Outside, the storm slowly dissipated. It continued to rain steadily, but the wind died down and the thunder retreated. After taking off her wet underwear and hiding them in a corner of the closet and pulling on a pair of pyjamas, Cathy opened the window that stood at a right angle to the foot of her bed and stood quietly, listening to the rain, feeling the cool breeze puffing through the screen and across her burning cheek. After a moment, she turned to her desk, picked up a pencil that lay on top of a geography book, and bent to peer beneath the desk drawer. When she located three parallel pencil marks on the rough unfinished underside of the drawer, she pressed the pencil against the wood and made a single swift short stroke. Four years down; three years to go. Then she straightened, replaced the pencil, and lay down on her bed.
There wasn’t much noise downstairs now, only an occasional slam of a kitchen cupboard door and the faint haze of audience laughter from the television. Soon the early evening news would be on. But it would blare out into an empty living room. Cathy knew that shortly her mother would take something from the fridge, the jar of olives, perhaps, and closet herself somewhere else.
Cathy wasn’t sure where her father was at the moment. Driving home slowly through the rain, or working late somewhere. She’d lost track of his schedule.
Because of her injured cheek, she could only lie flat on her back. She lay still with her injured finger resting carefully on top of her other hand. She would not be able to move it all night, lest she catch the nail and tear it further.
Her head rested directly above the hiding place of her stolen movie magazines. She lay absolutely still, breathing quietly, wishing that it were safe enough to bring one of Angela Gordon’s pictures out of its hiding place. It didn’t matter, though. Angela would have seen everything. She sensed her sitting beside her on the bed, looking down at her closed eyes.
“What happened this time?”
“I don’t know. I just got off the school bus and she was waiting for me. I think she thinks I have a boyfriend.”
Angela crinkled her nose in disapproval. Then she settled herself on the foot of the bed, propped up against the wall, with one hand resting gently on Cathy’s foot.
“This okay?”
“Ah-huh.”
“I’ll sit here until you fall asleep then.”
Although it was far too early to go to bed for the night, Cathy began to drift off to sleep. There wouldn’t be any supper now anyway, and sleep would help her heal. If she were still red-eyed and swollen-faced in the morning, Adele would accuse her of trying to get attention.
Her breathing slowed. She sank deeper. Secret admirer? Admirer? Who...? Nobody admired her. The faces of classmates drifted past beneath her heavy eyelids. No. None of them. There were a few boys from St. Mike’s at the bus stop after school, but they never bothered with her. None of them would have sent her anything like that. No. Something must have gotten mixed up. She stretched her uninjured hand across the bedspread and slipped it into Angela’s. The last injury that she noticed before finally falling asleep was the throbbing in the roots of her teeth, just below the swelling.
CHAPTER 2
While Cathy drifted off to sleep, the fridge door opened, glass bottles knocked sharply against one another, the fridge closed. Then footsteps chuffed across the carpet and a moment later a metal door latch clicked sharply.
Occasionally, Adele remained hidden only for the remainder of the day and night, emerging the following morning, stepping back into her routine as if nothing had happened. “Porridge for breakfast, kids,” she’d call up the stairs if it were a school morning. But most often she withdrew for days, closeting herself in the master bedroom or the den or the guest room. Her fury, though, potent and palpable as her physical presence, seeped out beneath the door, smothering everything to stillness. Only the diligently ticking clocks dared to defy her.
During these times, her husband, Gerald Mugan, came and went like an automaton, speaking in whispers to Cathy and Richard, staying away at his work for as long as he could, coming home only to undress silently in the dark and crawl beneath a blanket on a couch if his bedroom was barred. Although he was nearly six feet tall, he appeared to be shorter because of his stooping posture. A door had fallen on him during the war, damaging several discs in his back. During damp weather, the old injury grew painful, causing him to stoop and walk with a curious rocking gate, shifting his weight from side to side. Cathy thought she noted lately that the stoop seemed less and less dependent upon the presence of dampness. His hair, which was dark as tar but streaked with a bit of grey, hung, much to his wife’s annoyance, straight down the front of his forehead unless it was creamed firmly into place. He had blue eyes, a fair Irish complexion, and round, protruding ears.
“Monkey” was what Adele called him.
“No slip-ups from you,” he’d whisper to Cathy as they passed in the hall. “I want this to blow over as quickly as possible.”
The silences didn’t seem to affect Cathy’s brother, Richard. Unlike his father, he behaved completely normally. As tall and lanky as a young, uninjured Gerald, he moved with a confident stride, coming and going as he always had—just as he pleased. His only concessions were that he didn’t speak much, beyond one-word greetings, and he didn’t play any music in his room. Like his father, he spent most of his time at his job, coming home hours after Robinson’s had closed, never mentioning to anyone where he had been.
Only Cathy was left behind—the beast-keeper, as she thought of herself—left to come and go from school by herself, to preserve the tomblike silence and her own safety by taking extraordinary care not to step on squeaking floorboards, by soundlessly opening and closing doors, by depressing the toilet handle only halfway so that the water trickled quietly rather than gushed into the bowl. She didn’t dare try to stay away like her brother or bring a friend home to use as a buffer between herself and her mother. In the past Adele had burst out of a room at the sound of a school companion’s voice and demanded to know who Minnie the Moocher was and didn’t she have her own home to go to after school since this wasn’t a damned orphanage.
Even the telephone, suddenly shattering the quiet, ringing repeatedly in the kitchen, could not be answered during the silences. Adele would not come out to talk to anyone, but she would roar out from behind her closed door to snatch away the receiver and smash it down onto the cradle if she heard Cathy talking to anyone. And so, while her father and brother stayed away, Cathy spent hours up in her room, waiting for time to pass, carefully and quietly turning the pages of her magazine collection, one ear cocked to the door for any sign that her mother was emerging.
Sometimes Cathy woke from a deep sleep to hear her mother moving about in the middle of the night. At first, not knowing what had woken her, Cathy would lie in her bed, puzzled. But then she would hear it again: the soft clack of a door closing, a light switch snapping on or off, the fridge door falling shut. Suddenly her room would fill with the aroma of fresh toast. In the morning there would be a crumb-covered plate and a knife, sticky with the residue of strawberry jam, sitting in the kitchen sink. But still no