Windfalls: A Novel Read Free Page B

corner. She plugged it in and waited as it clattered to life. Holding out her palms, she stood unthinking, staring at the red, glowing rods, soaking up the elementary comfort of heat and light until the color stung her eyes and her palms began to itch and tingle. Then she went back to the mattress, took the sheaf of papers the nurse had given her from her backpack.
    Literature, she thought, as she spread the pages across the bed, hearing the nurse’s word and remembering the English classes she’d taken as an undergraduate. You’re not the first one, the nurse had said, though of all the novels that Anna had ever read, she could not think of one about a woman in a rented attic room at midnight, half nauseous and alone, studying the mimeographed pages spread before her like the tarot cards that would reveal her future.
    Below her the party continued to surge while she read and reread every word the nurse had given her, looking for the choices she’d been promised, seeking the hidden meanings she’d learned to search for in her English classes, trying to identify the decision that would return her life to the way it had been. She read until she’d memorized the words, read until her vision was thick and her head throbbed with unshed tears. But as hard as she tried, in the end she could find no choices, no safe havens, no way out.

    C ERISE UNLOCKED THE FRONT DOOR AND PUSHED AGAINST IT WITH her armload of schoolbooks. A sigh escaped her as she stepped inside, and it was as though the house also gave a sigh, exhaling the breath it had held all day in her absence. Inside it was still and utterly quiet, exactly as she and her mother had left it that morning, and yet as always, it seemed to hold a little edge of strangeness, as though she were returning to an alternative world, like in some old Twilight Zone rerun. There was her mother Rita’s pastel sofa, her cream-colored carpet, her glass-and-chrome coffee table still strewn with the little debris of Cerise’s breakfast. There were the new drapes Rita was buying on time, and the original oil painting she’d picked up last week at the furniture store closeout. It was all as Cerise remembered it, and yet everything seemed slightly different, too. Or maybe, Cerise thought resignedly, it was she who was different, she who did not quite belong, not even in her own home, not even alone.
    Standing in the living room, she inhaled deeply, partly out of relief at having made it through another day at school, and partly so that she could fill her nose with the smell of the place that was her home. Just for a moment she was able to examine the scent she could never detect once she’d been there for a while—that particular mix of perfumes and disinfectants, and below that, the slight sourness she always associated with her mother, a smell of unwashed nylons or unacknowledged disappointment.
    It was a smell that interested and unnerved Cerise, a whiff of foreignness at the core of who she was. It reminded her of how she felt each spring when she opened the envelope that contained her school photographs and drew out the sheets of little, identical Cerises. She knew that the girls on the glossy paper were supposed to be a more accurate reflection of herself than the glimpses she caught in windows and mirrors, but even so, she couldn’t help feeling that they were only a distant cousin of the person she really was.
    Despite the silence of the house, it was a comfort to be home again. Passing through the living room and down the mute hallway, Cerise could feel her face slacken as the expressions she had struggled all day to cover it with slid off. Her shoulders sagged, her spine collapsed, even her pelvis relaxed. But a moment later, climbing the stairs to her room, she felt the same little ache she experienced each afternoon as the quiet closed in around her once again.
    Only it was worse today.
    She allowed herself one quick thought of Sam, as though the memory of what he had just