====================== Symbiosis by Kate Wilhelm ====================== Copyright (c)1972 Kate Wilhelm First published in Cosmopolitan, The Hearst Corporation, 1972 Fictionwise Contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy --------------------------------- NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines. Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright violators of Fictionwise ebooks. --------------------------------- BEACHAM, INDIANA, has 1,200 people, a train station that has no passenger service, a main street called Davenport Street, with a Woolworth's, a hamburger joint, Penney's, Wesson's hardware, Stuart's department store, a Jack and Jill shop, and a bakery. There is an ice-cream bar in the drugstore, and a gas station, and then you're out of downtown. The post office is a block south, and across the street from it is the municipal park with its cannon and a few benches pigeon-spattered and three oak trees. They are the only trees downtown. Town Hall is through the park, across First Street. The building is flush with the sidewalk, not set back at all. A red brick building with gray, wide stairs, and heavy double doors with brass hinges. The school is out of town, a cooperative school that serves the whole county. Every morning the yellow bus makes the run through town, then vanishes with the town's children, a mechanized Pied Piper, expelling exhaust fumes as it strips gears and groans and races its engine. As soon as the children are old enough, or look old enough, they pile up in cars and race through the county to Valparaiso, where they spend their movie and soda money on beer or the drive-in, and the girls pick up boys and the boys leer at the local girls. They all know that our town is deadly, that it is out to get them. When they really are old enough, after the graduation exercises and the dance that goes on all night, with the morning light revealing drunk kids in cars, or on porch swings, or on each other's couches or, if the party was exceptionally "good," in jail, then they go off to college, or the army, and they vanish for good. Most of them never come back. Through town, down Third Street, past the doctor's office, my father's office, on through four more blocks and out of town for a mile and a half to the McInally farm. Laura McInally and I have been friends for all our lives. We went to school together, the same Baptist church that is near her farm -- our town is almost universally Protestant, except for the fourteen Jewish families who go to Rensselaer to the synagogue, and the hundred or so Italian families who go to the Catholic church. Laura and I used to walk past the tiny Catholic church and pretend that we were being captured and carried inside, forced to don nuns' clothes, mistreated by the nun in charge, and threatened constantly by the priests who used young Protestant girls most shamefully. We would pull our hair back tight and try to imagine what we would look like with it all shaved off. We were certain that they would do that to us. What else they would do we never actually put into words, but rather talked all around it with ellipses. David McInally, Laura's father, was a kind, red-faced man, who seemed to keep stores of tidbits in various pockets. His winter coat had nuts and caramels. His blue denim jacket had chewing gum. His tan work pants would yield lollipops. He was always surprised to find them there, and would hand them out as if glad to get rid of them. His life was regulated by corn. He had seven hundred acres planted in corn. He raised a few head of beef cattle, chickens, ducks, hogs; and he built: barns, silos, sheds, garages, a machine shop to care for his constantly growing fleet of farm machinery. The house was seventy years old and the kitchen had been remodeled once in the late forties. Other than that and the repairs that kept it from falling down, and occasional paint it never got touched. It wasn't a secret that Laura was his favorite of the four children. He wouldn't let her carry in kindling wood, or take out garbage, or walk to the bus stop half a mile away. There never had been a thing that she said she wanted that he didn't get for her, almost instantly. Let the boys do it, was constantly on his lips. There was girl work and there was boy work, and he wouldn't have her doing any boy work, even after the boys had left home and she was as strong as a teen-aged boy anyway, and willing to do the small chores that her brothers had always done. But he wouldn't let her. Also he wouldn't let her stay out after dark, or sleep over at my house, or play rough games, or ride a bicycle to school, or take an overnight trip to Chicago with our class. It was a two-sided blade. Mrs. McInally was pretty. As far back as I can remember I thought she was pretty. She had pale brown hair that curled around her face, and her eyes were bright blue. Her hands and feet were very small. Laura and I went through a period of awkwardness when we realized that our feet were larger than her mother's. She was plump, as a baby is. Her wrists were tiny, then her arms grew rounder until at the elbow they were dimpled and boneless-looking. Her fat legs tapered to shapely ankles and her waist was as small as mine, an hourglass figure that looked very pretty all the time. She sewed beautifully and made all of her own clothes; her dresses were gay and bright, even her Sunday best. She was like a fat little partridge with a mono-bosom, drawn-in waistline, round hips. I remember her as eternally busy, and all her business was centered on her family and home. There never was any question about where she was, everyone knew. She hummed in a monotone, and sometimes told very innocent, naive jokes. She mothered everyone. Since my own mother had died when I was six, she mothered me, lavishing kisses and good will and hospitality and love indiscriminately on her own children and me. Whenever she picked up a piece of material for a dress for Laura, she got one for me, too. Blue checks, white daisies on a field of blue, red candy stripes. I can remember every dress she ever made for me. All lovingly made up, beautifully finished and decorated with her own touches. An applique;, or a bit of lace, or a ruffle. I gave her nothing in return. It never occurred to me that I should. I accepted her love just as her own children did. All the McInally children had inherited their father's features: they were blue-eyed, with long noses and full lips. But the curious thing was the way their eyes were set in the face. They hardly were sunken at all, as if the eye sockets were too shallow to accommodate them, so the whole eye was forced out even with the cheeks. Laura wore sunglasses almost constantly from the time she was fourteen. She could never be pretty, or even very attractive, with them off, but with them on, she was lovely. Her figure was probably the best in our class, her legs long and smooth and beautiful. I used to exercise, trying to get that same look, and never came near it. Her hair was sun-bleached to a near platinum blond. Every winter it darkened, and we both mourned for it, then the spring sunshine worked its magic and the darkness disappeared. We graduated together and signed up for Purdue in September. All that summer we sewed and made handbags, and shopped for boots and new coats and gloves in Indianapolis. Mrs. McInally worked as hard as we did to get us ready for college. Poor Mr. McInally couldn't stand the "damn female flitterings from morning to night." He spent his summer with his hands in the fields, or in the barns. Later I could reconstruct the changes that had been taking place in Mrs. McInally over the past few years, but they were too gradual at the time for comment. There were two older brothers, and a sister, all of them gone now. The first brother worked for a plastics firm in New York. The next one was in the Navy, making it his career. The sister lived in Los Angeles with her husband. As each one left, Mrs. McInally had become busier than ever with the ones remaining. By the time Laura was the only one at home, Mrs. McInally was feverishly busy on her account. In August my father told me that he was giving up his practice in Beacham, that he was going to study in Chicago and specialize in ocular allergies. Also, he was going to be married. I really looked at him for the first time in years, I suppose. He was forty-eight then, overworked as a small town doctor is, but a handsome-enough man, stooped, almost bald, slack muscles now from inactivity, but potentially very nice. I cried and he had a tear or two and we talked all night and had breakfast, and that afternoon I met his fiancee, who was his age and a doctor. I was shocked and relieved that she was so old. They had met at a symposium in Chicago. They planned to marry as soon as I got settled down in school. I cried a little bit more, and we all ended up kissing each other. The McInallys invited me to spend weekends and holidays with them that year. I said I wasn't sure yet, and we let it go at that. I realized that Beacham was no longer my home, never would be again, and with the thought I began to look at it with new eyes. The town was ugly, I learned that summer. I hadn't really known it before. It was ugly and dull, and the land around it was dull. Flat cornland as far as one could see. During most of the year there was nothing there but gray fields, or snow fields, then the burst of green that gradually faded to brown and disappeared. The wind was louder than I had realized before. In August the corn was six to eight feet high, and when the wind blew in from the west, it was like the blizzard wind, the same high-pitched wail, the same rustling, of corn, not snow. The stores were ugly, neglected. The hot west and south summer winds and the sun that turned the sky white were merciless, fading, bleaching, blistering paint. In the winter the white of the sky reflected the land, and the winds were brutal. Nothing stayed pointed or smooth. Everything developed a sameness. The park was hideous with its bare ground and its scraggly bushes that no one ever pruned or fertilized or sprayed. The leaves were riddled: some were black with fungus or black spot disease. The benches were grimy, never used. Laura and I walked through town repeatedly, as if to imprint its ugliness on our brains so that we never would be tempted to return. I was going to study biology, and she was majoring in mathematics. She had a natural aptitude for mathematics that had been noticeable from the time she entered elementary school. None of the processes was ever a mystery to her; she knew intuitively how to add, subtract, how to derive a formula, how to do trig problems. In high school I'd do her essays and she'd do my algebra. It seemed fair enough then. School frightened both of us more than anything else we had known. We knew each other and a sprinkling of other kids who had come from our county, and no one else. In our town we had known everybody. And from being high among the top third of the class effortlessly, we suddenly had to work. Everyone in college had been top third. My first test paper with a D on it shook me. And Laura sat up three nights in a row studying for a French test, getting tighter and tighter on bennies. She made a C. We both pulled in and settled down to do some serious work, and it was Christmas. On Christmas Day I was embarrassed by the largess of the McInallys. I had bought them a silver candy dish, and they gave me presents that only a daughter could expect. I didn't know how to accept such presents, and knew that I had to, but they were paying very little attention to me then. Both parents' eyes were riveted with embarrassing intensity on Laura as she unwrapped gift after gift; my glance at them was an invasion of privacy. I watched Laura, too, then. There was a bewildering array of jewelry, sweaters, curler sets, bags, belts, records, and on and on and on. And finally there was a fur coat. "Mother! Dad! Are you both crazy!" Laura jumped up and put it on, twisting, dancing in it, burying her hands and her face in the soft pelt. It was a tawny-colored mink, the most beautiful coat I had ever seen. It was almost exactly the color of her hair in the middle of the winter. "You can't do something like this!" she cried, but to take it from her then would have been barbaric. Mrs. McInally had tears in her eyes, and Mr. McInally began to search frantically for a match for his cigar. I had matches in my pocket and I started to approach him with a package, but he found his and then put the cigar down. Mrs. McInally and Laura were examining the coat by then, and I found myself studying Laura's father. The expression on his face was strange, as if he were holding his breath. But of course he wasn't doing anything of the sort. He watched his wife with an anxious look, and I realized with a feeling of sickness that he was afraid. My stomach felt queasy suddenly as I watched him watch his wife. All the cheer that he had been showing was gone and his ugly eyes looked fierce, and afraid, the way he had looked afraid one time when the bull got loose and Laura was in the same pasture on her pony, the same quietness that was all tension ready to spring. Then it was over and Laura was insisting that I try on the coat and the incident seemed so out of step with everything else happening that I was willing to believe that I had imagined it all. Laura and I were busy all through the holidays, all our friends were in town, and there were parties and skating parties and sledding, and dances in each other's basements. It was as if we were desperately picking up our past again, knowing we couldn't do it many more times. Then back to Purdue for our midyear finals. "Laura," I said the first night back in our dormitory, "your mother looked tired, didn't she?" "She's always pooped by Christmas. She must have baked a ton of fruitcakes and cookies. She puts in weeks on decorating the house. You know." "I guess." And God help me, I forgot the whole thing. Neither of us covered ourselves with glory that first semester, but neither were we put on probation, so we decided that we were holding our own. Summer came closer and I had to decide what to do with myself. I couldn't accept being a houseguest for the whole summer vacation; finally I enrolled for courses and when school was out, Laura went home and I stayed on at Purdue, after a short holiday with my father and his new wife. We were all very polite; that was the lasting impression that I took from the week with them. In August I went to the McInally farm for two weeks. Everything was exactly as it had been from my first recollection of the place. Even to Morris, the hired hand, who never said anything, but grinned happily at us all. On a fairly regular basis Laura was dating Stephen Rodman, home from Harvard. Not exactly going steady, but almost. One night, two days before we were to leave for school again, I woke up with my heart pounding hard, and prickles on my arms and legs. My mouth was dry and for a long time I couldn't move, then I managed to lift my head and I saw Mrs. McInally. She was sitting in a chair near the window, watching Laura. She got up immediately and moved toward the door. "I just came in to check," she whispered, but she lied. She had been sitting there. How long? I stared at the ceiling, unable until dawn to return to sleep. At breakfast she said to Laura, "Billy Washburn called again last night." "Pretty Billy?" Laura giggled and spread apple jelly on toast. "Don't call him that. He's a very nice boy." "Oh, Mother!" "Well, from what I hear about the Rodman boy and from what I know about Billy, I'd say that you could do worse. You could." "Mother!" Laura refused to comment further. But the inflection, her disdain, the way she dismissed the idea without another word, it was clear that Pretty Billy was not her idea of date material. Billy Washburn had graduated with us, by the grace of most of his teachers. He always had been the best-looking boy in school, large, well-built, excellent in all sports, voted most popular boy. He worked for his father, who had a first-rate mechanic shop. Billy wanted no more than that. He never dreamed of leaving Beacham. I thought of him and Laura and smiled. With her sunglasses and her mink coat and boots she looked just like a starlet. I didn't go back to the McInally farm for over a year. I went to Jamaica with my father and his wife for Christmas, and at midterm I stayed with them in Chicago. We weren't all being so very polite to each other anymore and they both had wanted me, that was clear. Laura didn't want to go home. Her mother was driving her crazy, she said. Menopause, you know. She stared broodingly at the wall, then shrugged. She went down to Fort Lauderdale for Easter with friends from school, so I went back to Chicago, without even thinking about asking this time. I simply called and said when I'd be there and that was that. Later I had to smile at my first impression of his wife; she was really very nice and quite attractive, and not at all old. We were becoming very good friends. That summer I stayed with them and took some courses at Northwestern. In our third year Laura began to show signs of restiveness. She talked about changing her major, about dropping out entirely, about joining the Peace Corps for a year or two. She was doing beautiful work, and was on full scholarship now, with her future so assured that to talk about changing anything was insane. Suddenly corners were being cut for her, red tape was fading away, the drudgery of undergraduate work was being shelved. I was frankly envious, but she was cynical about it. "They want to use me," she said. "I'm a thing to them. A thing they can hone up and use. I just don't want it. What if I can't do what they want? Then what? The junk pile?" "What are you talking about? You've never failed yet and you know it." "Yeah, that was different. I've got a headache. You don't know how they're pressuring me now. You just don't know. I'd just like to get away from everything, everyone." We had a blizzard a week before Thanksgiving that year, catching everyone unprepared; the department of roads didn't have the plows out yet, the school didn't have its snow shovels out. Instant chaos. The school closed early for the Thanksgiving holiday. "Come home with me," Laura said, sitting on her bed, packed, ready to leave. Billy Washburn was coming for her. "Can't. I told Dad I'd be in Chicago." "That's silly. You'd have to sit in this dump for the next three or four days until they get everything unsnarled. Come on. Call him up and tell him. He'll say it's the smartest thing to do," Actually it was. We had a ride. Billy said the roads to Beacham were all right, but it didn't really matter, we all had driven in snow up to the windows of the car practically. When I still hesitated, Laura said, "Please do. I'm worried about Mother. I keep thinking it's my imagination, but then I see her, and I know it isn't." "What's wrong?" "That's just it. I don't know. Come see if you think there's anything." So I packed to go to the country instead of to the city. When Billy got there it was snowing again. Laura sat beside Billy in the front seat and I had the back seat to myself. Her hair and the mink coat blended until it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. She baited him all the way home. Billy didn't respond to her thrusts at all. He simply drove with concentration, and a scene from the past spring came to mind. It had been one of those times when a crusading editor, or reporter, or trustee decides to stir up a hornet's nest by announcing that the women's dorm is a den of iniquity. There had been investigations and visits by the local firemen of the administration and all that. And in our room one night, lights out, Laura and I had talked about it, laughing, but with undercurrents of self-mockery. We were both still virgins, although we would have died before telling any of the investigators that. "If I do decide to go all the way," Laura said, "it'll be with Pretty Billy." "For heaven's sake! Why that creep?" "Because I can wind him around my finger. He'd do exactly what I told him to do. Like the knight whose lady told him he had to quit defending her, all that crap. He had to obey and he couldn't, so there was no way out except suicide." "Good God, Laura, pick on someone your own size!" "I mean it," she said. "If you let someone that you care about too much, it'll lead to nothing but trouble. I ought to know." Stephen Rodman had become engaged to a Bryn Mawr girl suddenly, after almost going steady with Laura for a couple of years. I watched her head, and the back of Billy's head, and I knew she had done it. Neither of us had brought it up again when we got back to the dorm in September. When we got very near the sort of conversation that would have led to confessions, we both had scrambled to change the subject simultaneously. I hadn't been willing to let her know that she had been right. I had cared, and it had led to trouble. She obviously had not cared. Beacham had become stranger and stranger to me, and seeing it that day, springing up out of the blinding snow, was like glimpsing an alien landscape. No humans would have huddled their hideous buildings together like that with so much open country around them. They couldn't have chosen to crowd into such a small area. There must have been monsters out there for them to guard against. The monster was the silence and the emptiness, I thought as we went through town and out again, back into the empty farm country. Then we were at the farm and Mr. and Mrs. McInally were bustling about helping us off with boots, coats, putting hot toddies into our hands, everyone talking, laughing, and it felt like a homecoming. Morris stood against the wall grinning, saying nothing. Later I studied Mrs. McInally and I knew that there was something wrong. She had lost a lot of weight, but it was more than that. Two days later I realized that she no longer was pretty and tidy and gay. Her clothes were subtly wrong, not starched, or not ironed fastidiously, or not matched with her aprons just so. Little things here and there. Hard in themselves to find and label wrong, but with a cumulative effect of strangeness. And Mr. McInally was nervous. I wondered if he was what was wrong with his wife. He fidgeted with his pipe, he couldn't sit still, he started at a loud noise, and twice he got up to go to the barn because he was afraid the roof had blown down, or that a cow was bawling, or something. Then one night when Laura was out with Billy, Mrs. McInally sat down by me and took out her crocheting and said, "I guess she'll marry him, won't she?" "Billy?" "Yes. Has she said anything about it to you?" "No. Not a word." "That's funny. She always was like that, closemouthed when it came to her own plans." I stared at the page before me, but I wasn't reading. And later when Laura and I were in our room and everyone else was sleeping, I asked her. "Marry Pretty Billy! You're off your nut!" "That's what I thought, but your mother seems to think you will." "Damn it. She probably knows to the minute when I lost my wonderful state of innocence," We both heard footsteps in the hall then and became quiet. I heard those steps during the night all the time that I was there. On Sunday night, before we left, Mrs. McInally said to me, "It's such a shame that your father left us. We all miss him so much." "Are you sick?" I asked before I thought. "No!" She said it so quickly that it became a self-contradiction. Mr. McInally took a step to her side unconsciously, his hand out, reaching for her arm. Laura came in then and there was nothing else. We all kissed each other and Laura and I left with Billy. "She is sick," I said to Laura late that night. "She says she isn't. She says it's the change, that the doctor is giving her something. And Dad says she's fine." Three weeks later Mrs. McInally tried to kill herself and her husband. I came back to the dorm at ten. Laura was hysterical, trying to get some clothes into her suitcase. "Mother's sick. They took her to the hospital. I have to go. Goddamn it, where's my other shoe?" "Laura, sit down. Let me do it. What happened?" So we both began to throw things into the suitcase, because she couldn't sit down. Finally I got out the emergency bottle and gave her a drink of bourbon and Coke and she lighted a cigarette and let me finish. "Do you have a ride arranged?" "Billy. He's on his way. He'll take me ...." "I'll come too, Laura. You might need me. Your father might need someone there while you two are at the hospital. How serious is it? Was it a heart attack? What happened?" She shook her head. "I don't know. You can't come, not now. She's in ... she's in intensive care. We can't even see her yet. Dad told me. I'll be with him." She put out her cigarette and began rummaging in her purse for another one. She wouldn't look at me. "Laura, there must be something I can do. I'll make coffee and keep it hot. Something." "No! You can't come! Mind your own business!" Then she burst into tears. "Don't you understand anything? She's in Hillside Hospital." Then I understood. Hillside Hospital was in Indianapolis. It was for mental patients. I must have stood shaking my head for a long time. "She had a breakdown," Laura said, after a while. "She turned on the stove and tried to kill them both." She laughed shrilly. "In that old house she would have had to leave it on for a month for enough gas to accumulate to do any harm." She didn't have her sunglasses on. Her face was red from crying, her eyes bulging and red-rimmed. I gave her another drink, and had one myself. "When Dad woke up, she tried to hit him with whatever she could pick up. She was throwing everything not nailed down. I think he's cut up a little. He said something about stitches. He yelled for Morris to call the doctor and he got her and held her on the floor until the doctor got there and gave her a shot." She looked at me with a hopeless expression. "We knew, didn't we? Dad knew. He lied to me about her. This has been coming on for a long time. And we all knew something was wrong. And no one did anything at all." There wasn't anything I could say. She left with Billy and I didn't hear from her again until after the Christmas vacation. I started to go to the hospital a dozen times, but I didn't. It would have been an intrusion, I knew. I tried to call the farm every day, thinking maybe they were home again, but no one was. After I came back from Chicago, Laura turned up. She was pale and thin and haunted-looking. They're giving her shock treatments," she said. She was trembling. That was all she would say about it. She took her finals and did brilliantly, as expected. Then she went home for midterm, and again I was excluded. No one could see Mrs. McInally, there was no point in my being there. I didn't think Laura would come back for the second semester, but she did. Gray-faced, haggard, she studied fiercely, and each weekend Billy came to fetch her home. Her mother was being allowed visitors finally. In March Laura said I could go with her to the hospital. I had my car by then, so I drove, and she smoked continually all the way, and said nothing. The hospital was red brick, and the windows were barred, but I had known that. There was an outer gate and a gatehouse that had an attendant who stopped us and looked at our identification and then waved us through. Laura sat stiffly upright, staring ahead. The grounds were barren-looking, it was the season for barrenness. The sky was dirty gray and the air foul with smoke and haze and dirt. Although the heater worked perfectly, I was chilled. We drove around the main building, to Admissions, and went inside to get passes for the women's wing. We drove again on the winding roads with the remains of the winter's snows in black piles along the shoulders. Neither of us spoke, except when Laura told me to turn left, or right, or straight ahead to the parking lot. We walked back to the women's building and again had to stop, to show our passes this time, and to wait for the head nurse to verify our purpose. She was a large woman with soft gray hair and hard blue eyes. We signed her book and waited while she went back inside her office and used her telephone. Then we were allowed inside the corridor that led to the wing where Mrs. McInally was. What I had thought was a door was really a reinforced, locked gate that had to be opened and closed for each visitor. A second nurse accompanied us down the corridor past wards with neat beds in three rows, head to foot to head. Each bed had a brown cover folded at the foot, and each had a white nightstand at the head. It was very neat. A ring of keys jangled from the nurse's belt. The floor was brown linoleum, brown and tan squares, hopscotch, or checkers, or chess. Two women were on their knees scrubbing the floor near a closed door. They wore gray dresses. One looked up at us and smiled, she had three upper teeth, none at all below. "It's better for them to stay busy," the nurse said, leading us. I glanced again at the women. They kept scrubbing the same spot. _What damned spot?_ I thought, and pulled my coat tighter. The nurse stopped at a closed door. All the doors were metal, the walls tan, the floors brown, the doors gunmetal gray. The door was opened by another nurse who admitted us and closed the door after us. She turned a key in it. Then she announced, "McInally, company." The room had a concrete floor, stone walls. Long tables made a U, open at the door side. Women were seated at the tables, some of them talking to company, some of them alone, doing nothing. A few were doing needlework, knitting, crocheting, embroidering. One was coloring a child's coloring book, with scraps of crayons. Another was painting. All of them wore shapeless faded dresses, not all the same, but of a kind. Cheap gingham, simply made to fit all from size ten to sixteen, or even eighteen. There were high windows that had no curtains. The windows were very clean. The whole place was tidy and clean, obsessively clean. As if all the energy of the place went into keeping it tidy and clean. Mrs. McInally came from behind the table to our right. She looked hesitatingly at the nurse, seeking permission. The nurse nodded and she came forward, walking carefully, as if recovering from a back injury, and held out her hands to Laura. "How pretty you look," she said. "Where are your glasses? Wear your glasses, child, or your eyes will hurt you. You know that." I don't know if she saw me or not. She didn't look at me at all. When I spoke to her she didn't answer. "Come with me," she said, drawing Laura with her. "I'm making something for you. Come see." Again that strange, stiff walk, her head up a little too high, her neck too rigid. We followed her around the table to her chair. "That's mine," she said, pointing to a small wicker basket on the table. She felt around in it without looking, now she was eyeing her neighbors suspiciously. "They steal my things in here," she said, not lowering her voice at all. "They know I have pretty things for you and they want them. Here they are." She held up dime-store beads that were partially strung. "I'm making it for you," she said again. "Mother, they're very pretty. Are you feeling all right? Are you eating, sleeping?" She shook her head and looked warningly at the nurse at the door. "I'm fine," she said brightly. "Just fine." She had lost thirty pounds at least. Her little partridge bosom was nothing but skin now, and the plump hips were straight lines from her waist down. Her face was angular, and her eyes deep sunken. She looked very ill. Her dress was buttoned wrong, leaving a gap in the middle of her chest, and an extra button at the top. And her hair was straggly and full of bobby pins in an effort to keep it back. But the bobby pins had been put in without a mirror and most of them were in the wrong places. She went from her aware, suspicious expression to a half-asleep one suddenly. "I'll brush your hair, Mother," Laura said. She took a brush from her purse and began to remove the bobby pins. Her mother sat down, looking vacantly ahead. Another woman sidled close to Laura and felt her hair tentatively. Laura stiffened, but didn't pull away. After our visit we sat in the car not speaking, smoking quietly for several minutes, then I started the motor. "She lived for over a year believing that her next step would put her in hell," Laura said softly. Her hand with the cigarette shook. "She could see it burning in front of her, sulphurous flames and smoke waiting to engulf her. She couldn't sleep because she was so afraid the house would catch on fire from it. She would get up at all hours to make sure nothing was burning. Sometimes she inhaled the smoke, then she would cough for hours. Every time she walked, she was braving hell itself. She didn't dare look at her feet. As long as she didn't look, she could make herself walk about, but if she looked, then she froze. Dad knew that. That she froze. Sometimes he'd find her unable to move, staring at the floor in front of her, and he'd pick her up and carry her to bed." I drove slowly, meticulously, glad that I had it to do. Laura said, after lighting another cigarette, "He was afraid to doubt her when she said there was nothing wrong. He forced himself to believe her. She was going to Dr. Tom Dooley. He really believed that it would pass, that Dr. Dooley was taking care of her." "Have you talked to the hospital doctor yet?" "Nothing. They make no promises. At least she's quiet. Tranquilizers, of course. She was violent when they took her in. Poor Dad, he threw her down into hell and held her there until the doctor arrived. She may never forgive him." All the gaiety and spontaneity died in Laura that spring. She studied determinedly and went to the hospital on the weekends. That was her life. I went back with her three more times, and then we both agreed that there was no point in my going again. Mrs. McInally simply refused to acknowledge me. I began to feel that it was deliberate on her part, that somehow I had been made the heavy, just as Mr. McInally had been. The doctors had asked him not to visit her until they told him it was all right. His visits were upsetting to her. The other children came now and then, but they were busy and distant, and their visits were necessarily limited. They gave her mother another series of shock treatments late in the spring, and this time, according to Laura, it helped. We separated at the end of the semester reluctantly, as if we both knew that a whole phase of our lives had ended and the changes that were taking place would become more and more all-encompassing. When the new semester began in September, Laura wasn't there. I had heard from her during the summer, brief, not very communicative cards. I worked for a biological testing firm in Maine, so I hadn't had a chance to visit the farm, or the hospital. I got a note from Laura finally in October; she was through with school. I drove to the farm that weekend. "It's no good," Laura said, at the car door. "Go on back. Just don't try to talk me into anything. I'm fed up with everyone trying to talk me into things." "I didn't come for that. How is your mother? Is she home?" "Yes. Come on in. Only you can't stay more than half an hour or so." She was wearing tight pants and a jersey, thin and hard as a model, as taut and strung out as a bowstring. She wasn't wearing her sunglasses. Her mother was not well. I don't know why they let her out, but I could see very little difference from how she had been the last time I had seen her at the hospital. My visit was very brief. Mr. McInally was cordial, obviously pleased to see me. Mrs. McInally glanced at me once, then ignored me. She still didn't look down, although her avoidance wasn't quite as noticeable as it had been. She was less stiff, but it was still there, and she knew it, and she had decided to live with it. Maybe that was easier than the hospital and shock treatment. I looked at Laura, who knew that I knew. She didn't move a muscle anywhere. True or not true, she wasn't going to acknowledge anything now. She walked back to the car with me. I started to get in, then stopped and threw my arms around her. I was weeping, but she was cool and calm. "You'd better get started," she said. "We'll get heavy fog tonight. It's that time of year. You don't want to have to drive in it." She married Billy in the winter sometime. There was no wedding to speak of, from what I heard. They went to a justice of the peace, and then went back to the farm. She had a baby in April. I am still in touch with other people from Beacham, and they tell me how it is with her and her mother. It's been five years now; she has five children. She must have learned that you can't count on four being enough. Her mother recovered, apparently, marvelous what the doctors at Hillside did for her, but poor Mr. McInally leads a dog's life. They both pick at him constantly. I imagine Mrs. McInally walking around with her head up, her eyes straight ahead, restless at night, sniffing. Billy isn't around much. There's talk about a girl. With Billy there will always be talk about a girl. Laura has gained a lot of weight, and never wears sunglasses anymore. I don't go back there. Mrs. McInally still thinks I'm one of them, the ones who tried to take her child from her. And Laura wouldn't want to see me now. I know she wouldn't want to see me. I understand that she is very busy with church work. That and the children take all her time. She never even has time to go into town anymore. The last time she did, three or four years ago, she had such a bad asthma attack that they thought she might die. She couldn't stop coughing for days. They say she is a beautiful mother. ----------------------- At www.fictionwise.com you can: * Rate this story * Find more stories by this author * Get story recommendations