Chapter 15

 

Cara

 

 

"Hey! You! You lazy little bitch! Get your ass in here! Think you can lie there and sleep while I die all by myself? Get into this room, you piece of crap!"

Struggling out of bed, Cara could hear Ollie's voice, patient as ever. "Dr. Lindstrom, you are not by yourself. We can help you; what is it that you need?"

"Don't touch me, you stupid cow, get away from me. Cara, get in here this minute!"

"Cara is trying to sleep; she has classes to meet, lectures to give tomorrow," said Evvie, less patient than her sister, not bothering to conceal her irritation. "We are here to help you tonight –"

"Cara, you bag of shit, get yourself in here!"

Cara made herself take the time to put on her quilted robe; the house was just a little cool, Climate Control programmed down overnight when everyone was, theoretically, sleeping. She didn't bother to turn up the light. The windows hadn't been darkened; she liked to look at the patterns of frost flowers building on the glass, and the way the sun sparkled during the day when its light filtered through them. Even now, just past two in the morning, there was light from the larger moon and its small satellite, reflecting off the snow, and there was light from the streetlights beyond the hedges and the small driveway light.

And she knew her way in the dark; she had had plenty of practice, five long years of it.

"Useless little slut!" yelled Mother, and Cara ran barefoot to the back bedroom through the bathroom, which connected to her room and to Mother's.

Mother was floundering on the adjustable hospital bed, which had been raised a little at the head for the night. Her paralyzed legs and arm anchored her as she heaved with her good arm and shoulder, swinging at Ollie, who was trying to get an arm under her. Evvie was on the other side of the bed, where at least Mother couldn't punch her; she wrestled the safety rail down to get hold of Mother's bad arm.

"About time you showed up, you lazy little brat!" Mother greeted Cara, and Ollie, who had got hold of Mother's good arm, threw a glance over her shoulder.

"Go back to bed, Cara," she said. "She does not need you. We can handle her."

"You take your stupid cow hands off me!" shouted Mother, yanking herself away from Ollie; the momentum sent her rolling toward Evvie, who caught Mother with a grunt. Mother had never been as small a person as Cara was, and five years of invalidism had given her even more weight. Ollie reached to help, and Mother swung her good arm and got Ollie across the chest, throwing her back against the recliner. Stuffing leaked out of the chair arm where Mother had slashed it with the fork; that had been two years ago. How time flies, thought Cara wearily, when we're having fun.

Cara moved in quickly as Mother threw herself back against the pillow and swung her good arm toward Evvie, hand fisted. Evvie, experienced, dodged. Cara got hold of Mother's arm, and Mother turned her head to glare, flat cold black eyes.

"Do you want to sit up, Mother?" asked Cara.

"Numskull," said Mother. "Yes, I want to sit up, what do you think? I'm just going to lie here and die? You'd like that, wouldn't you, you little shit."

"You're not going to die," said Cara, as evenly as she could. "And you could let Ollie and Evvie help you, you know."

"I don't want fucking Ollie and Evvie to help me; I want you, you useless little princess, snoozing there in your bed on your goddamned satin pillows while I lie here in agony!"

"No satin pillows, Mother," said Cara, feeling tired. "Just regular near-cotton. And you're not in agony; the doctor says –"

"Goddamned useless fucking quack!" yelled Mother, and Evvie, on the other side of the bed, shook her head at Cara as one saying, forget it, it's hopeless. Cara gave brief thought to walking out of the room and allowing the two Bahtans to handle Mother. Evvie was right. Cara had to work tomorrow, or rather later this morning; she had an early class, the undergrad Zamuaon Lit class, and after that the Earthian folklore group. But she wasn't going to get any sleep until Mother was settled, one way or another; Mother would make enough noise to see to that.

"If you can lift her from this side," Cara said to Ollie, "I can get the other side. All right, Mother? We'll get you up, okay?"

"Idiot!" snarled Mother.

Cara moved around to the other side of the bed and Evvie stepped back out of the way, standing where she could reach out if she was needed. Over her shoulder Cara could see the gouge in the wall where Mother had thrown the piece of the broken drinking glass so hard it had actually stuck, point down in the plaster. Fortunately Tillie had ducked in time. Cara had just paid the hospital after Sika had the wound in her leg sealed, where Mother got her with the scissors; who would imagine that blunt-nosed scissors could do so much damage?

After the broken glass, they had switched to plastic dishes and Mother was still screaming about that, but there was nothing unusual in her screaming. She probably had gotten worse the last couple of years, but even at the beginning, five years ago, she had been difficult. Cara had learned not to answer the insults and complaints; they invariably accelerated into fits of screaming rage. Mother had always been prone to cursing – an educated woman, she could curse in all five Alliance languages, including D'ubian, a language few people knew. Why Mother had bothered to learn any of it was a puzzle; she didn't like D'ubians and didn't care to work with them. And she had always been prone to throwing things – if the things were sharp and dangerous, so much the better. The walls were scarred, a domestic battlefield.

Cara got a grip on Mother's paralyzed arm and slid her own arm under the fleshy shoulder on that side, and on the other side of the bed Ollie moved in; she would take most of the weight. She was, she always said, stronger, and this was what Mother's insurance paid her to do. In fact, Ollie and Evvie would spare Cara as much as they could, as much of the brute work, as much of Mother's temper, as was possible. Of all the aides who had circulated through the house in these last five years, Ollie and Evvie had become the closest to Cara; they were friends, they were almost her sisters.

She only wished she could, in turn, spare them a little of Mother's unpleasantness.

Mother was quieter now that she had got Cara up and involved; she lay back against the pillow with her good arm on the side of the bed, her hand gripping the mattress under cover of the sheet. What she was going to do now, Cara thought, familiar with the signs, was use her considerable weight and her remaining muscles to resist their attempts to lift her up while she cursed at their inability to move her. Cara gritted her teeth and nodded at Ollie, and flung her own muscles into the job of lifting the paralyzed side as Ollie began to lift the good side.

There was a flash as something long and metallic caught the ceiling light; Ollie let out a scream and fell backwards, clutching at her shoulder, and Cara saw red blood coming out between her fingers, and then she felt the full weight of her mother's body pinning her arm to the bed and she looked up to see Mother's good arm coming at her, long shining knife blade pointed right at her throat.

She dropped to the side of the bed, yanking her arm free, and the knife sliced through the air just over her head, right where she had been an instant before; the momentum carried her mother over on her side and then off the edge of the bed, where the safety rail had been lowered; she crashed down on top of Cara with the scream of an outraged devil. Evvie, grabbing at the hand and the knife, was knocked away, banging into the side of the bed.

"Bitch! Bitch! Die, you little bitch!" screamed Mother, using her good arm, the hand still clutching the knife, to roll her heavy inert body sideways against the legs of the bed; Cara pulled back, struggling for purchase on the hard foamwood floor. Mother was swinging the knife again. Her eyes were cold flat black stone; her lips rolled back, showing worn yellow teeth.

Cara got an arm up, felt the white-hot blade slicing through the forearm, saw the bright red of the blood staining her quilted robe, and then Mother was sliding abruptly back on the floor as if someone had shoved her. And then Evvie had her, and Ollie, a spreading red stain on her shoulder, reached for Cara. Mother was screaming, the wild furious screams of a balked demon.

Ollie pushed, hard, and Cara slid across the floor to hit the wall, and Mother, levering herself against Evvie, yanked herself free and skidded her body after Cara, a sort of sliding pursuit, the knife still upraised; Cara scrambled to her feet, balanced against the wall, and Evvie grabbed Mother around the waist and Ollie fell upon her legs, holding them down. Mother swung her knife wildly at Evvie, who dodged, grappling for the hand and the knife.

"You think you got away, you filthy sack of shit!" screamed Mother, waving the knife away from Evvie, toward Cara. "You think you escaped! You'll never escape me! You'll never get away! I'll see you dead in your grave, you stupid little slut! You'll never get away from me! Never! Never!"

The knife flashed again in the light from the ceiling and suddenly there was blood, more blood, much blood, a fountain of blood, covering Mother and Evvie and Ollie, covering the floor and Cara's bare feet and the hem of the quilted robe. Mother let go of the knife; it slid out of her hand. The gush of blood became a red river; it flowed out of the great slash on her throat; her head was thrown back and she stared at the ceiling with fixed eyes that grew dull.

Ollie reached through the blood and felt Mother's throat above the great red slash, looking for a pulse; she reached for the limp wrist lying across Mother's chest and tried there.

She looked up at Cara, still leaning against the wall, and shook her head, and Cara stood where she was, the blood dripping from her forearm, blood covering her feet and the bottom of her robe, and listened to the sudden, unbelievable, amazing silence.

 

The ambulance took Cara and Ollie and Evvie along with what was left of Mother, lying on a stretcher covered to the chin with a blanket; the EMT's, they explained, had no authority to pronounce her dead. One of the emergency room doctors would do that.

Her face was grey and waxen and incredibly still. Someone had closed her eyes.

The EMT's did bandage Cara's arm and Ollie's shoulder and Evvie's hand; Mother had got her too, although none of them had noticed at the time. Once at the hospital, a doctor and an intern, who turned out to be acquainted with Evvie, sealed up the cuts. Ollie's shoulder had caught the point of Mother's knife, and the wound was fairly deep but luckily the knife had missed major blood vessels. Evvie was sliced across the palm, a shallow wound, and Cara's arm was at least cut cleanly, sealed neatly in a few minutes.

The doctor opened a bottle of pills and insisted that Cara take one; he poured a few more into a smaller container and put it in Cara's pocket. "One every four hours," he said, "for the rest of today and until the bottle's empty. They'll help you sleep; they'll help you get over this." He tried to get Ollie to take a pill too, and Ollie and Evvie both shook their heads; they were, they said, drug resistant. These things never worked on them.

"What is it supposed to do?" asked Cara, trying to shake off the fog she seemed to be wrapped in, trying to take in what was going on.

"The pills are for trauma," said the doctor. "They'll blunt your memory of what happened. They won't make you forget entirely, but they'll make it easier to live with what you do remember."

The police arrived, asked questions, recorded answers. Mother's doctor appeared, looked the situation over, and talked for a long time with the police and their recorders. Later Cara could not remember any more questions; whatever he said must have satisfied the authorities.

Ollie stayed with Cara while Evvie went out and got a taxi, and then the two Bahtan sisters herded Cara into it and input the address. It was going on seven in the morning by the time they got back to Cara's house. Evvie closed up the back bedroom doors, the one to the hall, the one to the connecting bathroom, and Cara took off the bloodstained robe and thrust it into the chute; she never wanted to see it again. She didn't have the energy to shower; she sponged the blood off her legs and her arms and then she called the university office, just opening, to say that she would not be in, death in the family; she did not give details. The secretary offered her sympathies. Later in the day the department head called, as did the university president, and the head of the Institute of Science, where Mother had worked and taught before she went to work for Project Azuri/zai. All offered condolences. Cara thanked them, feeling nothing, feeling numb.

Ollie and Evvie stayed with her all that day, and then took turns staying with her during the following week. Cara called Mother's few friends – Dr. Saizy p'Anotta, for one, and Dr. Ned Wood and Dr. Louise Wood, who were actually neighbors, separated from her house by a maze of hedges and trees. Louise took over the duty of notifying colleagues, and Ned talked with the Institute officials and offered advice about memorial services and funeral arrangements. It was due to his efforts, Cara later realized, that the manner of Mother's death was kept under wraps, so that it was generally assumed that it had been natural, resulting from her disabilities.

Cara struggled to keep up. Her original numbness was replaced with confusion and nausea, made worse by her inability to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time; she woke from dreams of blood and Mother screaming that she would never escape, never escape, never escape.

Ollie and Evvie and Dr. Louise found a cleaning service that descended upon the back bedroom with an alarming array of cleaning machines and strong soaps and bleaches, but the blood on the floor by the window, where Mother had lain with her head back and her dull eyes fixed on the ceiling, had soaked in and could not be removed. Cara would have to have the floor taken up and replaced, which seemed like a lot of work, more than she could think about now. Cara and Ollie and Evvie stacked the furniture and shut the doors.

Her own doctor, who reluctantly consented to fit Cara into her busy schedule before the funeral, said the nausea came from the trauma pills; Cara, it seemed, was part of the very small percentage of the population who were resistant to these drugs. Since they had done no good that Cara could see, she was glad to throw the bottle into the chute.