Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

"Listen to that," he said. "Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”

"It would be very pretty," Maria said. "Go to sleep."

She was almost asleep when she sensed that his weight had shifted.

" Don't ." After she had said it she opened her eyes.

He was swallowing the capsules with a glass of water. There were not very many left on the bed.

"Don't start faking me now." BZ turned off the light and lay down again. "Take my hand. Go back to sleep."

"I'm sorry," she said after a while.

"Hold onto me," BZ said.

When Maria woke again the room was blazing with light and Carter was shaking her and Helene was screaming. Maria thought she had never heard anyone scream the way Helene screamed. She closed her eyes against the light and her ears against Helene and her mind against what was going to happen in the next few hours and tightened her hold on BZ's hand.

Carter called today, but I saw no point in talking to him. On the whole I talk to no one. I concentrate on the way light would strike filled Mason jars on a kitchen windowsill. I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you.

I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

Why, BZ would say.

Why not, I say.