Shelter

Coming In

She sank down on the curbstone.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go back. It’s so cold. Let’s make a big lunch. I’ll help you.”
“Yes, let’s. But where does it end?”
“It will. Come.”
“Yes.” But there was the awareness that nothing had been solved.

Kitchen

They tied their aprons and started lunch. She tried to concentrate.
“I’d rather have freshly pressed garlic go into the sauce. We let it simmer. It’ll do more to the sauce than the powder.” She couldn’t ignore the dull pain of despair that had been simmering inside her—weeks turning into months, turning into years.
“You can start cooking the pasta now.”
“How many bouillon cubes?”
“One—and some salt. Let me do the salt.”

Roof

Hard times had bred a plague of fortune seekers—like seasonal climate conditions breeding plagues of gnats, fleas, and ticks. Two men called at her door. They said they had been working on her neighbours’ house and had noticed loose and broken tiles on her roof, and lead sheets peeling from the chimneys. She signed for immediate repair work, to be carried out for $6,000, and bank-transferred the money on the spot, the men overseeing the transaction on her laptop.
She heard sounds: a brief cry, outlined in the short silence that followed; a thud; the other man shouting something. A roofer had slipped and plunged. She called emergency services. The man didn’t move. His mouth was lifeless. His eyes scuttled like water bugs in a jar rinsed clean and filled at the tap. An ambulance pulled away with this man—now face-masked to help him breathe. He had all but suffocated. How many of such cases, she wondered, ended in asphyxiation? Fall, snap, suffocate. Or jump, etc. She settled the matter with the remaining man.

Dining Room

“Now, let’s do the buttons.”
“Yes, let’s.”
“I’ll make a start on the first. Then you take over. I’ll show you how to finish. You can do the other buttons by yourself, from start to finish. I’ll watch.”
“Will you help?”
“And help.”
They sewed the buttons back onto her new coat. As so often happens with new garments, the buttons had been shed easily, one after the other, the child dutifully collecting them as they came off and stowing them away in the coat’s pockets. Life hadn’t happened to her. It had failed to play out. She had positioned herself impeccably—always—with the intention of making it to the other side, the safe ground. But she had never got there. Every success she seemed to have had (a certain wealth, all gone now) was positioning, not payout. There was no achievement, no completion. And so, despite all her successes, always suspended mid-air, never safe (a curtain of fear she imagined hanging between her and the world), she could be caught out at any moment and made to lose everything. Oh, if only I had not been constantly aware of it before that moment arrived, she thought, at least I might have known instances of happiness.

Middle Room

“My party is in two weeks.”
“I know, love. We will send out the invitations today, shall we?”
“Do let’s! I know exactly how I want them. Will you help me make them?”
“Of course. We’ll do it together.”
She felt she was procrastinating. Her shelter was the little harbour of her nightly dreams of death. Before halfway through each day she started longing for her bed.

Dining Room

“We should clean the fish tank.”
She loved and praised the fantails for having been with them for more than three years already. They had bought them only days after her husband had died. He had put up the tank in a corner of the dining room. He had collapsed shortly after, then died (alcohol, death disclosing the addiction).
“Oh, but must we do it now?”
“I will do it.”

Teen Bedroom

They bought two ottomans for her room. They were cherry red, with red flowers stitched into the fabric—vaguely rose-like. She would finish middle school in a few months’ time, then start high school. She had begun to want such things for her room. Even now, she realized, at her age, in the situation she was in, she could represent to herself the excitement of her daughter. She felt a tingle of excitement herself. It was not just about the ottomans. It wasn’t even about an entire room done up new, as would soon be the next thing. It was about the new life extending hazily to the mind’s eye of the twelve-year-old, with promise undefined.

Dining Room

During their big Sunday breakfast, they watched the deer that had come all the way down from the dune forest into their beautiful garden to eat the ivy undergrowth. She noticed it trampling valuable vegetation, but the deer she valued more. Fresh flowers stood in her rooms every week. She ironed. I can still iron, she thought. I can still clean. I prepare good meals daily. I take good care of her. I can take care of our home. I can’t deflect the attacks from outside, she thought. I can’t stop them. All I want, she told herself, is to stay here; take care of her; stand watch over her as she outgrows my protection—until only my love for her remains, more than hers for me. Or different, anyway.

Front Room

To fortify her life against the ongoing siege—ignoring, she thought even as she acted, her better judgment—she had a large screenprint, bought in better days, framed and hung on the whitewashed wall in the front room. She had a lithograph and a watercolor with food-related subjects framed and hung in the dining room.

Middle Room

Most of her books were in the large bookcase in the middle room, where the TV was too, which she didn’t use. She had many books. The bookcase could not hold all her books—not by a long stretch. She had stored books in three of her upstairs rooms. She read every day, hour upon hour upon hour, if she was allowed hours at a time.

Dining Room

They carefully stuffed silver-tone bells into small balloons. They inflated the balloons and wrapped wool yarn drenched in diluted glue around them. They blow-dried the wool harness, then punctured and pried out the balloons, releasing the bells into the structure, the bells tinkling unconcerned with mood or timing as their fingers worked. The yarn eggs, mounted on embossed gel candle jars, were sitting beside their plates at next day’s breakfast. It was Easter Sunday.
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