Флетчер Флора - Take Me Home

“That’s true. You’re not. I don’t blame you for not giving me any money, and I don’t blame you for being angry.”

“I’m not angry. I was angry in the bedroom, but I’m over it.”

“You were right to be angry. You’ve been very kind, and I’ve been a perfect bitch. I’m ashamed of myself.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be.”

“I am. I’m grateful and ashamed. Thank you for giving me a warm place to stay.”

“It’s all right. It was nothing.”

“I think I’d better go now. Good-by.”

Looking at her, his despair mounting, he knew already, although he was not ready to admit it, that he could not send her off to somewhere with nothing. He wondered, if she would try again to commit suicide, and if she would succeed if she tried. It did not seem possible that she could go on and on failing. He had a mental picture of her in the city morgue, a slim and childish body in a stark box that pulled out of a wall like a drawer. He had never been in a morgue and had no clear idea of what one was like, but he was certain that it would be bleak and cold and inhospitable to the dead.

“Look,” he said. “There’s no hurry about leaving. Sit down for a while.”

“I thought you wanted me to leave as soon as possible.”

“I was angry when I said that. I told you I’ve got over it.”

“Nevertheless, I ought to leave at once. It will only be harder to go if I delay.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

“I don’t know. Quite a while. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not hungry.”

“I might be able to spare you a little money after all.”

“I wouldn’t want to take it. I’d be ashamed.”

“Oh, nonsense. I wish you’d sit down and stay a little longer. I’d like to talk with you.”

She shrugged and sat down in a chair facing him, smoothing the skirt of her wool dress over her knees. Her legs, he saw, were quite good, with slender ankles and clean lines curving nicely to the calves. She was, in fact, a pretty girl altogether, and she would be, he felt, even prettier if only she would take the trouble to make the most of what she had. It would be a pity if she were actually to come, sooner or later, to the bad end she seemed to be looking for. As he watched her, he was reminded suddenly of someone else he had once known.

“What is there to talk about?” she said.

“Tell me about yourself.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“There must be something.”

“Nothing interesting. Nothing you’d care to hear.”

“If you want me to give you some money or try to help you, you could at least tell me the truth.”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“It’s pretty obvious.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because you tried to kill yourself, and almost did. No one tries to kill himself over nothing.”

She folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at them. He thought at first that she was considering an answer, but after a long period of silence it seemed that she had merely decided not to make any answer at all.

“All right,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Then she looked up from her folded hands, and he saw that his first impression had been right, that she had been considering an answer all the while.

“It’s evident,” she said, “that I tried to kill myself because I didn’t want to go on living. The truth is, someone I loved tried to kill me last night, and I saved my life by walking and walking and refusing to die, and then later, this morning, I decided it would be better to die after all, and so I tried, as you know, but it was no use. It’s rather silly, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it?”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’d rather not tell you.”

“Because no one did?”

“No. It’s true. Why should I lie about it?”

“Why should you lie about anything? I’ve got a notion you’re pretty good at it. Maybe you think it’s fun. Maybe it’s essential to your ego.”

“If I tell you what happened, will you believe me? There’s no point in telling you if you won’t.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“All right, then. I’ve been living with my cousin. Her name is Lila Galvin. Her father, who is dead, was my father’s brother. She’s very beautiful and clever, and I loved her, and for a long time she loved me, but then I began to bore her and become a nuisance, and she doesn’t love me anymore. I don’t think she trusts me, either, and she’s afraid that I may destroy her. Or destroy, at least, the kind of life she has made for herself. It isn’t true, I wouldn’t do anything deliberately to hurt her, but she thinks I might, and that’s why she tried to kill me. Because she wants to be rid of me and is afraid of what I may say or do. Do you understand?”

She was looking at him levelly, holding his eyes, and he saw in hers an expression that he thought was composed of the pride and pain of masochism. He was convinced that she was deriving, now that she had begun to talk, a kind of intense and morbid pleasure from exposing in herself what he would surely consider shameful, even if she did not. And it was true that he did. He considered it shameful, and it made him sick. Not the aberrance itself, which was common enough, but the specific existence of the aberrance in this particular person — this thin girl with folded hands and pained eyes who was beginning to be someone he liked, and who might have become, with better luck on different terms, someone he could have loved.

“I think I do,” he said.

“Well, then,” she said, “that’s the way I am, and that’s what happened, and now I hope we needn’t talk about it any more.”

“How do you know she tried to kill you? Your Cousin Lila. What did she do?”

“Oh, it was very clever and almost worked, and it would probably have been much better if it had. It would have been so easy, simply a matter of going to sleep and never waking, and there was even music to die by. I wasn’t feeling well, very depressed, which is the way I often feel, and she put me to bed and gave me too much sleeping medicine and went away. You see how it would have been? She’d have come back and found me dead, and it would have seemed like suicide, and that’s exactly what everyone would have thought it was.”

“How do you know she gave you too much sleeping medicine? How did you discover it? Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”

“No. I didn’t imagine it. She had been angry with me and had said that I would be better off dead, and later, after she had gone and I was lying in bed in the dark with the music playing. I suddenly remembered what she had said, and I was certain that I would die if I didn’t do something to prevent it. I got up and looked at the bottle the medicine had been in, and the bottle was empty, and I had seen earlier that it was almost full. There was no question about it. None at all. She had given me too much, and I was dying painlessly, as she wished, and when I knew this, although I had no particular desire to live, it was somehow imperative that I not die. It makes no sense at all, does it? Anyhow, that’s the way it was, and I had heard that the thing to do was to keep moving and not, above all, to go to sleep, and so I dressed and started walking in the streets. After a long time I was too tired to walk any farther, and that’s when I went into the diner where we met. You were nasty and chintzy about the coffee.”

“Never mind the coffee. If all this is true, what do you intend to do about it?”

“Nothing. What is there to do?”

“Well, if this cousin of yours tried to kill you, you should at least report it to the police.”