Part 4
In the morning Linda brought the cup.
She always did it the same way. She poured two fingers of warm water into the cup, took the dark bottle from the pocket of her housecoat, shook it, and counted out the drops, moving her lips. She handed over the cup and stood beside her until Jules drank.
Jules took the cup in both hands. She looked at the water and thought: now I’ll raise my eyes and ask straight out. What is this? Show me the bottle. Let me read the label.
She didn’t ask. In that second she understood something very simple, and the thought was cold and clear as spring water. If she asked, she would never find out anything again. The bottle would disappear. Another would appear with something else in it, and they would go on giving it to her, just more carefully.
“Drink. It’s getting cold.”
Jules lifted the cup to her lips and took a mouthful, and didn’t swallow. She held it in her cheek, set the cup down, reached for the dish towel that always lay across her lap, dabbed her lips, and spat into the towel.
It was simple. It was so simple that she started to shake.
“Why are you shaking?”
“I’m cold. The window was open all night.”
Her mother-in-law took the cup and left.
That was how her second life began: a life in which three times a day she took a mouthful of bitter water and didn’t swallow it. She rinsed the towel herself in the basin. Then she came up with something better. On the windowsill by her pillow stood a geranium in a condensed-milk can, a sickly thing with dry lower leaves. She started spitting into that.
On the ninth day the geranium died. It simply fell over, all at once, as if it had been yanked out, and the stem went dark and wet at the soil line. Jules looked at it for a good while that morning, then rolled out to the yard, emptied the can under the fence, and put it back on the sill, empty.
“What happened to your geranium?” Linda asked that evening.
“Dried up. I kept forgetting to water it.”
“That’s you all over. Anything you touch, you let rot.”
The first days without the drops were terrible, just not in the way she’d expected. She had expected to feel better. She felt worse.
On the second night the shaking started. It came from inside, not from the cold, fine and steady, like an engine idling. The sheet under her back was soaked. She lay listening to her heart, which beat unevenly, skipping, and after every skip nausea came up in her throat. On the third day her ears started ringing, and the ringing didn’t stop till evening. Something kept twitching at the edge of her vision, as if someone were drawing a black thread past her face. She wanted to cry for no reason, and she wanted to scream, and she clenched her teeth and pretended to read.
On the fourth night she didn’t sleep at all. Toward morning it began to seem that her grandmother was standing in the corner of the room, silent. Jules knew it wasn’t her grandmother, that it came from not sleeping, but she spoke to her anyway.
“Wait, Grandma. I’m not done yet.”
“What are you mumbling about?” her mother-in-law asked in the morning.
“Praying.”
“You pray?”
“Grandma taught me.”
Linda looked at her closely, too closely.
“You look bad. I’ll give you an extra drop.”
“All right.”
She did, and that morning Jules spat out more than usual, and the smell alone made her sick all day.
The worst of it was that she couldn’t talk to anyone. Ayana came every other day with bread and the mail, and a hundred times Jules opened her mouth to say, Ayana, listen, I think they’re poisoning me. A hundred times she closed it again, because how could she say that? Say it out loud and you’d hear for yourself how it sounded. A young woman who hadn’t walked in three years, whom the doctors couldn’t explain, suddenly announces that her mother-in-law is feeding her poison because a woman who lives past the ford said so. The town already whispered that Jules Pruitt had gone soft in the head from lying around. She knew it. At the Fourth of July picnic last summer her mother-in-law had complained in front of everyone that her daughter-in-law had turned mean and, as she put it, not right, and the women had nodded and sighed. Say it, and it would reach Linda that same day.
On the seventh day the ringing in her ears stopped.
On the eighth, Jules woke before sunrise and lay there trying to understand what had changed. The house was quiet. The neighbors’ rooster was crowing outside. The air smelled of hay and woodsmoke. And she realized her head didn’t hurt. The cottony, rustling fog she had lived in for so long was gone. The world stood level and had sharp edges. She could see every crack between the boards of the ceiling. She remembered she needed to ask Sam about his school planner, and the thought didn’t drift away; it stayed and waited for her to pick it up.
Jules lay in the dark and cried silently into her pillow so no one would hear. It was proof, not the kind she could show anyone, but it settled the matter for her.
Her legs didn’t come back right away, and not all at once.
First came pain. It was the eleventh or twelfth day. In the night a burning in her feet woke her, like a foot gone to sleep but a hundred times worse, and it didn’t pass; it spread upward to her ankles and calves. She lay biting the corner of the blanket, howling into it and laughing at the same time, because for so long she hadn’t felt anything with those feet. By morning the pain eased and left a tingling behind, small and alive, like ants crawling under her skin.
On the fourteenth day she moved the big toe of her right foot. She lay there watching it. It moved slowly, reluctantly, but it moved. She tried the left. The left wouldn’t obey. She kept at it all day, until she was drenched with sweat from the effort, and by evening the left one twitched too.
After that it went faster. She learned to bend her knee, then to draw her leg up toward her, the same movement she had made in May of last year and called a miracle.
Then one night, when the whole house was asleep, she lowered her legs off the bed, braced her palms on the mattress, counted to three, and stood up. The floor under her feet was cold and rough and very, very real. She swayed so hard she had to grab the windowsill. Her legs held her, barely. They were like borrowed stilts, like umbrella sticks, and her knees wobbled wildly. She stood for half a minute, sat back down on the bed, and stayed there with her hand pressed over her mouth, the way she had in the yard.
She had stood up on her own, in her own house, at night, in secret.
In the morning they moved her into the chair, and she let them, going limp as always.
From that day on she began to act. That turned out to be the hardest part, harder than the pain, harder than the sleeplessness. By day she sat and let herself be pushed, lifted, tucked in. She dropped her spoon and waited for someone to pick it up. She watched Linda walk past and felt everything inside her pulled tight as a wire, and she knew that if she said one word, the wire would snap. At night she got up and walked three steps along the bed, holding the wall, then five, then to the door and back.
After a week she understood she couldn’t do this alone.
On Thursday she wrote a note. She had no paper, so she tore the last page out of Sam’s math notebook and wrote briefly: Pru, you were right. Tell no one. Come at night to the window by the apple tree. J.
“Sam, you know the place past the ford where Pru Tate lives? With the mean dog?”
“Yeah.”
“Ride your bike out there and give her this. Don’t let Grandma see. Don’t let anybody see you on the way.”
Sam took the note and gave his mother a long look that wasn’t a child’s look.
“Is this because of what she said in the yard?”
Jules was quiet for a moment.
“Yes.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” Sam said. “I don’t tell anybody anyway.”
Then he flushed red and blurted out something he had obviously been holding in for a while.
“I heard Grandma on the phone with Uncle Rob. She said you won’t last long. By fall, she said. I was behind the woodpile.”
The room went gray at the edges. “What Uncle Rob?” “The one who came in the white car. He was looking at the land. He walked out past the garden and took video on his phone…”
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