The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,44

flowed the other way, she had gained solace from listening to Beth’s voice. It was far more comfort than she had been able to send or receive through Cassie’s hand. In the stockade, in the miserably small room where they were allowed to visit after her court martial, they had been separated by a wire mesh screen that kept them from touching. The thirty minutes allotted them was over, Vera was nowhere near dealing yet with the shock and incomprehension that came with their talk, and yet, by instinct, needing it badly, she reached her hand out to touch Cassie’s before getting up to leave.

She was letting her hair grow long again—never had it looked so shiny and beautiful.

She remembered thinking that, of all possible things, and then a second later, worrying that maybe Cassie would turn and walk away with no gesture whatsoever. Then very slowly she did move her hand—low to the mesh where Vera’s hand already waited. They hadn’t touched. They hadn’t touched the way she touched Beth because a quarter inch of wire mesh in an army stockade is thicker, more impermeable than a hundred years’ worth of time.

But she was a liar, to remember it that way. When it came to touching, the truths a mother and daughter can exchange through their hands, she had been glad that the mesh was there.

She could lie to herself. She could fool herself, too. For when she woke up next morning it was with the fixed intention of stripping the sewing room wallpaper without paying any attention whatsoever to the writing underneath. Beth’s story still held her. The emotion could only lessen gradually, it didn’t need to be forced away by someone new.

Her resolution lasted about as long as it took to peel off the first strip. The new woman’s voice was simply too loud and insistent to ignore. I can’t tell a story like she can. Plain enough. But how was she going to tell it then?

The handwriting was sloppy, bold and fast, like the letters were racing each other, tripping over themselves, staggering back up again, making their erratic way to the finish line there in the corner. Whoever wrote it had a fondness for cheap ballpoints and liked different colors—by the end of the first paragraph she had already used blue, black, green and red. The lines sloped down, then rose back the other way like a crude drawing of waves. When she became passionate or angry she pressed too hard, pockmarking the plaster or even gouging it; the walls in the sewing room were in much worse shape than in the parlor.

Was that the reason she had chosen such thick wallpaper? Not just because she liked knotty pine? Not just because she was brassy and original and didn’t give a damn, but to cover up the damage? Someone using a chisel couldn’t have scarred the plaster much worse.

There were other reasons to start reading. The unknown woman had done Vera a huge favor by stripping off the first three layers, a job she would have found impossible on her own. This was a debt and a real one. Then, too, she was almost certainly the only other person to have read Beth’s story, which formed a bond that couldn’t be ignored.

She went back to the same method she had used with Beth, stripping bare the entire wall before allowing herself to read. With Beth, she had the sensation of words pressing outward on the paper and helping, but this woman’s words were gummier, they didn’t want to let go of the paper that covered them, so she had to work twice as hard.

She was halfway through the first wall, on the point of taking her morning coffee break, when something surprising happened—surprising only in the fact it hadn’t occurred sooner. It came from the radio, Jeannie’s boom box, which had been her trusted companion all through work. The station played the same lulling French music as always, soothing precisely because she didn’t understand a word, but then suddenly between songs the announcer said something she understood all too well.

“Iraq,” he said, rolling the r. There were more words she couldn’t understand, then two she could: “mort” and “soixantequinze.”

She felt betrayed, that was the strange thing. Mad at the radio, mad at Canada, mad at Quebec. She trusted them to stay neutral, and now here they were, deliberately targeting her, jabbing her with a needle, making fun of her—her desire for numbness, her vanity in