Cat in Glass by Nancy Etchemendy

Author:Nancy Etchemendy [Etchemendy, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7953-0998-4
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2002-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE SAILOR’S BARGAIN

I am whimpering in my sleep again. Across the abyss between our beds, I hear my friend Mary Fairfax calling my name.

“Electra. Electra! Wake up.”

But I can’t seem to separate her voice from the cobweb fabric of the dream. Neither can I separate the roar of the wind from the roar of my own blood, or tell which is real and which imagined.

“Wake up!”

Fairfax crosses the dark room, grabs my shoulders. In my dream, I kneel on the rain-swept deck of a wooden ship, a ship with many sails, huge and dark. Waves crash over the bow, and the masts groan as if they are about to splinter. In my dream, the wind shakes me until my teeth clack. It tears at me, and it laughs, and it says, A bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.

Then I realize that the bow of the ship is really the chapel of the orphanage in San Francisco where I grew up. I am taking part in the celebration of some skewed Mass. A canticle response rises to my lips. It is part of no prayer I have ever heard. I do not know where it came from. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind.

At once, the chaos of the dream falls away, a black mirror shattered by words, and I am sitting up, staring into Fairfax’s face. Dim light from a street lamp seeps through the window. In it I can see the disheveled spikes of her hair, like a fiery halo, which I have envied since we were children, and the wrinkled impression her pillow has left across one of her cheeks. The orphanage and the chapel and the ship have disappeared. It has happened just the same way almost every night for two months.

“Shit,” says Fairfax. “I can’t take anymore of this. Either get some help, or I’m moving out.”

I press the sheets against my forehead to soak away the dream sweat. I look around the room. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m not seeing the adobe walls of the dormitory at Our Lady of the Harbor. It’s been almost two years since Fairfax and I left the Catholic orphanage. Now we live on the campus at Las Piedras University, in a “temporary dorm”—really just a trailer with several sleeping cubicles and a big bathroom.

Outside I hear the night wind rushing from the land to the sea, prowling around beaverboard corners, scrabbling at the cheap window frames. This little box of a shelter feels like paper compared to Our Lady of the Harbor, with its thick walls, oak beams, and heavy, nail-studded doors.

“I don’t want any help,” I say. “I’ve made up my mind this dream is never coming back again.”

But Fairfax knows me too well.

She sighs and switches on my chipped bedside lamp. In its comforting yellow glow, our room is a perfect illustration of the differences between us. My side

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