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Show 62 exhaustion, she knows, from the trip, from the solitude and the long walks in the wet mists of the moors; then too it is the dazed dislocation of altered timezones, so that what is daytime for everyone else is the middle of the night for her, and she speaks to them only through a continuous film of sleep. But then she discovers that the face she has not recognized is a doctor: he leaves capsules for her, rigorously administered by her sons, and it seems to her that they too produce a drowziness. through which she cannot quite find herself. Gradually, though, she begins to recover from her exhaustion, and she sees that she is the center of crisis: the house is full, and there is an air of emergency, urgency, fear. Rod's small children peek wide-eyed into the bedroom from the door; they are scolded for it by their mother, who hides in the kitchen. The adults take turns sitting by the bed: Evan reads, Rod examines the newspaper, John sits and simply stares ahead. Even Luel's adolescent child sits by the bed, her thin legs knotted up beneath her and her dark hair falling wild across her eyes, but she says nothing. She leaves as suddenly as she arrives, without a word or nod, but she comes again, day after day, and sits beside the bed. For a moment, Annis imagines that it is a summer-house, where all the family has come together for those most intimate and joyous times, but then the truth intrudes, and she sees that this is crisis, entirely surrounding her. She gets out of bed. She examines the pills left on her dresser by the psychiatrist; she studies the contents of her desk. She calls John. "Why are these people here?" she asks. "I'm only tired from the trip, not ill." |
