After the Fire by Jane Rule

Author:Jane Rule [Rule, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2946-8
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-05-01T16:37:00+00:00

Chapter IX

MILLY LAY WATCHING THE sunlight on the fresh roses which Bonnie had brought this morning. If Milly had had more energy, she might have demanded whether these, too, had come from Forbes, but she hadn’t the strength or mind for vexation. She was reduced to passive and basic pleasures. Roses in sunlight, the at first very painful and now just miraculous reawakening of her bladder and bowels. Milly had dealt with her body so long as an aging enemy that it was a largely forgotten experience to be aware of it simply as a servant to her consciousness. She breathed and felt her lungs at work acquiring oxygen for her blood which traveled through her veins carrying nourishing messages. For every conscious effort she made, her body carried out thousands of instructions she was not aware of. She felt amazed by it and grateful.

In birth, the child’s body was the miracle. Milly’s own, torn and depleted, breasts sore with her first milk, had been something to be pitied—a crude and vulnerable vehicle for life, hardly belonging to her at all, though a vital convenience for the child. And very soon—she had never been able to think how—it would have to be repaired and restored to the uses Forbes made of it.

Now no one else’s need pushed at her. She could lie and rest and let herself heal for herself. She didn’t resent the nurse’s urging her out of bed for the short journey to the bathroom, and, though she didn’t yet look forward to the time she spent sitting in a chair each day, she knew she would.

While Milly had been very sick, Bonnie seemed nearly always at her bedside. Now she came briefly in the morning with flowers or a magazine, came back in the afternoon for a real visit and occasionally again briefly in the evening.

“Don’t muck up your evenings for me,” Milly told her. “There must be lots of old friends you’d like to see.”

“I don’t,” Bonnie assured her. “You were on the way to a party tonight, that’s all.”

Milly didn’t really remember most of the people Bonnie referred to, expecting her mother to be familiar with high school and college friends who had frequented the house and who had often been more charmed by Milly than Bonnie had liked. They had never been much more than a blur of young faces to Milly but when Bonnie had complained at her mother’s behavior, her friends became something more of a challenge to beguile. “I’m teaching you how,” Milly had said to her daughter.

Instead of complaining that she couldn’t be expected, even with full presence of mind, to remember all those callow young, Milly let Bonnie chatter on about them and their affairs until, for lack of other interests, Milly began to look forward to Bonnie’s reports like episodes in the soaps. She could probably have watched television instead, but, since she had lived on the island, she was out of that habit. Bonnie, right there in the room with her, was an easier distraction.

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