Page 34 of Saint Céline
“I didn’t sleep much.”
There was a small pause before she asked if something had happened.
My throat tightened because my mother had always been able to hear fear in my voice before I heard it myself. When I was little, she knew from the other side of a closed door whether I was crying silently or holding my breath. She knew the difference between quiet because I was safe and quiet because I was trying not to make him angry.
I sat down on the edge of the tub, wrapped in a towel with water dripping from my hair onto the tiles.
“No. Just school,” I say.
Mom responded with silence.
“I saw Mrs. Montgomery this morning,” she said at last. “She asked about you.”
My stomach twisted. “How is she?”
“Not well.” My mother exhaled softly. “She keeps going into Katherine’s room and moving things around. Then putting them back. Then asking me if I remember where something used to be.”
I closed my eyes.
Katherine’s room.
The pale curtains. The shelves of books. The floorboard near the bed that creaked if you stepped too close to the wall.
“What did you tell her?”
“That I remembered some things, but not everything.” My mother’s voice grew quieter. “She asked me if you’ve eaten.”
Of course she had. Mrs. Montgomery could not keep her daughter alive, so now she was worrying about whether I had breakfast. The cruelty of that almost broke something in me.
“I’ve eaten,” I lied.
“I’ll tell her.”
“Mom.”
“Yes?”
I swallowed. “Are you okay there?”
The question sounded ridiculous the second I asked it. My mother still worked inside the house where Katherine had grown up. She folded towels in rooms filled with photographs of a dead girl. She polished furniture under portraits of people who had never known what it was to run in the middle of the night.
But she only said, “I’m working.”
“Don’t let them lean on you too much,” I said.
A small laugh came through the phone. “Listen to you.”
“What?”
“Sounding like my mother.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know, sweetheart.” Her voice softened. “And you don’t let people lean on you too much either.”
I looked toward the fogged mirror, and for a moment all I could see was the blurred shape of myself.
“I won’t,” I said.
