Afloat Read Online Free Page B

eyes.
    â€˜I don’t
eat
cows, Mother, but I’ve decided I don’t mind wearing them.’
    â€˜You’re getting old,’ I tell her, pleased.
    She pats me on the shoulder. ‘No more ice cream before bed, remember.’
    This morning I answered the door to Anna in my nightgown, ice cream stained all down the front from last night when I fell asleep watching television. The last of the carton melted all over me, but I’d been too tired to get up and change. It was a cold, sticky sleep. Anna had looked at the material, and up at me. ‘Mom, why do you look like you took a chocolate bath?’
    â€˜It leaked.’
    She helped me with my bath then, though I could have washed myself.
    â€˜Keep an eye on the weather,’ she tells me now. ‘It’s a 6.5.’
    We both look out the window.
    â€˜It will be fine,’ I say, confidently. ‘Look, a blue jay.’
    She doesn’t see it, but she didn’t look either.
    The front door shuts behind her and she walks into the wind chimes that are hanging too low from the roof’s overhang.
    â€˜Goddamn you,’ she says matter-of-factly.
    The hollow pitch of the chimes echoes in my head long after I hear her car start and drive away.
    In the quiet minutes that pass in her absence, the blue jay in the oak tree is still, and I wonder if it isn’t a branch after all. If I could lift my arms properly and be sure I had a proper grip on the rock, I would go outside to see if I had imagined him, or if the bird would fly away.
    I want Anna to come back, to make her watercress and banana sandwiches on multi-grain bread and talk about the advanced downward dog
asana
she is practicing for yoga and the different essential oils she uses on her mat.
Lavender and geranium. For balance
. I want another voice besides my own internal narrator – someone aloud and real to keep me from pulling up anchor and sailing into the past.
Wallowing
, Anna calls it.
Remembering
is different from wallowing, I told her once.
    â€˜Not when you do it for weeks at a time,’ she said.
    But who’s to judge? I map my veins as they come and go, down through my arms, into my wrists, thick and blue over the tops of my knuckles. My hands look swollen, and remembering my water pills, I take two and retreat to the bathroom to wait. I bought the ones with calcium included to help strengthen my bones. Two years ago I fell, breaking my collarbone in two places, but I haven’t broken anything since. Sitting straight with my hands on my naked thighs I inspect each swollen finger, waiting for them to deflate as my body drains. Absently I wish we’d been bold enough to paint thehouse a dramatic color instead of opting for off-white. When we moved in we did all the decorating and painting ourselves – wallpaper, paint, everything. Everything white. Clean. Empty. Our first place together – we thought we might upgrade in a few years and the real estate agent advised white houses sell better. That’s what we did. Moved in thinking about moving out. We bought it the year Anna was born.
    â€˜It’s like living in an egg,’ Alan had said approvingly, tapping the walls with a knuckle.
    â€˜What happens when we hatch?’ I’d asked.
    He had raised an eyebrow at me then, a talent for facial contortion that I lack.
    Anna’s just done her house in terracotta and yellows, each room like a vacation. ‘I couldn’t resist,’ she said. ‘Now I’m on my own I can do the walls whatever color I want.’ ‘Join the club,’ I said.
    My system flushed, I return to the kitchen, taking a sip from my mug and breathing the fumes back quickly. The tea is too hot, and, still, I am not quite ready for what lies before me on the table.
    I put the mug back on its coaster, part of a set we received for Christmas years ago from Anna and her then-husband. They bought them during an eco-vacation in Venezuela and,