All Days Are Night Read Online Free

see you for a little bit after work.
    I wouldn’t, she said.
    Really? he asked vaguely. Have you got everything you need?
    I don’t need anything, said Gillian, just to be left alone. You don’t need to come.
    I’ve got a lot going on, he said, in advance of the holidays everyone needs things done.
    It looks even worse, said Gillian, and suddenly she was crying.
    Her father seemed not to notice, he just said that was part of the healing process, the doctor had shown him pictures of the various phases.
    It’s not like with your cars, you know, said Gillian, where you can hammer everything out.
    As if you knew, said her father. How are you feeling?
    She had to laugh. Oh, I’m fine.
    I’ll come by tonight, he said and hung up.
    The prospect of his visit made Gillian uneasy. It was conceivable that one day there would be a person with a different face, who would be her. But there was as little connecting her to that person as to the other one she had been before the accident. In drama school she had imitated faces and tried out gestures, and that had produced a sort of vague echo of whatever feeling was to be expressed. She turned down the corners of her mouth and felt a weak, unspecific sadness, she pulled them up and straightaway her mood brightened. Now, without a face, she couldn’t do that. All sorts of feelings, relief, fury, grief, were just possibilities that couldn’t be realized. Even other people’s faces, those of the nurses and people in magazines, became illegible scribbles to her.
    In the evening, Gillian’s father hung his coat on a hook and hovered near the door. Then he approached her bed. He looked at her, not saying a word, gripped the bed frame, and reluctantly slid down onto the chair beside the bed. He didn’t look at her while they spoke, he took her hand in his. His voice was quieter and more hesitant than during his other visits, and he only stayed for fifteen minutes.
    After he had gone, Gillian called her mother-in-law. The phone rang a long time. At last a breathless Margrit picked up. When she heard who was calling, she fell silent.
    I’m sorry, said Gillian.
    It’s not your fault, said Margrit.
    Then she talked about Matthias’s funeral, which had been beautiful, and she wanted to get Gillian’s approval of the music and the restaurant where they had held the wake, and the text of the death announcement, which she read to her. She listed the people who had attended.
    That’s fine, said Gillian, I’m sure you did everything right.
    It’s too bad you couldn’t be there, said Margrit.
    Yes, said Gillian. I’ll visit the grave as soon as I’m out of the hospital.
    She got along with Margrit better than she did with her own mother. They talked a while longer, then Gillian said she was tired.
    Call anytime, said Margrit.
    Gillian wondered what Margrit and her parents would say if they saw the photographs. She was briefly alarmed that her mother might have found them in the apartment, but then she remembered that she had put the envelope away in her desk. She hadn’t looked at the pictures herself. They were evidence of an evening she would prefer to forget. She still remembered her sense of shame, and then panic. She had pulled her clothes on as in a trance. Hubert stood in the open doorway. For the first time that evening, he was looking straight at her. She grabbed the film, which was still on the table. Then she walked off without either of them saying a word. She went to the train station. There was a man on the platform who stared at her as though she had nothing on, and she realized that she didn’t feel up to taking a train or a streetcar home. She followed theroad into the city center, first through the industrial precinct, then suburbs she had never set foot in before. She kept running into children in costume moving from house to house. They were strikingly quiet. A few were accompanied by their parents, who hung back a little while the children rang doorbells and asked