I’ve lied to my closest friends.
Yes. I let my mother die unattended.
I spied on my husband and read his private letters.
Yes. I cleaned bits of my father’s brain off the backyard flagstones.
My son won’t talk to me. He says I ruined his life.
Yes. I helped kill my friend.
How can you bear to look at me?
There are harder things to bear.
The sunlight changes. Slits of light crawl up the walls. It occurs to Stephanie to wonder if it’s still today, or if that was some time ago. Her pupils have long since started to seesaw, closing and dilating by turns, dimming and glaring the room. She can’t even summon up the will to stand and leave. When it can’t go on, that’s when this will end. Then they’ll never see each other again, except for always.
Her eyes burn. She blinks, numb, dumb, ravenous, wrecked, and badly in need of emptying her bladder. Something keeps her from breathing—this frail, scarred woman who won’t look away. Pinned in that look, she becomes something else, huge and fixed, swaying in the wind and pelted by rain. The whole urgent calculus of need—what she called her life—shrinks down to a pore on the underside of a leaf, way out on the tip of a wind-dipped branch, high up in the crown of a community too big for an