Three, four, five, sang the litany in her exhausted mind.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. She watched as a huge fly crawled across a food-flecked dish in the kitchen sink. Plates and glasses and saucepans, all dirty, piled high in the stained enamel sink. Something buzzed—a handful of flies at the window over the sink.
She wrinkled her nose, noticing for the first time the odor of sour milk, the sickeningly sweetness of over-ripened) fruit. The stink of something else underlay all the others, and she wondered what it was. She couldn’t identify it, not immediately.
She had to do something first.
One, two....
She should wait a bit before she went out. Yes, that was right. She could wash the dishes with really hot soapy water and dry them with some of her linen hand towels bordered with the fancy embroidery she used to have time for, and put them away in the cabinets, and then she would make herself a nice lunch.
Or was it dinnertime?
A sandwich...she could make that for either meal, and so it didn’t matter which meal it actually was, because the sandwich would be for lunch or dinner.
No, she had to get it right. She looked out the window, saw it was still light, but couldn’t see the sun’s position. It could be afternoon. It had to be, since she was wearing gloves which meant that it was cooler outside which meant that it had to be autumn or winter or spring, and night came so much earlier then. Afternoon.
Or late morning.
One, two....
Buckle my shoe.
She almost giggled aloud.
In the last few months of her job she had grown increasing late. She had recognized that—she certainly didn’t need anyone, much less Farron and her boss telling her—and so had started out of the house earlier and earlier each day. In the beginning she’d left on time, then that had graduated to twenty minutes earlier, then an hour earlier. Finally she was getting up at 4:10, so she could get out of the door and get to the University by nine.
It didn’t take her long to get ready in the mornings—she showered, dressed, threw on her makeup, ate a quick breakfast. What took so long was the ritual of going through the door, because she had to do it right—or else—and every time she blew it, and she had to start over, and the ritual grew longer and longer.
Three, four, shut the door.
Five, six, pick up sticks.
Seven, eight, nine....
Thirteen, fourteen—
Why hadn’t she chosen longer numbers? Something like a hundred would have been better. It would take more time to reach; but she hadn’t selected the numbers. They had chosen her. Her mother had always told her to count to ten before responding when she was angry. She remembered as a child counting slowly to ten, and then over again because she liked the feel of control it gave her. She realized she could count and even as she was doing that, she felt her anger or frustration melting away.
She didn’t remember having a temper, but her mother always insisted she did, and her mother must be right.
She counted as high as she could go the first time her father put her in the closet and left her alone with the darkness. She had counted because she had nothing else to do. Counted. And eventually he had come back and let her out. He had said then that she was a good girl, not the screw-up she normally was.
She came to realize during the long hours when she was alone that it really was all her fault, and that she had better learn to get things right.
And the numbers had just popped into her head, and without warning, she started counting—to one, to five, to fifteen, then to fifteen, to five, to one. She tried to draw out the ritual sometimes, tried to slow the counting, but it didn’t always work, and so she would count over and over and over, and the quickness of it irritated her.
It had become her mantra. When she was angry, she summoned it; when she was tired or stressed out, she did the numbers. Knowing that somehow things would be right again.
Only the reassurance she obtained from it had decreased, and so she had increased the number of times she counted. Doubled the times. Then tripled.
Quadrupled.
Until the numbers bled together in her mind, jumbling—one, six, eleven, five, ten—and she had to start over from the beginning. Sometimes it seemed like every minute, every second of her life was devoted to the numbers...to getting it right.
Eventually, even her boss had noticed, and he’d taken her into his office one morning, and asked gently if there was a problem.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice trembling. She had been so upset that she forgot to count.
“You’ve been late six months in a row now, Dottie,” Hal said. “I’ve looked the other way because you’ve been here so long and you’ve always been on time, but you’re getting worse. You’ve got to do better. You’ve had a perfect record—and now this. And you’re making mistakes in your work—you’ve never done that before. It’s like your mind is on something else. Is something going on at home?” He had leaned across the desk and for a moment she had thought he was going to place his hand on her shoulder.
“No, there’s nothing wrong,” she lied.
“It’s got to get better,” Hal said.
She nodded.
Only it hadn’t, and finally he had said regretfully that he must fire her, and they’d given her a generous severance check because of the years she’d been there, and she had gone home and sat in her living room and looked out the window at the dying flowers and counted.
To one, to five, to fifteen.
Too late now, she told herself, because she hadn’t gotten it right.
She should have been counting more, should have slowed it down, made it last.
Only she hadn’t.
The fear wrapped itself more tightly around her heart and squeezed.
The tears flowed freely now, and she brushed at her cheek with her other gloved hand, and left a streak there. She stared down at the dirt on her glove and wondered vaguely how it had gotten there. They had been clean when she put them on.
To one, to five, to fifteen.
One, five, fifteen.
She listened to the house, and heard nothing. Didn’t hear the sound of the furnace, didn’t hear the grandfather clock in the front hall, and wondered why. The clock must have run down, and she wondered when she had wound it last. Hadn’t it been yesterday? No. Friday. No...before that. But when she didn’t remember.
Five, six...seven, eight, open the gate.
She told herself she would get through the door now. She had things to do. She had to get outside and get to—
Get to where? She frowned, wondering if she’d been heading to the store or someplace else. Maybe a job interview? Yes, that was it. After she’d been fired, she’d pored through the classified section of the newspaper for jobs that interested her. A number of positions called for workers who stayed at home, which appealed to her. So she had called for an appointment, and she was headed for it.
Only...she frowned...only that appointment had been yesterday.
Or the day before.
She had blown it again.
One, five, fifteen.
She must have stopped the sequence somewhere, some place, and she’d royally screwed up again.
She hadn’t been counting last week when she’d been singing along with the old Bee Gees song on the car radio, and she hadn’t seen