“No,” she said, “no one blamed me. But nobody could make it better either. No one could change it. No one could make it an unhappening, Louis. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue. She started making a sound, a kind of, I don’t know-gaaaaaa-like that-”
In her distressed, total recall of that day she did a more than creditable imitation of the way her sister Zelda must have sounded, and Louis’s mind Bashed to Victor Pascow. His grip on his wife tightened.
“-and there was spit, spit coming down her chin-”
“Rachel, that’s enough,” he said, not quite steadily. “I am aware of the symptoms.”
“I’m explaining,” she said stubbornly. “I’m explaining why I can’t go to poor Norma’s funeral, for one thing, and why we had that stupid fight that day-”
“Shh-that’s forgotten.”
“Not by me, it isn’t,” she said. “I remember it well, Louis. I remember it as well as I remember my sister Zelda choking to death in her bed on April 14, 1965.”
For a long moment there was silence in the room.
“I turned her over on her belly and thumped her back,” Rachel went on at last.
“It’s all I knew to do. Her feet were beating up and down… and her twisted legs… and I remember there was a sound like farting… I thought she was farting or I was, but it wasn’t farts, it was the seams under both arms of my blouse ripping out when I turned her over. She started to… to convulse… and I saw that her face was turned sideways, turned into the pillows, and I thought, oh, she’s choking, Zelda’s choking, and they’ll come home and say I murdered her by choking, they’ll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true, and they’ll say you wanted her to be dead, and that was true too. Because, Louis, see, the first thought that went through my mind when she started to go up and down in the bed like that, I remember it, my first thought was Oh good, finally, Zelda’s choking and this is going to be over. So I turned her over again and her face had gone black, Louis, and her eyes were bulging and her neck was swelled up.
Then she died. I backed across the room. I guess I wanted to back out the door, but I hit the wall and a picture fell down-it was a picture from one of the Oz books that Zelda liked before she got sick with the meningitis, when she was well, it was a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible, only Zelda always called him Oz the Gweat and Tewwible because she couldn’t make that sound, and so she sounded like Elmer Fudd. My mother got that picture framed because… because Zelda liked it most of all Oz the Gweat and Tewwible… and it fell down and hit the floor and the glass in the frame shattered and I started to scream because I knew she was dead and I thought… I guess I thought it was her ghost, coming back to get me, and I knew that her ghost would hate me like she did, but her ghost wouldn’t be stuck in bed, so I screamed… I screamed and I ran out of the house screaming ‘Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead!’ And the neighbors… they came and they looked… they saw me running down the street with my blouse all ripped out under the arms… I was yelling ‘Zelda’s dead!’ Louis, and I guess maybe they thought I was crying but I think… I think maybe I was laughing, Louis.
I think maybe that’s what I was doing.”
“If you were, I salute you for it,” Louis said.
“You don’t mean that, though,” Rachel said with the utter surety of one who has been over a point and over it and over it. He let it go. He thought she might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long-most of it, anyway-but never this part. Never completely. Louis Creed was no psychiatrist, but he knew that there are rusty, half-buried things in the terrain of any life and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they cut. Tonight Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, like some grotesque and stinking rotten tooth, its crown black, its nerves infected, its roots fetid. It was out. Let that last noxious cell remain; if God was good it would remain dormant except in her deepest dreams. That she had been able to remove as much as she had was well nigh incredible-it did not just speak of her courage; it clarioned it. Louis was in awe of her. He felt like cheering.
He sat up now and turned on the light. “Yes,” he said, “I salute you for it. And if I needed another reason to… to really dislike your mother and father, I’ve got it now. You never should have been left alone with her, Rachel. Never.”
Like a child-the child of eight she had been when this dirty, incredible thing had happened-she reprimanded him, “Lou, it was Passover season-”
“I don’t care if it was judgment trump,” Louis said with a sudden low and hoarse savagery that caused her to pull back a little. He was remembering the student nurses, those two candy stripers whose evil luck it had been to be in attendance on the morning Pascow had been brought in dying. One of them, a tough little lady named Carla Shavers, had returned the next day and had worked out so well that even Chariton was impressed. The other they had never seen again. Louis was not surprised and did not blame her.
Where was the nurse? There should have been an R. N. in attendance… they went out, they actually went out and left an eight-year-old kid in charge of her dying sister, who was probably clinically insane by then. Why? Because it was Passover season. And because elegant Dory Goldman couldn’t stand the stink that particular morning and had to get away from it for just a little while. So Rachel got the duty. Right, friends and neighbors? Rachel got the duty. Eight years old, pigtails, middy blouse. Rachel got the duty. Rachel could stay and put up with the stink. What did they send her to Camp Sunset in Vermont for six weeks every year, if not to put up with the stink of her dying, insane sister?
Ten new shirt-and-jumper combinations for Gage and six new dresses for Ellie and I’ll pay your way through medical school if you’ll stay away from my daughter…
. but where was the overflowing checkbook when your daughter was dying of spinal meningitis and your other daughter was alone with her, you bastard? Where was the R-fucking-N?
Louis sat up, got out of bed.
“Where are you going?” Rachel asked, alarmed.
“To get you a Valium.”
“You know I don’t-”
“Tonight you do,” he said.
She took the pill and then told him the rest. Her voice remained calm throughout. The tranquilizer was doing its job.
The next-door neighbor had retrieved eight-year-old Rachel from behind a tree where she was crouching and screaming “Zelda’s dead!” over and over. Rachel’s nose had been bleeding. She had blood all over her. The same neighbor had called the ambulance and then her parents; after getting Rachel’s nosebleed stopped and calming her with a cup of hot tea and two aspirins, she was able to get the location of her parents out of her-they were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father’s business.
By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone. The room was a bare box. Later-much later-it had become Dory Goldman’s sewing room.
The first of the nightmares had come to Rachel that night, and when Rachel woke up at two o’clock in the morning, screaming for her mother, she had been horrified to discover that she could barely get out of bed. Her back was in agony. She had strained it moving Zelda. In her spurt of adrenaline-powered strength, she had, after all, lifted Zelda with enough force to pull her own blouse apart.
That she had strained herself trying to keep Zelda from choking was simple, obvious, elementary-my-dear-Watson. To everyone, that was, except Rachel herself. Rachel had been sure that this was Zelda’s revenge from beyond the grave. Zelda knew that Rachel was glad she was dead; Zelda knew that when Rachel burst from the house telling all and sundry Zelda’s dead, Zelda’s dead at the top of her voice, she had been laughing, not screaming; Zelda knew she had been murdered and so had given Rachel spinal meningitis, and soon Rachel’s back would start to twist and change and she too would have to lie in bed, slowly but surely turning into a monster, her hands hooking into claws.