Orphan #8 by van Alkemade Kim
Author:van Alkemade, Kim
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-03T16:00:00+00:00
Chapter Twelve
AT FOUR O’CLOCK ROUNDS, WHEN I FOUND DR. SOLOMON in terrible pain, I enjoyed seeing her writhe and squirm. I resented the morphine for bringing her peace, then regretted there wasn’t enough in the syringe to snuff her out. The vengeful feelings terrified me. Who was I, what was I becoming? First that librarian, and now this. Already wobbly from spending the hot summer on my own, I’d been knocked off my axis by Mildred Solomon’s arrival. All day I’d been suppressing my anxiety over tomorrow’s appointment with Dr. Feldman. I kept telling myself to keep it together until I got out of work, that I could fall apart once I got her on the phone in Florida, knowing her words could put me back together.
I hurried home, desperate to get behind the closed door of our apartment, to hear her voice, to know I wasn’t alone. I let the phone ring and ring but still no answer. It was eight o’clock at night, where could she be? I began to panic, anxiety capitalizing on my old fears of being abandoned. It was as if she’d dropped off the end of the earth and left me behind, the same way Sam left me behind, again and again.
It seemed the refrain of my life: when had I last seen my brother? At least I had something to remember him by. I went into my room, grabbed the leather handle on the side of the steamer trunk at the foot of my bed, and tipped it up on end. Undoing the clasps, I opened it like a book on its spine. Behind the curtain where dresses once hung, I now stored folded quilts layered with mothballs. On the other side, each drawer that once held gloves or stockings was now dedicated to a different person’s correspondence. From Dr. and Mrs. Abrams there were letters of encouragement while I was in nursing school, annual holiday cards, his obituary clipped from the Denver Post. From Simon I’d saved the childish notes that matured over the years until, at last, his heartbroken mother had mailed me his military portrait along with the carvings I’d sent each year on his birthday, saying in her letter that he’d wanted me to have them. There was Mary’s drawer, which I preserved like a museum. In another, my collection of movie ticket stubs, torn reminders of nights out together over the years. Craving the memories, I sifted through the tickets, reading a few of the movie titles I’d scrawled on the back of the stubs—Adam’s Rib, Notorious, Jezebel, Stage Fright—but each flash of memory only made me lonelier. I shut that drawer.
Kneeling before the open trunk, I pulled out Sam’s drawer, spread its contents across the floor. I shuffled through the couple dozen postcards Sam had sent from out west, color-tinted pictures of canyons or mountains, a different postmark on every one. Counting them out, they averaged two a year. He’d never been much for writing. Then the last card, from that apple farm in Washington State.
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