Drinking rye fast was a little like drinking fire.
She and Ira had been over every inch of the situation too many times to count. There was nothing left to talk about. Still, it was easier to talk than to sit by herself with her infinite circling, If only this, if that, if that then this, if this then not that, if only . . . the tired, torturous track she’d been circling since she was seventeen. The specifics were new—introducing the shiniest, latest-model engine, the shipwreck!—but the rails were the same, and they led, circling, back and back, a seamless heritage of regret, the genealogy of her mistakes, a lurid line in her mind from the shipwreck to the whistle buoy to her fit to her jealousy and disappointment to her first temperance meetings to dropping out of Radcliffe to more fits to leaving the baby like a parcel, all the way back to the lieutenant pressing her up against the wall.
Looking at it like this, Bea could see that Lillian was a monster, for it was Lillian who had thrown the lieutenant at her and Lillian who had taken Bea’s complaints about the whistle buoy as a request to have it removed. It was Lillian, too, who had accepted Bea’s dropping out, doted on her at Fainwright, watched as she quit the piano and fell into the movement. She had let Bea make decisions Bea was not prepared to make. She had manipulated, cajoled, done nothing, done too much.
Sitting on the bed, sucking Templeton through her teeth, Bea fantasized about killing her mother. This was not new, either—it was a familiar little detour off the circle, a daggerlike path leading to a cliff, off which she pushed Lillian, or on top of which she strangled Lillian before she pushed her off. This was satisfying, somewhat.
Ira whistle-snored. He slept on his back since being moved to the parlor, the blankets wearing into peaks at his feet, knees, belly. He was always cold. On his face was an expression of frank bemusement, the expression she’d associated him with and loved him for when she was a child. Watching him age was like watching herself, early in her adolescence: not wanting to see the disfiguring changes taking place yet unable to turn away.
She should remember to change the sheets when he was next out of the bed, or learn to change them with him in it, like a real nurse. Emma had done that, too, rolled him, understood how it was done. Now she would do it for her husband, Bea supposed.