A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

Author:Laura Whitcomb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Ten

WHEN WE ARRIVED, I crept to Jenny’s bathroom and bathed as before but with a cup from the sink to pour over my head. I didn’t want to lose James’s scent but was afraid that someone else would notice it on my skin, deep in my hair. When I’d put on Jenny’s robe and was picking up the dirty clothes, I found a bloodstain on the panties. I turned on the water in the sink and started scrubbing the cloth, using a bar of soap shaped like a rose from the dish on the counter.

“Honey?” Cathy opened the door immediately after one soft knock. I jumped, sorry I hadn’t locked it. She looked dumbfounded. “Did you take a shower?”

“No.” I stopped scrubbing the panties and closed them into my fist. “A bath.”

“Are you feeling all right?” She looked at my hands. “What are you doing?”

“I was just washing a couple things by hand.” I smiled at her, but she still looked concerned. “Is anything wrong?” I asked.

She just raised her brows at me and closed the door again. I slipped out with the wet panties wrapped in the dry clothes. Before I could get to Jenny’s laundry hamper, I was startled to find Cathy standing over my open bag, looking at one of my library books.

“What’s this?” she asked, turning Romeo and Juliet over in her hands.

“It’s a play.”

“I thought you didn’t have an English class this semester.”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “I just like to read.”

Cathy looked unconvinced but placed the book back in the bag. “Put something on. It’s almost homework time,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the table in five.” Cathy left the room with a brush of her hands, as if she needed to dust Shakespeare off her fingers.

I put on clean clothes and brought my schoolbooks into the study, but Cathy wasn’t there. I walked through the house and found her sitting at the dining room table with a box beside her and notepaper in front of her. She held a pink pen and smiled up at me as I sat across from her. Her box was labeled CORRESPONDENCE and was covered in a pink floral paper. This was a mother-daughter ritual, though I couldn’t tell whether it was performed daily or weekly. I glanced at Cathy every now and then as I pretended to read history, government, and math. Like a child, she moved her lips slightly as she wrote—ordering her words in straight lines and her life in neat paragraphs. Although Cathy was in all likelihood thirty-five years old or more, and I had stopped aging at twenty-seven, I felt, just then, like the elder sister of Alice, sitting under a tree, watching her little sister lest she tumble down a hole. But it was only an illusion. Cathy was my keeper, and I was the one fallen into a strange land. I needed to be as clever as Alice to devise a bridge between Jenny’s world and Amelia Street.

I had not bothered to record any homework assignments.

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