Justin Cronin - The Twelve

“Sorry about this.”

The woman was behind her. She had reached one hand around Sara’s waist, drawing her into stasis; the other hand, holding a cloth, rose to Sara’s face. What in the world? But before Sara could utter a single sound of protest, the cloth was covering her mouth and nose, flooding her senses with an awful choking chemical smell, and a million tiny stars went off inside her head; and that was the end of that.

Lila Kyle. Her name was Lila Kyle.

Though, of course, she knew that the face in the mirror had other names. The Queen of Crazy. Her Loony Majesty. Her Royally Unhinged Highness. Oh, yes, Lila had heard them all. You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to pass one over on Lila Kyle. Sticks and stones, she always said (her father said), sticks and stones, but what galled her, really, was the whispering. People were always whispering! As if they were the adults and she the child, as if she were a bomb that might go off at any second. How strange! Strange and not a little disrespectful, because in the first instance, she wasn’t crazy, they were one hundred percent wrong about that; and in the second, even if she were, even if, for the sake of argument, she liked to strip naked in the moonlight and howl like a dog (poor Roscoe), what concern of it was theirs? How crazy she was or was not? (Though she had to confess, there were days, certain difficult days when her thoughts would not cooperate, like an armful of autumn leaves she was attempting to shove into a bag.) It wasn’t nice . It was beyond the pale . To speak behind a person’s back, to make such vile insinuations—it was outside the bounds of common decency. What had she ever done to deserve such treatment? She kept to herself, she never asked for anything, she was quiet as a mouse; she was wholly content to bide her time in her room with her lovely little things, her bottles and combs and brushes and her dressing table, where now she sat—it seemed she had been sitting there for some time—brushing out her hair.

Her hair. As she shifted her attention to the face in the mirror, a wave of warm recognition flowed through her. The sight always seemed to take her by surprise: the rosy, pore-free skin, the dewy glistening of her eyes, the humid plumpness of her cheeks, the delicate proportionality of her features. She looked… amazing! And most amazing of all was her hair. How lustrous it was, how abundant to the touch, how rich with its molassesy thickness. Not molasses: chocolate. An excellent dark chocolate from someplace wonderful and special, Switzerland, maybe, or one of those other countries, like the candies her father had always kept in his desk; and if she was good, very good, or sometimes for no reason at all, simply because he loved her and wanted her to know it, he would summon her to the sanctified quarters of his masculine-smelling study, where he wrote his important papers and read his inscrutable books and conducted his generally mysterious fatherly business, to bestow upon her the symbol of this love. Only one now , he would say to her, the oneness amplifying the specialness because it implied a future in which further visits to the study would occur. The golden box, the lifting lid, the moment of suspense: her little hand hovered over the rich bounty of its contents like a diver poised at the edge of a pool, calculating the perfect angle for her plunge. There were the chocolate ones, and the ones with nuts, and the ones with the cherry syrup (the only ones she didn’t like; she’d spit them out into a Kleenex). But best of all were the ones with nothing, the pure chocolate nuggets. That was what she craved. The singular treasure of milky melting sweetness that she was attempting to divine from among its fellows. This one? This one?

“Yolanda!”

Silence.

“Yolanda!”

In a flurry of skirts and veils and windy fabric, the woman came bustling into the room. Really now, Lila thought, what a ridiculous getup that was. How many times had Lila instructed her to dress more practically?

“Yolanda, where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling.”

The woman was looking at Lila as if she’d lost her mind. Had they gotten to her, too? “Yolanda, ma’am?”

“Who else would I call?” Lila sighed exorbitantly. The woman could be so dense. Though her English was not the best. “I would like… something. If you please. Por favor .”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course. Would you like me to read to you?”

“Read? No.” Though the thought was suddenly appealing; a little Beatrix Potter might be the very thing to soothe her nerves. Peter Rabbit in his little blue jacket. Squirrel Nutkin and his brother Twinkleberry. The two of them could get into such mischief! Then she remembered.

“Chocolate. Do we have any chocolate?”

The woman still appeared totally out of it. Maybe she’d gotten into the liquor. “Chocolate, ma’am?”

“Leftover Halloween candy, maybe? I’m sure we have some somewhere. Anything will do. Hershey’s Kisses. Almond Joy. A Kit Kat. Whatever is fine.”

“Um …”

“ Sí ? A little choc-o-LAH-tay? Check the cabinet over the sink.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking for.”

Now, this was annoying. The woman was pretending not to know what chocolate was!

“I fail to see what the problem is, Yolanda. I have to say, your attitude has begun to trouble me. A great deal, in fact.”

“Please don’t be angry. If I knew what it was, I’d be glad to get it for you. Maybe Jenny knows.”

“That’s my point, you see. That is precisely what I’m saying.” Lila sighed heavily. A pity, but there was really nothing left to be done. Better to rip the band-aid off than drag things out.

“I’m afraid, Yolanda, I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Go?”

“Go, yes. No más . We no longer require your services, I’m afraid.”

The woman’s eyes seemed practically to pop from her head. “You can’t!”

“I’m truly sorry. I wish things had worked out. But under the circumstances, you really leave me with no alternative.”

The woman hurled herself at Lila’s knees. “Please! I’ll do anything!”

“Yolanda, get ahold of yourself.”

“I’m begging you,” the woman blubbered into her skirt. “You know what they’ll do. I’ll work harder, I swear!”

Lila had expected her to take it badly, but this undignified display was wholly unexpected. It was positively embarrassing. The urge to offer some consoling touch was strong, but Lila resisted it, lest this draw things out, leaving her hands hovering awkwardly in the air. Maybe she should have waited until David got home. He was always better at this sort of thing.

“We’ll provide you with a reference, of course. And two weeks’ pay. You really shouldn’t take it so hard.”

“It’s a death sentence!” She hugged Lila’s knees as if she were clinging to a life raft. “They’ll send me to the basement!”

“I hardly think this qualifies as a death sentence. You’re completely overreacting.”

But the woman was beyond appeals to reason. Unable to form words through the storm of her uncontrollable sobs, she had given up her pleading, soaking Lila’s skirt with mucusy tears. The only thing on Lila’s mind was extricating herself from the situation as quickly as possible. She hated things like this, she hated them.

“What’s going on in here?”

Lila lifted her gaze toward the figure standing in the door, at once breathing a sigh of relief. “David. Thank God. We seem to have a bit of a situation here. Yolanda, well, she’s a little bit upset. I’ve decided to let her go.”