It’s only pain, Rose told herself. You can’t die from pain.
The trip to the latrine was almost unbearable. She’d had to lean on Hazel all the way. Rose was determined not to scream. She’d given Hazel a bad enough day as it was.
She remembered there were a few Tylenol left. Hazel got them for her, and got her a drink of water to swallow them with. The pills wouldn’t take away the pain in her back, but they would make it feel less severe. She got back on the bed, and Hazel covered her up again.
“Get yourself something to eat, honey,” Rose told her.
“I’m not hungry,” Hazel said. A moment later, Rose heard her daughter open a box of crackers and twist the lid off the peanut butter jar. Crackers and peanut butter had been Hazel’s favourite snack ever since she was a toddler.
“You’re not being punished, Hazel,” Rose said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Well, you did something very wrong today, but you know what I mean. Living here isn’t a punishment.”
“It feels like a punishment.”
“You used to think it was an adventure.”
“It was. It used to be.”
“It still is,” Rose said. “Don’t you like going into the city at night, when everyone else is asleep? Don’t you enjoy going treasure hunting with me?”
“I want to get food from a grocery store,” Hazel said. “I want to watch television in the evening and sleep in my own room at night. I want to use my library card again. And I want to go back to school.”
“One day, honey,” Rose said.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“But when?”
“Don’t pester me.”
“We could go back to our house today,” Hazel said. “Daddy won’t be there. Someone would have cleaned him up.”
“Hazel!”
“I saw it in the newspapers. Someone found his body and took it away.”
“You’re not supposed to read newspapers! All that bad news gives you nightmares.”
“You can’t forbid me to read newspapers,” Hazel said. “I’m a citizen. My teacher said it’s everybody’s job to keep up on current events.”
Rose wanted silence. She wanted to keep her eyes closed, huddle under the blanket, and wait for the Tylenol to work. She wanted to have only herself to worry about. She wanted another life.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “We can’t go back.”
“But why can’t we?”
“Do you want me to be arrested?” Rose asked. “Because that’s what would happen. And you would end up in foster care. Do you want to live with strangers?”
“You said it was an accident.”
“It was. But people won’t believe me.”
Hazel didn’t say anything, and Rose started to drift off. The Tylenol was taking the sharp edge off the pain in her back. Maybe this time it wouldn’t last too long. After all, she could rest, here in this shack. She didn’t have to get up and look after her husband. She could rest and heal and be all right again.
She was almost asleep when Hazel spoke again.
“We could tell people that I did it.”
Rose opened her eyes. “What?”
“We could say I killed Daddy. They won’t put me in prison. I’m too young.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
Hazel shuffled over to the bed on her knees and leaned in close to her mother. Rose could smell the peanut butter on her daughter’s breath.
“I’ll say it was an accident,” Hazel said. “They’ll believe me. I’ll say I wanted to get him to stop hitting you, and I grabbed the knife to protect myself, and it went into Daddy by mistake.”
“Stop,” Rose said, even while she was thinking. She’d thrown the knife into the river. Was there anything, really, that could prove she killed her husband?
Hazel leaned in even closer. Her face was excited, like it used to be when she retold the plot of a movie she really liked.
“I was in the kitchen,” Hazel said. “I was putting my plate in the sink. You and Daddy came in. He was yelling and hitting you. I picked up the knife to get him to stop, and I accidentally killed him. Then I got scared and ran out of the house. You came after me to protect me.”
Rose was impressed by the detail in her daughter’s story.
“How long have you been thinking about this?” she asked.
“I just thought of it now,” Hazel said, taking another bite of cracker. “But maybe it’s been in my head for a while, waiting to come out. My teacher last year said our brains work like that sometimes. We’ll try and try to do something in math, and we can’t do it, and then one day it all makes sense.”
“You have a good brain,” Rose told her, “but your plan won’t work. I’ll still be in trouble for keeping you out of school, and for other things, too, I’m sure.”
“But you won’t be in prison,” Hazel said. “Please, Mom, can’t we go back?”
It’s so wrong, Rose thought, but she began, in spite of herself, to feel something like hope. Maybe there was a way out of this.
But no. It was wrong. “I can’t let you take the blame,” Rose said. “It would be a lie, and I can’t let you do it.”
Hazel slumped back to the floor. She sat again with her back to her mother.
“I’m going to grow old in this shack, aren’t I?” Hazel said. “I’m going to be thirty years old and still living here.”
Rose had no comforting words. She had no plans, no ideas, and no thought for anything except to get through another day.
Hazel kept quiet then, and Rose finally fell asleep.
She woke up in the middle of the night, freezing in spite of the blanket. She had to pee, but Hazel was asleep and Rose couldn’t make it to the latrine without her.
She was stuck with a full bladder, in the dark and the cold, with nothing to distract her from the slow passing of the minutes.
It was a long, long night.