Cat's eye полностью

“I’m fine now,” I say. The last thing I want to do is talking. I know what he means by someone: a shrink. Someone who will tell me I’m nuts. I know what kind of people hear voices: people who drink too much, who fry their brains with drugs, who slip off the rails. I feel entirely steady, I’m not even anxious any more. I’ve already decided what I will do, afterward, tomorrow. I’ll wear my arm in a sling and say I broke my wrist. So I don’t have to tell him, or Jon, or anyone else, about the voice. I know it wasn’t really there. Also I know I heard it.

It wasn’t a frightening voice, in itself. Not menacing but excited, as if proposing an escapade, a prank, a treat. Something treasured, and secret. The voice of a nine-year-old child.

Chapter 66

T he snow has melted, leaving a dirty filigree, the wind is blowing around the grit left over from winter, the crocuses are pushing up through the mud of the desolate smashed-down lawns. If I stay here I will die. It’s the city I need to leave as much as Jon, I think. It’s the city that’s killing me. It will kill me suddenly. I’ll be walking along the street, thinking of nothing in particular, and all at once I will turn sideways and dive off the curb, to be smashed by a speeding car. I will topple in front of a subway train without warning, I’ll plunge from a bridge without intention. All I will hear will be that small voice, inviting and conspiratorial, gleeful, urging me over. I know I’m capable of such a thing. (Worse: although I’m afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it. It’s like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it’s there. It’s a fallback, it’s a vice, it’s an exit. It’s a weapon.)

At night I sit beside Sarah’s crib, watching the flutter of her eyelids as she dreams, listening to her breathe. She will be left alone. Or not alone, because she will have Jon. Motherless. This is unthinkable. I turn on the lights in the living room. I know I must start packing, but I don’t know what to take. Clothes, toys for Sarah, her furry rabbit. It seems too difficult, so I go to bed. Jon is already in there, turned toward the wall. We have gone through a pretence of truce and reformation, straight into deadlock. I don’t wake him up.

In the morning, after he leaves, I bundle Sarah into the stroller and take some of my grant money out of the bank. I don’t know where to go. All I can think of is away. I buy us tickets to Vancouver, which has the advantage of being warm, or so I suppose. I stuff our things into duffel bags, which I’ve bought at Army Surplus.

I want Jon to come back and stop me, because now that I’m in motion I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. But he doesn’t come.

I leave a note, I make a sandwich: peanut butter. I cut it in two and give half to Sarah, and a glass of milk. I call a taxi. We sit at the kitchen table with our coats on, eating our sandwiches and drinking our milk, and waiting.

This is when Jon comes back. I keep eating.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he says.

“Vancouver,” I say.

He sits down at the table, stares at me. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for weeks, although he’s been sleeping a lot, oversleeping. “I can’t stop you,” he says. It’s a statement of fact, not a maneuver: he will let us go without a fight. He too is exhausted.

“I think that’s the taxi,” I say. “I’ll write.”

I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. We don’t have a sleeper, because I need to save the money. I sit up all night, Sarah sprawled and snuffling in my lap. She’s done some crying, but she’s too young to realize what I’ve done, what we’re doing. The other passengers extend themselves into the aisles; baggage expands, smoke drifts in the stale air, food wrappings clog the washrooms. There’s a card game going on up at the front of the car, with beer.

The train runs northwest, through hundreds of miles of scraggy forests and granite outcrops, hundreds of small blue anonymous lakes edged with swamp and bulrushes and dead spruce, old snow in the shadows. I peer out through the glass of the train window, which is streaked with ram and dust, and there is the landscape of my early childhood, smudged and scentless and untouchable and moving backward. At long intervals the train crosses a road, gravel or thin and paved, with a white line down the middle. This looks like emptiness and silence, but to me it is not empty, not silent. Instead it’s filled with echoes. Home, I think. But it’s nowhere I can go back to.

It’s worse than I thought it would be, and also better.