Sunshine (14 page)

I suppose I didn't realize how rough I was that first morning. After I had one bath I had another. (Bless landladies with absurdly huge water heaters.) I washed my hair three times during that first bath and twice during the second. Hot water and soap and shampoo hurt like blazes, but it was a wonderful, human, normal, this-world sort of hurt. Getting dressed wasn't too difficult because my wardrobe specializes in soft, well-worn, and comfortable, but finding shoes and socks that didn't feel like they were scarifying my poor feet with steel wool was hard. Then I drank a pot of very strong tea and on the caffeine buzz I almost half convinced myself that I felt almost half normal and if I felt half normal I must look half normal.

Wrong.

At the last minute I didn't burn the dress. I put it in the sink with some handwash stuff and then hung it in a corner with a bowl under it to drip dry. It leaked thin bloody-looking water and this made me so queasy I almost screwed it up to be burned anyway. But I still didn't.

I did burn the underwear I'd worn. It was like I had to burn something. I took it out—nearly on tiptoe, clinging to the shadows, as if I was doing something illicit I might be caught at—and stuffed it into the ashes and wood chips on Yolande's garden bonfire heap. My hands shook when I struck the match, but that might have been the caffeine. It burned surprisingly well for a few scraps of cloth, as if my eagerness to see something go up in smoke was itself inflammatory.

I stuck that note in a drawer so I didn't have to see or think about it. Or about who had written it.

The house key that had been a jackknife lay on top of a pile of books next to the sofa. It had been one of the first things I'd seen when I'd managed to lever myself upright. I had done all of this other stuff—wash, rewash, inject caffeine, set fire to things—while not deciding what to do about it. It wasn't that an extra house key was an enormous problem. But it was a house key that had been a pocketknife. Was supposed to be a pocketknife. And I
missed
my knife. I wanted it back. And there was only one way to get it back, which would remind me of all that stuff I was working on forgetting. I had returned to the world where I made cinnamon rolls and was my mother's, not my father's, daughter, and I wanted to stay there.

I had opened all the windows, and the door to the balcony; I wanted as much fresh air as I could get. I wanted no faintest remaining scent here of anything that might have come back with me last night. The blanket that had covered me was soaking in the tub. I had brushed the sofa within an inch of its life, with a whisk broom that would take the hide off an armadillo. The cushion I had had my head on had spot remover troweled over it and was waiting to dry.

I stood on the balcony, closed my eyes, and let the sun and the soft breeze move over me. Through me. I heard—felt—the leaves of my tree stir and rustle. My grandmother had taught me that if you handle magic, you have to clean up after yourself. Just like washing (or burning) your clothes or troweling spot remover on a sofa cushion.

I went back indoors to pick up the house key that shouldn't be left a house key. I knelt on the floor inside the balcony door, in the sunlight, near enough the open door to smell the breeze from the garden.

It was so easy this time. I felt the change, felt the key slip from keyness to knifeness. It was like kneading dough, feeling the thing become what you want it to be under your hands, feeling it responding to you, feeling it transform itself as a result of your effort. Your power. Your knowledge.

I didn't like it being easy.

But I liked having my knife back. It lay in my hand, looking like it always had. “Welcome back, friend,” I murmured, and refused to feel silly for talking to a jackknife. Maybe I was talking to myself too.

Then I put it in my pocket and went to look for incense. I never use incense in my life as a coffeehouse baker—I much prefer the smell of fresh bread—but it was one of those things that people who need to give you something but haven't a clue who you are give you. My aunt Edna, my mother's other sister, every year at one solstice or another, gives me a packet of the current hot fashion in incense. So there was probably some lurking in the back of a cupboard somewhere. There was. I lit a wand of World Harmonics Jasmine and put it in a glass and said the words my grandmother had taught me. I didn't have to remember them, they were right there, like my tree.

Then I called the coffeehouse to tell them I was back, and all hell broke loose. Especially after Mom belted out to my apartment when I explained I didn't have a car any more, to pick me up, and got her first look at me.

I won't go into a lot about that. It was not one of our finest mother-daughter moments.

I did go to the doctor because everybody said I had to. The doctor said there wasn't much wrong with me but minor dehydration and exhaustion, gave me a tetanus shot, and some cream to put on both my feet and my breast. He asked me how I'd got the cut on my breast because as he put it, in that portentously unruffled and infuriating way of doctors, “It looks a bit nasty.” But I hadn't decided how much I was going to tell anyone, and having had everyone who had seen me so far freaking out (except the doctor, who was doing portentously unruffled like a kick to the head) wasn't helping. So I said I didn't remember. He said “mm hmm” and put some stitches in so it would heal neatly, muttered something about post-traumatic shock syndrome, offered me a reference to someone who could talk to me about remembering and not remembering, and sent me away. Mel had brought me. He borrowed Charlie's car so I didn't have to ride pillion on a motorcycle. (I hadn't known Mel could drive a car. He drove his motorcycles in all weather, including heavy snow and thunderstorms.) And he brought me back. To the coffeehouse. The thought of going back to my apartment was only fleetingly tempting. I wanted to return to my
life
, and my life, for better or worse, was in the coffeehouse bakery. Also, I wanted to get the freaking out over with so that I didn't have to keep coming back to it, and I knew Mom wasn't through yet. Charlie had nearly had to tie her up to let Mel take me to the doctor. Mom is a bit prone to overreacting. But Mel, when he first saw me, turned haggard, and his eyes seemed to go about a million miles deep, and I suddenly felt I knew what he was going to look like when he was ninety. And he didn't say anything at all, which was probably worse than the noise everyone else was making.

Mom tried to insist that I stay at the house—move back in with her and Charlie and my brothers. I said that I would do nothing of the kind. I meant it, but I was a little hindered by the fact that I no longer had a car. (They never did find my car. I had liked that car.) That afternoon, after talking to the doctor and about forty-seven kinds of cop, Mom and I had a big shouting match that I didn't have the strength for, and I burst into tears and said that I would
walk
home if I had to and then Mom started weeping too and it was all pretty ghastly. Charlie at this point reminded Mom in a reasonable facsimile of his normal voice (he kept starting to pat my shoulder and then stopping because I'd told him, truthfully, that I was sore all over) that there was no longer a bedroom for me: the spare bedroom and den had disappeared when Charlie knocked all the downstairs walls out, and Kenny had moved out of the boys' bedroom into my old bedroom upstairs. This only made Mom cry harder.

Then Mel, who had been left more or less singlehanded to run the coffeehouse while all the drama went on in the office, began collaring the staff who had crammed into the office door to watch and be a kind of Greek chorus of horror, and one by one heaving them physically toward what they ought to be doing, like minding the customers, before
they
all came back to see what was going on too, which, given Charlie's kind of customers, they would be quite capable of. When he'd forged his way through to me, he handed Charlie the spatula he was still holding in his other hand, like the relay runner handing on the torch at Thermopylae, and said, “Can you hold the kitchen a minute?” and hustled me off to the bakery.
My
bakery. Just standing in my own domain again, where I was Queen of the Cinnamon Roll, the Bran Muffin, the Orange-Date Tea Bread—the Caramel Cataclysm and the Rocky Road Avalanche—made me feel better. I had to cancel the immediate impulse to put on a clean apron and check my flour supply. It was far too
clean
in here for a Thursday.…

“Nobody's been in here while you've been gone. We gave Paulie the time off.”

Paulie was my new apprentice. I had stopped crying for the moment but this made my aching eyes fill up again. “Oh …”

“Hey, we didn't know what to do. No carthaginian idea.” Mel sounded grim but studiedly calm. For the first time I had some glimpse of what it must have been like for everybody here when I disappeared. I wasn't the disappearing kind. They would have feared the worst. It was the right response. And given what could have happened, I probably looked a lot worse than I was, so everybody was taking one look at me and fitting this vision against what their dreams had been churning out the last two days.

“Sweetheart.…”

I stiffened.

“Hey. Sheer. This is me, okay? I saw you not taking the name the doctor wanted to give you about someone to talk to. You don't have to talk to me unless you want to. Or anyone else, including Charlie and your mom. But if you tell me what you do want, I'll help you make it happen. If you'll let me.”

Thanks to all the gods and angels for Mel. I couldn't explain that while yes, I'd always been a bit solitary, a bit disinclined to talk about what mattered to me, about what I was thinking about, it was
crucial
that I be able to go home, to
my
home, my private space, now. Alone. Where I didn't have to lie.

I hadn't forgotten nearly as much as I was pretending I had.

Mind you, I'd forgotten a lot. Post-traumatic whatsit, like the doctor said. The cops mentioned post-traumatic whatsit too. I had to check in with the cops because Mom and Charlie had, of course, reported me missing. I said that I'd driven out to the lake Monday night and didn't remember anything after that. No, I didn't remember where I'd been. No, I didn't remember how I'd got home two days later. No, I didn't remember why I was so beat up. Mel went with me for that too, even though he was pretty allergic to cops. (Charlie, trying to make a joke, said that he hadn't done so much cooking for years, and did I want Mel to take me anywhere else? Florida? The Catskills?)
And
the cop shrink they made me talk to had to go into it again. The gist is that you only remember what you can bear to remember. If you're lucky, as you get stronger, you can bear to remember a little more, and eventually you get round to remembering all of it and by remembering it then it can't mess up your life. That's the theory. Fat lot they know.

I didn't say “vampires” to anyone, and I sure remembered that much. If I had said it, SOF wouldn't have just talked to me, they'd've
kept
me. People don't escape from vampires. I wasn't going to think about how I'd escaped from vampires—let alone tell SOF about it—so let's just pretend I hadn't escaped from vampires. Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog.

I had to talk to SOF, because anything mysterious might be about the Others, and SOF were the Other police. But I told them I didn't remember anything too. By the time I talked to SOF I was getting good at saying I didn't remember. I could look 'em in the eye and cay it like I meant it. They were cleverer about questioning me. They asked me stuff like what the lake had looked like that night, where exactly I'd sat on the porch of the cabin. They weren't trying to trick me; they were trying to help me remember, possibly to our mutual benefit, trying to help me find a way in to remembering. I pretended there was no door, or if there was one, it had six locks and four bolts and a steel bar
and
it had been bricked over years ago.

It was easier, saying I didn't remember. I walled it all out, including everybody's insistent, well-meaning concern. And it turned out to be easy—a little too easy—to burst into tears if anyone tried to go on asking me questions. Some people are mean drunks: I'm a mean weeper.

The first days started passing and became the first week. The bruises were fading and the scratches skinned over, and I began to look less like hell on earth. On the second Monday movies night at the Seddons' after my return, people began to make eye contact with me again without looking like it was costing them.

And I was making cinnamon rolls and bread and all like a normal crazed coffeehouse baker again, thus deflecting poor Paulie's imminent nervous breakdown. He was going to be good, but he was still new and slow from lack of experience, eager to gain that experience, he'd been several weeks going through the wringer, or the five-speed industrial strength mixer, with me, and then I disappeared and everybody was barking at him because his presence reminded them that I wasn't there, and sending him home. I wanted to cheer him up, so I let him in on the secret of Bitter Chocolate Death and he made it, beautifully, first time. This bucked him up so much he started humming while he worked. Gah. It was bad enough having someone in the bakery with me some of the time, so I could teach him what to do and keep an eye on him while he did it: humming was pushing it. Was it absolutely necessary to have a cheerful apprentice?

Charlie found someone who could loan me a car till I could replace the one they never found, and then found another one when the first one had to go back. The insurance took forever to cough up but it did at last. Their agent wanted to complain about my not remembering exactly what had happened, but he was promptly inundated by people from Charlie's, staff and regulars, offering to be character references, the doctor I'd seen and the cop shrink I'd seen said I was genuine,
and
then Mom started writing letters. The company might have held out against the rest, but no one resists Mom for long when she starts one of her letter-writing campaigns.