thinking about killing Taber, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even know what a sidon looks like. I was only thinking about Kovich and waiting for him to come and finish killing me.” She was breathing shallowly now and very fast, taking a breath between almost every word. “What do sidons look like, Ruby?”
I tried to remember what Kovich had looked like when he came to find my uncle, his broken hands already infected, his face already red from the fever that would consume him. “I want you to copy me,” he had said to my uncle. “I want you to learn to play the pianoboard from me before I die.” I want you to kill a man for me. I want you to cut out his eyes. I want you to do what I can’t do.
I could not remember what he looked like, except that he had been very tall, almost as tall as my uncle, as me. It seemed to me that he had looked like my uncle, but surely it was the other way around. “I want you to copy me,” he had said to my uncle. I want you to do what I can’t do. Pearl had asked him to kill the tapper, and he had promised to. Then Pearl had asked him to finish killing her, and he had promised to do that, too, though he could no more have murdered her than he could have played the pianoboard with his ruined hands, though he had not even known how well a Mirror copies or how blindly. So my uncle had killed the tapper, and I have finished killing Pearl, but it was Kovich, Kovich who did the murders.
“Sidons are very tall,” I said, “and they play the pianoboard.”
She didn’t answer. The twillpaper strap on the lantern burst into flame. I watched it burn.
“It’s all right that you didn’t kill Taber,” she said. “But you mustn’t let him put the blame for killing me on you.”
“I did kill Taber,” I said. “I gave him the real sparker. I put it in his jacket before he left to go out to the sidons.”
She tried to sit up. “Tell them you were copying him, that you couldn’t help yourself,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me.
“I will,” I said, looking into the darkness.
Over the horizon somewhere is Taber. He is looking this way, wondering if I have killed her yet. Soon he will take out his cigar and put his thumb against the trigger of the sparker, and the sidons will go up one after the other, a string of lights. I wonder if he will have time to know he has been murdered, to wonder who killed him.
I wonder, too, kneeling here with Pearl’s head on my knees. Perhaps I did copy Pearl, as she says. Or Jewell, or Kovich, or even Taber. Or all of them. The worst thing is not that things are done to you. It is not knowing who is doing them. Maybe I did not copy anyone, and I am the one who murdered Taber. I hope so.
“You should go back before you get burned,” Pearl says, so softly I can hardly hear her.
“I will,” I say but I cannot. They have tied me up, they have locked me in, and now I am only waiting for them to come and finish killing me.
DAISY, IN THE SUN
During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day, the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine would be going. It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned down for reasons that had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private armageddons to be faced.
None of the others were any help. Daisy’s brother, when she knelt beside him on the kitchen floor and said, “Do you remember when we lived at Grandma’s house, just the three of us, nobody else?” looked at her blankly over the pages of his book, his face closed and uninterested. “What is your book about?” she asked kindly. “Is it about the sun? You always used to read your books out loud to me at Grandma’s. All about the sun.”
He stood up and went to the windows of the kitchen and looked out at the snow, tracing patterns on the dry window. The book, when Daisy looked at it, was about something else altogether.
“It didn’t always snow like this at home, did it?” Daisy would ask her grandmother. “It couldn’t have snowed all the time, not even in Canada, could it?”
It was the train this time, not the kitchen, but her grandmother went on measuring for the curtains as if she didn’t notice. “How can the trains run if it snows all the time?” Her grandmother didn’t answer her. She went on measuring the wide curved train windows with her long yellow tape measure. She wrote the measurements on little slips of paper, and they drifted from her pockets like the snow outside, without sound.
Daisy waited until it was the kitchen again. The red cafe curtains hung streaked and limp across the bottom half of the square windows. “The sun faded the curtains, didn’t it?” she asked slyly; but her grandmother would not be tricked. She measured and wrote and dropped the measurements like ash around her.
Daisy looked from her grandmother to the rest of them, shambling up and down the length of her grandmother’s kitchen. She would not ask them. Talking to them would be like admitting they belonged here, muddling clumsily around the room, bumping into each other.
Daisy stood up. “It was the sun that faded them,” she said. “I remember,” and went into her room and shut the door.
The room was always her own room, no matter what happened outside. It stayed the same, yellow ruffled muslin on the bed, yellow priscillas at the window. She had refused to let her mother put blinds up in her room. She remembered that quite clearly. She had stayed in her room the whole day with her door barricaded. But she could not remember why her mother had wanted to put them up or what had happened afterward.
Daisy sat down cross-legged in the middle of the bed, hugging the yellow ruffled pillow from her bed against her chest. Her mother constantly reminded her that a young lady sat with her legs together. “You’re fifteen, Daisy. You’re a young lady whether you like it or not.”
Why could she remember things like that and not how they had gotten here and where her mother was and why it snowed all the time yet was never cold? She hugged the pillow tightly against her and tried, tried to remember.
It was like pushing against something, something both yielding and unyielding. It was herself, trying to push her breasts flat against her chest after her mother had told her she was growing up, that she would need to wear a bra. She had tried to push through to the little girl she had been before, but even though she pressed them into herself with the flats of her hands, they were still there. A barrier, impossible to get through.
Daisy clutched at the yielding pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. “Grandma came in,” she said out loud, reaching for the one memory she could get to, “Grandma came in and said…”
She was looking at one of her brother’s books. She had been holding it, looking at it, one of her brother’s books about the sun, and as the door opened he reached out and took it away from her. He was angry about the book? Her grandmother came in, looking hot and excited, and he took the book away from her. Her grandmother said, “They got the material in. I bought enough for all the windows.” She had a sack full of folded cloth, red-and- white gingham. “I bought almost the whole bolt,” her grandmother said. She was flushed. “Isn’t it pretty?” Daisy reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth. And… Daisy clutched at the pillow, wrinkling the ruffled edge. She had reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth and then…
It was no use. She could not get any further. She had never been able to get any further. Sometimes she sat on her bed for days. Sometimes she started at the end and worked back through the memory and it was still the same. She could not remember any more on either side. Only the book and her grandmother coming in and reaching out her hand.
Daisy opened her eyes. She put the pillow back on the bed and uncrossed her legs and took a deep breath. She was going to have to ask the others. There was nothing else to do.
She stood a minute by the door before she opened it, wondering which of the places it would be. It was her mother’s living room, the walls a cool blue and the windows covered with venetian blinds. Her brother sat on the gray-blue carpet reading. Her grandmother had taken down one of the blinds. She was measuring the tall window.
