Hugh walks the long linoleum hall in the nightlight-yellow glow. Some doors are open. Old people sitting on beds, relatives visiting. Only occasional sobs. At Mimi’s door, he pauses, gathering courage. Relinquishing Ivy’s warmth, preparing to bear his mother’s deathly cold.
He pushes open the door and sees Della, standing by the window like a ghost.
“She’s out. The morphine’s working,” she says. “I came to spell Ruth off. Come talk for a minute?”
He’s downcast. Anticlimactic—sacrifice not required. He goes into the dusk-draped room and stands by the window, close enough for Della to whisper.
But then she doesn’t. “What’s up,” he finally has to ask.
Another minute. “I saw Ken. I saw where he is, out at Sturgeon.”
“I know.”
“No, he’s been there all this time.”
Hugh takes a deeper breath. “I know.”
Della looks at him. “What do you know?”
“I know he went there instead of to the Elora Gorge thing. He told me he was going out to Bobcaygeon, he asked me not to tell you about it.” In the grey night-window light Della’s eyes are painfully large, painfully dark, great shadows around them. Hugh feels worse about this than he even imagined he would. “He said he needed a few days to think things through—I saw him coming out of Conrad’s office, that’s the only reason he told me.”
“Told you—what?” Her unnatural stillness makes him think she might fall over, faint.
“Breathe,” he says.
She obeys, but only barely.
“He told me he was having trouble deciding what to do, that’s all. That he couldn’t go on, he had to make a change, and wasn’t sure how you would take it.”
Della sits on the window ledge, as if her legs won’t hold her.
Hugh touches her shoulder, her arm. “Della, don’t—it’s not the end of the world, it’s just—Listen, he was afraid to tell you. He knows it will mean a huge change in your life, he needed a few days to find his courage. I couldn’t say no.”
She looks away, almost laughs. “You could have.”
He’s surprised she’s taking this so hard. She never wanted Ken to be a lawyer, after all. Wouldn’t she’d rather he teach, or whatever he’s intending to do, consult?
“I know you want his happiness—when he talked to me, I thought it might even be a case of his life.”
She shifts on the ledge. She looks as old as she is. As old as he is too.
“When someone wants so badly not to be—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Dell. I should have told you anyway.”
“You promised,” she says, looking down into the hands abandoned in her lap. “He might have changed his mind, or something. Better if we
didn’t, if I didn’t know. It won’t make much difference for Elly, she’s leaving anyway.”
“I’m sure he’s figured out the finances, how you can manage.”
“Hugh,” she says. Her face is flat white. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
He’s beginning to lose patience with her, always crying poor. Everybody’s poor. “Look, if it’s going to mean hardship, I’ll help—we can do more classes, raise the fees.”
He stops. Della is shaking her head, tears falling into her loose-cupped hands. He sits, he puts his arm around her.
She takes a couple of hard breaths, then stands. “Thanks. Ken won’t talk, can’t talk. I’ll—I’ve got to go and think about what to do.” She turns and is out the door, made mobile by some awful collision of time and emotion.
Emotion everywhere, exhausting. Ken looked terrible.
Hugh goes to Mimi’s bed, to the chair that waits there, his predestined seat. Try not to move from it for an hour. Just in case she comes to life again, out of the sleep that is close, but not close enough, to death.
Sheridan’s implement: Sheridan Tooley sent away in the mail for some kind of masturbation aid that arrived yesterday, and he talked about it all through Spring Awakening in class. Excellent, apparently. Alone at home, Orion contemplates masturbation, but it’s so lonely, so stupid. Like sucking your thumb. Plus he has heard, not that he believes it, that it desensitizes a person. Instead of porn, he shifts the screen to eavesdrop on people he knows, to Facebook and Twitter, finding nothing. Instagram, Tumblr. There’s Jason’s vidblog from the beginning of term. Half-naked, fake-funny, his soul exposed in the worst way. Wandering around some bedroom, looks like L’s. How can you ever help the people around you to not be asswipes?
VidBlog, Jason the Egonaut
“I’m the first person in my class to get their own project. It’s down. Working with down. I’m down with that.” [Strikes black-culture pose, unsuccessfully.] “So, I’m looking at a slim-line take on the ski jacket. It saves on down, it’s wearable in all kinds of climes. Also I know some chunkier girls.”
[A pop can hits him in the head, L’s arm in frame for an instant; the camera turns on Savaya and Nevaeh: they are twined together on L’s trundle bed. While Jason talks, offcamera, they mouth extremely rude things.]
“I’ve taken the plunge and gone for purple. I figure black is great but … But there’s room in this world for purple. It’s pretty ugly actually. It was all they had left that would keep the down in. I’ve got a line on that bathing suit stuff, neoprene.”
Boring, boring boring. Every person, every thing, every molecule in this world is boring.
Unless part of, attached to, cellularly integral with the loved one.
Orion leaps up the stairs and silent, silent, so as not to wake his zonked-out mother who never does awaken, out the door and onto his bike.