IT WAS DOLORES’S time, the hour of death. Illness had invaded her, creeping into her lungs and coloring the air, closing her mouth like a mask; she was a mummy. She was Lazarus, brought back to life just to prove someone else’s point, just long enough to see her death coming.
They were releasing her from the hospital before the sun was even up. There was no sign of Melvina. The nurses had trundled Dolores into the wheelchair; they said she was well enough to eat, sleep, and move, all on her own. Behind her, back in the room, Lana was saying, “Hey, where you going with her? Hey, she’s sick,” and trying to flash some kind of SOS on the venetian blinds by her bed. Dolores heard the television playing early morning music in the background.
She knew she would be leaving her sister Peachy behind, the only one of them all she could spare a thought for. Dolores saw herself climbing to the top of their windblown field; it came to her through the walls and mirrors of the hospital as they wheeled her along. She could see it in the eyes of the nurses and orderlies: the broken trailer, the strewn bottles, her muddy feet. She would climb to the top of that field, no matter how they cried and clung to her skirts. She would stand where she could look at the trailer and at Euclid and lay it all down. So she could step out of that body of hers at last, the heavy flesh, the teeth, the hair, lay it aside and go free.