Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,87
out the toilet and wiped every surface.
Still, as she sat in the tub full of water as hot as she could stand it, she imagined that every surface teemed with germs and filth. Bacteria were oddly harmless-looking things in the textbook photos—little tubes like so many Mike and Ike candies—but Lucy knew they could poison you. Who knew what bacteria were waiting to burrow down your neckline or into your eyes and ears, to tunnel through your pores into your organs, your brain?
Only in the water did she feel safe, despite the heat making sweat trickle down the back of her neck. She washed with a rough rag and the lye soap Leo used to remove motor oil from his hands, scrubbing until her skin stung and turned the red of an overripe tomato. It took a long time for her to feel clean enough, and then she stayed as still as she could in the water, trying to feel nothing at all. At one point Mrs. Sloat knocked on the door, but after Lucy ignored her long enough she finally went away.
Lucy drowsed, the bathwater lapping gently over her stomach, her breasts. Her arms floated, her hair swirled around her face. She sank lower, her ears under the surface; only her nose, lips and eyes remained exposed, and she listened to the groaning of the house, magnified by the water. Only when every bit of heat had left the water, and her knees, bobbing above the surface like pale islands, were pocked with gooseflesh, did Lucy finally get out of the tub.
She put on clean clothes and used her damp towel to pick up the dirty clothes, and took them to the laundry. Sharon and Ruby had arrived and the aroma of fried onions filled the air, but Lucy avoided the kitchen, slipped out the front door, fetched the cleaning cart and got to work.
Lucy welcomed the ache in her muscles from washing Garvey’s walls the other day. By the time she finished the last room, she was out of breath, sweat dampening her dress and dripping in her eyes. She hadn’t bothered with gloves, and her hands were raw and itching. Her scars throbbed, her whole face pulsing with the rhythm of her shame. But at least she had managed to keep her thoughts at bay.
It reminded her of something Sister Jeanne had told her when her pain was at its worst, when she’d stopped screaming only because she lost her voice. Jeanne told her she had known a wounded soldier who described his pain as a burning sheet of foil, a thousand degrees, curling from the heat. When the pain was greatest, the foil glowed as though the sun was shining down directly on it. When the pain lessened the surface seemed to dull, like tin or tarnished silver. Jeanne said this was as good a way to think about it as any, and that Lucy should practice envisioning her pain this way, folding this sheet of foil into a tiny square using only her mind. That she should fold it over, and over again, and over and over until she made it small enough to bear.
Lucy dragged the bucket to the backyard one final time, drenching the parched soil around the roses before she went to the fence at the edge of the forest and sank to her knees, exhausted from the afternoon’s cleaning. Weeds and bits of dead grass poked her knees. She didn’t care. The pain was everywhere. It was in the pads of her fingers and the rough ends of her hair, the dry skin of her knees and heels and the soft flesh of her stomach. It was inside—where her organs were, the muscles and veins and fat.
She shifted from her knees to her haunches. The buzzing of insects had swelled as the sun grew high in the sky. The sounds of the meal—conversations in the dining room, kitchen sounds, cars pulling into and out of the parking lot on the other side of the building—seemed safely distant. No one would search for her here. No one would search for her at all. She was neither expected nor wanted until morning, and if she didn’t return at all until then, she doubted anyone would care.
After a while, Lucy allowed her eyes to flutter closed. She dozed, in between waking and sleep, listening to the night sounds. An insect buzzed near her ear. A rustling in the brush signaled some small animal startled