Tomorrow's Sun (Lost Sanctuary) - By Becky Melby Page 0,12
floor at the house. They left it nice and clean.” She narrowed her eyes at her eight-legged roomie. “I slept great.” That, surprisingly, was true.
The questions continued through the cobra pose and the bridge. Her mother giggled. “You’re exercising, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Multitasking again.”
“The trip didn’t affect your energy level any.”
The trip sapped me, Dad. I’m stretching so I can walk to the bathroom. She’d lived with her parents since rehab ended, but she’d hidden her morning routine, along with her private pharmacy and her tears, behind closed doors. “Yup. Feeling great.” Another week under their roof would have driven her back to the dock and a handful of pills. Long-distance faking was far easier.
“E-mail pictures of the remodeling. Mom’s going to start a scrapbook for you.”
“That’ll be nice.”
“Sooo …” Her mother’s voice rose to a squeal. “What did you think of Susan’s news?”
“What news?”
“She didn’t call you?”
“No.”
Silence. And then her father cleared his throat. “You knew she was having a sonogram yesterday, didn’t you?”
Emily closed her eyes. “No.”
“It’s a boy.”
Lowering her head, she waited out the vertigo. “That’s wonderful.”
Her mother giggled. “We’ll do a video chat when she’s here on Friday. She can show you the pictures.”
Emily squeezed the phone. “I don’t think I’ll have Internet by then.” Or ever. “Small town, you know.”
“Well, then, we’ll just talk to you on speaker phone. It’ll be just like you’re here with us. Almost.”
“Okay”—I won’t answer, but—“call Friday.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
With the weight of half truths adding guilt to her stiffness, she shuffled to the bathroom and flipped the switch. A lightbulb in the fixture above the de-silvering mirror burned out with a pop, leaving a single clear globe still working. It didn’t really matter. Her makeup was packed away in a plastic bin in the van and would likely stay in the cellar ensconced in Rubbermaid the whole time she was here. By the time she’d flipped her way across the country to a time and a place where she might actually care what she looked like, every tube and bottle would be past its expiration date. Some of it should have been stamped RIP long before she’d finished rehab.
The bathroom didn’t have a vanity. No place to set mascara and blush even if she’d wanted to. She reached for the toothpaste and knocked it onto the floor. Emily sighed. There had been a time she’d made a career out of the simple move this required. Bend, scoop up a child, wipe a nose, kiss a boo-boo, bend back down. Effortlessly.
Focus on the here and now. She had a cliché for every situation and, step by painful step, the trite phrases were getting her through, moving her beyond. Life might never again shine like it once had, but a dim light glowed at the end of her tunnel, which, in her case, ended just short of the Pacific. The closer she got to San Francisco Bay and the farther she got from the people who wanted to wrap her in cotton batting like a china doll who might fall and break again, the brighter the light became.
“Don’t go.” Her mother’s voice whispered in the echoey room, blurring her view of the present. “You’re surrounded by people who love you.” The air compressed around her. “We just want to help, Em.”
A year and a half and they hadn’t yet realized she wasn’t fixable.
Sliding the toothpaste tube to the middle of the floor with the tip of her cane, she eased onto one knee and picked it up. Stay present in the present. Describe your surroundings. Dim light…white tiles… octagon shaped…dark blue grout…tiles around the toilet cracked… mirror above sink cracked…plaster cracked…
Like lines on an X-ray.
Halfway to the van she noticed the male cardinal perched on the driver’s side mirror. His call to his mate reminded Emily of her father’s Sunday morning voice.
“She’s a woman. Cut her some slack. You got all the natural beauty—she has to work at it.” She pictured her mother running barefoot out the door to church, carrying shoes and earrings, a piece of toast in her mouth. I’m coming, Bob.
Karen and Bob. She’d name her little red neighbors after her parents.
Squinting against the morning sun, Emily stood still. A hundred feet behind her, the Fox River whooshed under the bridge. Water trickled in the ditch along the road. A soft breeze teased the straps on her bike rack as if beckoning her to free her Trek from its restraints. The cardinal tweeted. “You think I should go