The Last Night

This is the last day, but it is enough. Hollis is staying in the city overnight and will not be out until late this evening, and Della is driving down to meet him for dinner, which I encouraged, which I did with my whole heart, and which I have never done before in my life.

Della wanted to sleep in my room last night. The sly thing. She brought it up the way you bring up a favor for somebody else's benefit: that she could put the air mattress down and be right there, that it would be company, that the fog was making her jumpy. I told her I would undoubtedly rest better in a night entirely alone. I said it lightly, and I looked at my hands while I said it, which turned out to be the right thing to do, because she watched my hands the whole time.

That was clever of me. For in fact I was not alone a bit.

As soon as the moon was up, and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and went to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before the sky got gray we had peeled off yards of it. A strip as high as my head and halfway around the room. It came away in long curling sheets, and the plaster underneath was white, so white, like something that had been kept out of the sun its whole life.

And then the sun came up and that awful pattern began, in the new light, to laugh at me, and I declared I would finish it today.

We leave tomorrow. They are already carrying my furniture back down the stairs — the chairs, the little table, the lamp — to leave the room as they found it, and Della is supervising, in the way she supervises, with a clipboard and a cheerful voice.

Della looked at the wall and stood there in amazement with her hand flat against her chest. I told her merrily that I had done it out of pure spite, at the vicious thing, at the way it had been looking at me all summer. She laughed, and said she would not have minded doing it herself, and that I must not get tired.

How she betrayed herself that time.

But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me. Not alive.

She tried to get me out of the room afterwards. It was too patent: the car keys, the suggestion of lunch in the village, the voice she uses for the baby's temperature. I said that the room was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down and sleep as long as I could, and that no one was to wake me, not even for dinner, and that I would call down when I woke.

So now she is gone, and the cleaning woman is gone, and the boxes are gone, and there is nothing left in this room but the great bed, which does not move because it is bolted to the floor, with the bare foam mattress the family keeps upstairs for it.

We are supposed to sleep downstairs tonight and drive home in the morning. That is the plan. I have heard the plan many times. The intake forms for Marbury are on the hall table, and Della has filled in my name and my date of birth in her round handwriting, and the appointment is the eleventh of October, which is six weeks after the day I am supposed to agree to it.

I quite like the room now that it is bare. You can see what the children did to it: the scratches, the gouges, the plaster dug out at the height of a small furious hand. They tore about this place like animals. The bed frame is fairly chewed, at the foot, at exactly the height of a child's mouth.

I have work to do. Why has he never once asked about it? I have worked out why: the app still shows two months of a woman who sleeps, night after night, and a man who has already decided what your chart says does not need to look at the chart. The hotel repeat is still open on the laptop downstairs. It has been open since May. It can stay open.

I have locked the door and thrown the key out of the window, out over the porch rail, down into the hostas by the front walk, where the leaves are big enough to hide a body. I do not want to go out, and I do not want anybody to come in, until Hollis is here.

I want to astonish him.

I have a length of cord up here. It was in the third cottage, the one the family keeps locked, which has a window that does not latch — I found that out in July, on a morning Della had driven into the village with the lists, and I have been keeping the cord in the gap in the plaster behind the skirting board ever since, which is why Della never found it. She is thorough about rooms and not about walls. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her.

But I forgot that I cannot reach far without something to stand on, and this bed will not move. I tried to lift it and push it until I was lame in both arms, and then I got so angry that I bit off a little piece at one corner.

It hurt my teeth.

Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern enjoys it. All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths simply shriek with derision, and I have stopped answering them, because they are not worth the breath.

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To go out the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try, and there is a drop of two stories onto gravel, and anyway I know perfectly well that a step like that is improper and would be misconstrued, and I have spent three months being misconstrued, and I am not going to hand anybody that.

I do not even like to look out of the windows now. There are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast, up the lane and around the garden, keeping to the shade, and I wonder whether they all came out of that wallpaper the way I did.

But I fastened myself in this morning with my well-hidden cord, and neither of us is going out into that road.

I suppose I will have to get back behind the pattern when it comes dark. That is the hard part.

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please.

I will not go outside. I will not, even if Della asks me, even if she asks me in the voice. Outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.

But here I can creep smoothly on the floorboards, and my shoulder fits exactly into that long mark along the wall, the one that goes behind every piece of furniture except the bed, the one Hollis says is a rug. Round and round and round. As long as I keep my shoulder in it I cannot lose my way.

Why, there is Hollis at the door.