A Winter's Rime by Carol Dunbar

Author:Carol Dunbar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

17

Mallory strode out of the hospital with militant strides, barreling past doctors and nurses and passing through the sliding glass doors to the outside. Tears smeared down her face from the wind and the cold and she jaywalked out to her junk heap parked at its expired meter alongside the waist-high rubble of snow. Snatching the ticket out from under the wiper blade, she got in to start the car. It would have to warm up. Her nose ran, her eyes watered, the ends of her fingertips throbbed. The car coughed and the belt whined. It turned with a decrepit squeal, no matter what brand of belt she tried—and she’d tried them all, every kind, switching them out. And still it squealed.

Anger rose in her like a burning star.

She got out of the car and kicked at the tire turds caught by the wheel wells. Blocks of blackened ice dropped into the street. It was a mistake, to talk about all that for the first time in front of a vulnerable youth, a person in crisis, and in a psych ward for chrissakes. What is wrong with you? She had just wanted the girl to feel understood, to feel that she wasn’t alone. It humiliated her that she got so emotional. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know why everything made her so angry. Sometimes it felt like she had always been angry, even before things with Jarrod went bad, like she’d been born this way. She’d never identified what, specifically, made her so mad. Anger so vast it obfuscated her. Anger occupying all the spaces in her skull until there was nothing left and no room to think. The only thing she could do was move her body to get it out.

She kicked and smashed until all the grimy ice blocks were obliterated. Another car went past, slushing up snow and ice. The cuffs of her work pants had soaked through, streaked with sand, and her hands were red and numb because she’d neglected to put on her gloves.

She was a little girl on a sidewalk with a chalk crayon, trying to make sense of things, and she didn’t have the tools or the knowledge or the training.

When she’d worked with Mrs. Champagne, her therapist from high school, the woman always kept her voice the same. Nothing surprised her. Mrs. Champagne wore plastic-framed glasses on a beaded chain and didn’t try to hide her age. When Mallory said she didn’t want anyone’s help, Mrs. Champagne took her glasses off and said, “Help isn’t what you need, dear. What you need is mercy, and that is given unearned.”

Mallory needed mercy because she had attacked another student in class. And she remembered Mrs. Champagne saying that, because she had never thought it was possible to receive anything unearned, let alone mercy. She’d been taught that to be deserving—of food, shelter, love—you had to earn it.

Maybe Shay believed the same thing. Maybe Shay didn’t want anyone’s help because she thought she didn’t deserve it.

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