The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping.
That was how you did it. You let go, you left all that behind, you refused to remember. You let the dark in.
Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now.
It didn’t much matter where the path went, she wasn’t the least bit curious, she just needed a direction.
She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness.
It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn’t survive.
IT DIDN’T TAKE ME long to figure out why the girls called Amelia Cruella De Vil. In the beautiful wooden house, we went hungry all the time.
The future was a white fog into which I would vanish, unmarked by the flourish of rustling taffeta blue and gold. No mother to guide me. I.
Amelia liked me. She had me sit next to her and finish the food on her plate when she was done eating.
The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. I.
People just wanted to be loved. That.
Everybody left you eventually. He.
Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he’d taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels.
But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?
My words, that’s what she wanted. What’s this? she kept asking. What’s this? But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.
I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person?
All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them. I.
She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted.
It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way. “You.
High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.