The Silver Kiss

The house was empty. Zoe knew as soon as she walked through the front door. Only a clock ticking in the kitchen challenged the silence. Fear uncurled within her. Mommy, she though like a child. Is it the hospital again- or worse? She dropped her schoolbag in the hall, forgetting the open door, and walked slowly into the kitchen, afriad of what message might await her. There was a note on the refridgerator: Gone to the hospital. Don't worry. Make your dinner. Be back when I can. Love, Dad. P.S. Don't wait up. She crumpled the note and flung it at the trash can. It missed. She snorted in disgust. It seemed that lately all her conversations with her father had ben carried on with a banana refridgerator magnet as intermediary. The banana speaks, she thought. It defended the refridgerator, stopped her from opening the door. She couldn't eat. Zoe the Bird they called her at school. She had always been thin, but now her bones seemed hollow. Her wrists and joints were bruised with shadows. She was almost as thin as her mother, wasting away with cancer in the hospital. A sympathy death perhaps, she wondering half seriously. She had always been compared to her mother. She had the same gray eyes, long black hair with a slight curl, and deceptively pale skin that tanned quickly at the slightest encouragement. Wouldn't it be ironic if she died, too, fading out suddenly when her look-alike went? Zoe drifted from the kitchen, not sure what to do. How could she wash dishes or wipe counters when God knows what was happening with her mother at the hospital? She shrugged off her coat, leaving it on a chair. Dad kept on saying everything would be all right, but what if something happened and she wasn't even there, all because he couldn't admit to her that Mom might be dying? She tugged at her sweater, twisted a lock of hair; her hands couldn't keep still. I should be used to this by now, she thought. It had been going on for over a year: the long stays in the hospital, short stays home, weeks of hope, then sudden relapses, and the cures that made her mother sicker than the pain. But it would be a sin to be used to something like that, she thought. Unnatural. You can't let yourself get used to it, because that's like giving in. She paused in the dining room. It was sparsely furnished with a long antique trestle table and chairs that almost all matched, but the walls were a fanfare to her mother's life. They gave a home to the large, bright, splashy oils that Anne Sutcliff painted; pictures charged with bold emotions, full of laughing people who leapt and swirled and sang. Like Mom, Zoe thoughtlike Mom used to. And that's where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It's not even good poetry, she thought. I don't have talent, it's her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. "You're a dark one," her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. "You're a mystery." I want to be like them, she thought almost pleadingly as she stroked the crimson paint to feel the brush strokes, hoping maybe to absorb its warmth. The living room was cool and shadowed. The glints of sunlight on the roof she could see through the window resembled light playing on the surface of water, and the room's aqua colors hinted at undersea worlds. Perhaps she'd find peace here. She sank into the couch. Just enjoy the room, she told herself; the room that has always been here, and always will; the room that hasn't changed. I am five, she pretended. Mom is in the kitchen making an early dinner. They are going out tonight to a party, and Sarah is coming over to baby-sit. I'l go and play with my dollhoAnnette Curtis Klause is the author of 'The Silver Kiss', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385734226 and ISBN 0385734220.