like they’re filled with beans or lots of tiny balloons.
Finally she gets up and walks to the dresser where Louis sits, looking on. She hopes her movement will gently wake Mumma, and even if it doesn’t she’ll feel better once she can tell Louis that Mumma is back now. He’ll be relieved, and maybe even surprised, because he said Mumma was never coming back.
But when she picks up Louis she notices he looks really weird. Not happy at all at the sight of Mumma.
“What’s wrong, Louis?” she asks crossly, because how dare he not smile and laugh and say how amazing it is. She remembers how she felt when Coco came—excited at first, but quickly disappointed because Coco was so boring and she got all of Mumma’s cuddles and attention. “It’s not like that, Louis,” she tries to reassure him, but quickly she notices his face—he looks stunned.
“What’s the matter?” she whispers, but he won’t look at her. In fact, he’s squirming in her hand like she does when she needs the toilet. She follows his gaze to Mumma, but when she turns around Mumma is no longer on the floor but on her feet.
She is standing there, both hands by her sides, her feet in a puddle of water. The water is coming from her dress, which is soaking wet. She sees the drips dotting the puddle. It’s not Mumma but the Sad Lady, and as she lifts her head a little the moonlight reaches the features of her face and Gaia opens her mouth to scream because she looks like a monster and her eyes are missing and in their place are two endless holes that reach to the bottom of every grave right down to the bottom of the earth.
15
the bottom of the earth
NOW
I felt anxious after the conversation with Maren about Tom. She’d hinted that Tom’s return to the very site where Aurelia killed herself less than a year earlier was indicative of some sinister character flaw. My relationship history had proven that I was rather wanting in the Character Judgment department, but I’d discerned that Tom was a Still Waters kind of guy. That is to say, most of the time he was an affable, tea-drinking middle-class architect, but occasionally he’d have a meltdown over the slightest thing—an offhand remark, a piece of wood cut a centimeter too thick, a missing pencil—and hurl a torrent of abuse at everyone in sight until the error was corrected. His face would turn red, veins would bulge in his neck, and sometimes he’d punch the doors in frustration.
Even Gaia seemed a little nervous around him. She seemed more nervous in general, now that I think about it, and her drawings got more Gothic. The same horrific figure with big black holes for eyes, drawn over and over.
But now that Derry was back, I felt safe. She was super buff. Her arms looked like stockings filled with melons and she had the thighs of a racehorse. She rose at five each morning to clamber down the ladder that ran down the cliff to run ten miles along the fjord. While I was shuffling like Igor after Coco around the playroom at dawn, yawning into my fist and counting the seconds until I could grab a coffee, Derry was bounding back into the house, sweaty as a farm horse and lithe as a pipe cleaner, the sound of the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” pumping out of the earbuds around her neck as she stretched out her piriformis. Even last thing at night she was still radiant with inexplicable jubilation, her smile so broad that you could see both rows of teeth all the way back to her shining white molars.
At first, I kind of hated Derry and all her bead-wearing, namaste-ing, “life is a journey” balderdash. But her particular brand of guru-level Inner Peace was magnetic, and soon I found myself practicing her smile in the mirror. It hurt my face. I suspected I might pull a muscle in my neck. Even when I decided that Derry must be on crack—because nobody is that happy just because it’s another day—her indefatigable elation crept into my attitude, and I started finding myself attempting to think happy thoughts. I even printed out and laminated some quotes about positivity for the playroom.
“What are these?” Gaia asked when I Blu-Tacked them to the whiteboard.
“‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony,’” I read aloud.