Garden of Eden Read Online Free Page B

against the wall shaking so hard she was afraid she might fall. After a moment she got a basin of water and a brush and began to scrub the puddled trail of blood from the cement floor.
    It was a botched genital mutilation, Inge had told her later. The woman who did it was drunk, the relatives said, had cut clumsily and too deep, had — God, she mustn’t think of it. She’s glad she’s not a nurse; she doesn’t have the courage. She’d finally written a piece about it, but is certain the church magazines she was writing for didn’t print it. Maybe they didn’t believe it, not that they’d think she was lying, but out of a sheer inability, born of their utter naivete, to assimilate the story. Like Iris, she thinks. She can’t imagine telling Iris such a thing either. It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t write.
    Climbing the hospital steps now, she edges sideways through the door, letting it slap shut behind her. Rita, the nurse on duty, looks up from where she’s bending over one of the pallets, soothing a skeleton who whimpers softly, too weak to form words. She hurries over, takes the child from Lannie’s arms.
    “Set up that camp bed,” she tells Lannie. Lannie runs to the bed leaning against the wall and pushes the legs down as quickly as she can while Rita waits, holding the child. She sets the boy gently downon it and Lannie waits as Rita takes his pulse. “It’s okay,” she says to Lannie, glancing at her over her shoulder as she crouches by the child. “I’ll take it from here.” Then she hesitates, staring up at her, and says, “You should go home now.” Home. For one instant Lannie sees the farm kitchen, its bright yellow walls — Iris loves colour so much. Before that they’d been turquoise and before that, hollyhock pink — Barney grinning a silent good morning at her over the paper, his eyes brightening at the sight of her, Iris turning from the toaster to say,
Did you sleep well, dear?
as if there were no horrors in the world lurking in the shadows just out of arm’s reach. “You look exhausted,” Rita tells her.
    “But I’m not!” Lannie answers, flushing. She pushes loose strands of her hair back from her face, forces a laugh, and its falsity makes her blush more. Rita doesn’t answer her, rises, goes quickly to the medicine cupboard. Lannie turns away. She catches a glimpse of her reflection in an aluminum basin hanging on the wall. She’s a ghost, the freckles dusting her high cheekbones and the bridge of her narrow nose barely visible. Two dark holes for eyes, a blur of palest pink her lips. Shaken, she skims her eyes away from the image, erases it, leaves the hospital.
    And yet she does not wonder what she’s doing here. She knows now, in this camp, what it is: it is escape from her own too-marginal, too-pitiful, too-ugly history. There is a part of her that is grateful for this famine, this drought, this pneumonia, this tuberculosis, leprosy, the spear-wounds, the kwashiorkor and endless, desperate cases of marasmus, even the grenade wounds — no, not for the bloody, inhuman war — she is grateful for all the rest of it because it saves her from her own hopelessness, from the pointlessness of her life. But she hates herself at the same time, for her heartlessness, that she would use this devastation to escape the pain of her own wounds.
    Rob is sitting in their living room being entertained by Lucy and Maggie when Lannie and Caroline get back. Lannie sees at once that Maggie is smitten — the way she laughs too much, fingering her long, blonde hair that she has to keep pinned up at work, as if she’scalling his attention to it. In the background they’re playing a tape of a rock group unfamiliar to Lannie, and it seems to her annoyingly loud.
    “There’s some supper left in the kitchen,” Lucy says. “If the bugs didn’t get it.” They all laugh.
    “Thanks, but I’m having supper in town,” Lannie says. Rob doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t want to sit