, hon,” Jerry had said as he comforted her in his arms. He kissed the top of her head.

Anita had nodded against his chest, knowing he was correct; that she had done the right thing. And still the guilt and unhappiness flowed through her.

She could no longer do anything for her mother who had laid so still in the bed with eyes closed, rarely responding to anyone’s voice, nearly comatose, but not quite. Monitors and machines beeped, hissed and hummed, while tubes snaked and coiled out of the woman, and after a while Anita couldn’t separate in her mind what was really part of her mother, what wasn’t. Sometimes she thought she remembered her mother having the tubes coming out of her skin years ago, back when Anita was a child, but she told herself that was nonsense. It was, wasn’t it? But the memories from before were fading, were changing, and she didn’t like it.

Anita had done what she could to make her mother’s life easier, and her brother and sister were not willing to help. In fact, they had proved quite vocal, informing her that they didn’t want the old woman living with them. Their conversations had stayed with her all too well.

“Old woman?” Anita had said, not believing she’d heard the scorn in her siblings’ voices. “That’s our mother there.”

“That’s a shell,” Raymond had said, his voice devoid of emotion. His eyes would not meet hers. “Nothing more, Nita.”

“No,” she’d whispered.

“Face it,” Anna had said, “that hasn’t been our mother since the accident. You know that—God knows, we’ve been telling you that for a year now. But you never listen to us; you never have, even when we were kids. It’s for the best, you know.”

“But—”

”No,” Raymond had said, holding up a hand. “We’ve heard all the arguments. There’s nothing new you can tell us. And face it, Nita, you’ll be better off with her in the nursing home. We all will. We can get on with our lives now.”

After that, Anita knew they were right, that it was time for the professionals to take over, time for her mother to go where she would get around-the-clock treatment. It was time. Long past time.

Time...the clock ticked away. One, two, three, four, and she found she was breathing in rhythm with the clock. She held her breath for a moment, tried to break the rhythm, then almost laughed at the absurdity.

Time...one part of her wondered if she should have kept their mother just a little longer. What if she had abandoned her parent too soon? What if it had only taken a few weeks more, a month, two or three even...Time....

No. It was the right time; and she hadn’t abandoned her mother. She hadn’t. Really.

Even though she felt as if she had.

And so, here she was, getting away to rest in her mother’s house, getting away from the situation. The irony, of course, was that it was all she could think of.

It was all her life had turned into. Waiting for her mother to live, to die, to do something other than lay there so still.

No.

She wouldn’t worry about her mother and the nursing home any longer. It had been done; the act was completed. There was no turning back.

The door and pane rattled with the force of the cold wind. The curtain trembled ever so slightly, as if something had breathed against it.

The clock ticked and ticked and ticked...ticking away her life, she thought.

She concentrated on the book, forcing herself to finish the paragraph and go on to page two. But again her mind wandered; her eyes lifted, glanced at the dark oblong window.

Something white pattered against it. She rose and glanced out, and saw snowflakes.

That was the problem with coming to this old place set in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, east of Santa Fe. Winter came so early here, painting the slopes white long before it ever reached the capital city. It was only mid-September, and yet it might as well have been the depths of winter.

She had not thought she could take the time off—after all, she was a legislative assistant and the legislature was in session right now—but somehow Jerry had arranged it. He insisted she needed the time away, and her boss had agreed, and so she had come home.

To this house.

She remembered when there had been much more here, in this room—when it had been filled with the playful shouts and gleeful laughter of three energetic children, and the cheerful calls of their mother from the kitchen for them to wash up and come to dinner right away.

She remembered when Raymond, not more than nine or ten years old, had drawn in bright red Crayola a picture of Father Martinez from the parish church on the wall; it had not been a flattering representation, but all their mother had done was chuckle and suggest that perhaps he might wish to use paper next time.

She remembered her mother sitting by the window the night they had learned that their father had walked out on them and would never be back. She, not even eleven, had gone to her mother and put her arms around her, her head resting on the dark one below hers, and the others had come to them and held their mother as well. So long ago.

Years before she had gone to the legislature, years before Raymond had bought his art gallery on Canyon Road, years before Anna had moved down to Albuquerque with her second husband.

Years before they had grown apart.

Tick, tick, ticking away....

She shook her head, sighed, then started when she heard a sharp bang in another room. She hurried down the darkened hallway and into the end bedroom—one of the casement windows had blown open, and the lace curtains stood straight back from the wind gusting snow across the sill. She rushed over and locked the window, batted away the damp curtain as it slapped against her cheek, then fetched a towel from the bathroom to wipe the snow up before it melted.

When she finished, she looked around the room, with its blue and white quilt on the wide bed, at the intricately carved pine chest set against one wall, at the painting of a Santa Fe church she had done when she was a teenager and had thought she wanted to be an artist. The room was so...bare...bare of furniture, of belongings, but not of memories.

Again she could close her eyes and recall so easily those days when her mother had let them climb into bed with her, and the three children had piled up onto its softness, then burrowed under the quilt while their mother told them tales of talking rabbits and squirrels. How warm and cozy—how safe—it had all been.

She forced herself to return to the front room, where she stood before the fireplace and held her hands out to the flames. She was so cold; maybe this would help.

The ticking sounded louder now.

Wind pounded against the door, and she stepped closer to the fire, as if seeking protection. Of course, that was nonsense, she thought when she realized what she’d done.

She shouldn’t have come out here this time of the year, she told herself, not for the first time since her arrival. She should have waited for spring; but she couldn’t. She’d had to get away now, before the weeks grew into months, the months into years, into decades.

Something white drifted across the floor, and she whirled around.

A snowflake.

It had sifted in through the crack under the door.

Ice crystals had formed on the window, too, and she wondered how long the storm would last. Hours, perhaps; maybe even a day or two. She didn’t worry about being stuck here, though, because Jerry knew where she was. He would come for her, if she needed him, if she couldn’t get out in the morning.

Jerry. She smiled at the thought of her husband, then sat on the bench again to read. Another page gone by slowly, then she looked up as more snow drifted into the room.

The windows were not as tightly closed as they could be, she knew. Or rather, the old wood frames were warped from cold and heat and age; there was nothing to do but replace them, and perhaps she and Jerry could do that in the spring, when it was warm again.

It hadn’t always been this cold, the house; once it had been warm and open. Mi casa, su casa, her mother had always proclaimed to friends and strangers alike. My house is your house. And their mother had never turned anyone away in all the years she had lived here.

Not like Anita. Anita had turned her mother away.

No, she told herself sharply as she bit back tears; she had not turned her mother away. Her brother and sister had done that; she at least had nursed her mother as best she could. And when it had grown too much, she had sought help. There was nothing wrong with that.

Was there?

Mi casa, su casa.

Yes; she had told her mother that very thing when the old woman had come to live with them after the accident, the accident that had left her paralyzed along one side, and nearly speechless and her mind rambling, a wreck of the once smiling and pleasant woman who had raised three children by herself. But it was Jerry’s and her house, not her mother’s.

And then, when the situation grew too inconvenient, she had turned the old woman away.

No!

She shook her head, denying.

Mi casa—

There was a deep roaring, like a dark train barreling a hundred miles an hour or more along a steel track—the wind had become a gale. The walls of the house seemed to reverberate from its power, and she wondered if they and the roof could withstand the escalating wind, this blizzard. Surely, yes, because they had withstood so much else before.

Snow formed a powdery semi-circle inside the door, and the windowsill was white. A trickle of water from melted snow inched down the wall.

The temperature in the room had dropped in the past few minutes, and she shivered, then rubbed her arms briskly with her hands, but nothing would warm her. Not now.

The ticking of the clock dropped to a whisper, as if the clock were winding down. Slowing, slowing, slowing...as if it were more the beat of a heart than a clock now.

Anita admitted it at last. She had turned her mother away. Had abandoned the woman when she needed her family most. She had.

But coming here had been the right thing. This would make it all right. This waiting at the house. She knew it would.

Slower...slowly...the ticking....

She smiled. Nothing ever changed. The snow would come in, as it always did, and in a minute she would get another towel from the kitchen, and she would wipe up the snow, knowing even then that this small action was futile. And she would look once more out into the darkness, and behind her the fire would burn, and the wind would scream.

The snow would continue falling, collecting slowly around the house in gigantic drifts.

And she would sit down and read again.

And she would listen as the wind screamed and the roof shook.

She would.

Just as she had every night for the past five years.

She would wait. Wait until her mother joined her, and once more there would be warmth and laughter, the two of them together.

My house.