She wondered why he was smiling at her.
Was he happy to see her in pain? She didn’t blame him. She couldn’t. She had earned this pain, even if she didn’t understand it.
“I don’t know why I did it,” she mumbled breathlessly, her words sluggish, her body heavy. “I don’t know why I did it, Michael.”
He didn’t know either. How could he? She was just his crazy cheating wife. He deserved better than her. Everyone did.
*
Delores woke to the soft sound of the television. She opened her eyes sluggishly, letting the world come slowly back into view. It was night-time. The darkness had crept in like a thief and stolen away another day. Naughty night, she thought deliriously, naughty thieving night.
Michael snored softly in the chair next to her bed, and she turned her head to look at him. His suit jacket was crumpled. It would be terrible to iron. He was sleeping at any awkward angle, so awkward she knew that he would wake and be in pain tomorrow. He’d have a headache and back ache and he wouldn’t be able to concentrate at work.
He’d tell her it was her fault, and it would be.
It always was.
She tried to say his name, but the words wouldn’t come. Her mind could think them, but they wouldn’t leave her lips. Her mouth was a vault that was locked, closed for business it might say if it wore a sign.
Closed for business.
She was closed for business.
She had loved him once. And he had loved her. Michael had been her everything. Her knight, her shield, her armour, her sword. He’d been her world, until he wasn’t anymore.
It was all her fault, of course it was. Whose else could it ever have been?
She turned at the sound of a soft creak and found a nurse coming in. The nurse came over to the bed. Her face was round, and she had two chins. Her eyes were barely there. Just two small pin-pricks in her face. She reminded Delores of a weasel sneaking around in the dark.
Delores watched the nurse smile at her and then inject something into the tube attached to her arm. When Delores tried to pull away and use her jittery numb hands to stop the nurse, she only smiled some more.
Delores mumbled something incoherent, something so rambling that even she herself couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“Hush now, child. It’s going to be okay.” The nurse stroked along Delores’s forehead soothingly. The motion relaxing and calming.Still a weasel, but perhaps a kind weasel, Delores thought. “Hush now.”
Warmth slid along Delores’s cheeks. Wet tears were escaping once again.I don’t know why I did it, she thought, willing her mouth to open and the words to come out, but they didn’t. The need to say them was a compulsion. She had denied them for days, not wanting to curse her lips with them. But she had said them now. Once, twice, three times. It didn’t matter how many. She had said it out loud. Admitted it to everyone. And now they were the only words she wanted to say.
Perhaps this was hell, she wondered hazily, her mind drifting around the room on the crest of a wave.
Perhaps this is hell.
‘Mama? Where are you mama? Anabel’s voice sang out.
Mama?’
Delores blinked into the dark, the beady eyes of the nurse still staring down at her. “Hush,” she soothed.
‘Mama?
Where are you, mama?
Don’t hurt us, mama.
We love you, mama.
We love you.’
Delores’s eyelids fluttered closed, the stillness of the night swallowing her. Her mind began to slow, a thundering of hooves converging into one dull ache.
