Children of Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

not sane. Lee Verger loved her above all women.
    Rosalind in the looking glass smiled, a tiny curve of the lip on one side. I am Rosalind who can strike you lame with reasons and be mad without any.
    Lee Verger smiled back into her mirror. A circus taste bubbled up in her mouth. She thought of a voice but never heard it, only imagined what the voice might say. She closed her eyes and made a fist and rested her forehead on it.
    When Lionel came out of the bathroom she straightened up. He had dressed after his shower in white duck trousers and a Filipino wedding shirt; he glowed. He stood beside her again, just where he had stood before, combing his sparse red-blond hair, humming “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
    “How are you?” he asked after a minute.
    “I’m all right,” she said, smiling for him. “Mostly tired, I guess. Those period clothes, poof …” She shook her head. “It makes you feel for those women back then. The stays. The pins.”
    “Have you stopped taking your medication?”
    “Oh, honey,” she said, “please don’t.”
    “I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Truly I’m sorry to press you. But I must know.”
    “Did you count them?”
    He hesitated. “I had a quick look.”
    Aware of his displeasure and his eyes on her, she bent her head in shame. Presently, he reached out a hand and began to massage the back of her neck. She could not relax. His touch, the strong fingers kneading the base of her skull, seemed perfunctory and unloving, a fidget.
    “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.
    “No. Look,” he said softly, “you were acting guilty.” He pursed his lips, embarrassed. “If you feel guilty it can mean something’s wrong.”
    “You don’t know what it’s like to try and work behind the fucking things. Your eyes hurt, you can’t use them. Your head weighs a ton.”
    Lionel took his hand away. “Really, I wish we’d had this out earlier.”
    “Lionel,” Lu Anne said, “I want to try something. I’m finding the drug very hard to work behind and I want to try cutting it for a while.”
    She looked up at him but his gaze was fixed on some place behind her. He was avoiding her pleas, her sickness. He wanted it simple, done with pills. She supposed she could hardly blame him.
    “When did you stop?”
    “A week ago,” she said. “More than a week.”
    “And you feel all right?”
    “Yes.”
    “You haven’t been hallucinating?”
    “Oh, Lionel,” she said. She affected a dismissive shudder and a condescending smile.
    “Don’t bullshit me,” he said fiercely.
    “I’m not. I’ve been fine.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “If you stop taking your medication,” Lionel told her, “I can’t go.”
    Lu Anne took a deep breath, looked in the mirror and covered her eyes.
    “Are you hallucinating now?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Look at me!”
    She was staring at the tiled floor. Suddenly she raised her head and looked him in the eye.
    “What do you expect to see?” she asked him coldly. “Do you expect to see it?”
    Lionel removed his glasses and wiped them on a Sightsaver. He rubbed his eyes.
    “As though,” she said, “it soiled my eyes. And I should avert them from the doctor’s godlike gaze.”
    “I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Sometimes I get so frightened I can’t function.”
    She watched him turn away confounded and her heart filled with pity for him and with love.
    “It’s my enemy,” he said, and she thought she heard a throttled sob in his voice. He was looking at her. He was dry-eyed. “It frightens me. I hate it.”
    She walked up to him and took his right hand and kissed the knuckle of his forefinger, which was callused where he chewed it in his terrors and rages. They were endured, she thought, for her.
    “You are my hero beyond fear,” she told him. “My knight.”
    “I’ve finally come to think of it as evil,” Lionel said. “That’s a term I’ve always resisted.”
    “As unscientific,” Lu