Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

lifted themselves, didn’t stand or even sit up, just roused their heads as if from bed, still tangled together some way. The back kitchen light didn’t shine directly out but lit the yard enough for her to see their faces. Blaikie and Char.
    She never did get a look at what state their clothes were in, to see how far they had gone or were going. She wouldn’t have wanted to. To see their faces was enough for her. Their mouths were big and swollen, their cheeks flattened, coarsened, their eyes holes. Et left her dress, she fled into the house and into her bed where she surprised herself by falling asleep. Char never said a word about it to her next day. All she said was, “I brought your dress in, Et. I thought it might rain.” As if she had never seen Et out there pulling on the clothesline. Et wondered. She knew if she said, “You saw me,” Char would probably tell her it had been a dream. She let Char think she had been fooled into believing that, if that was what Char was thinking. That way, Et was left knowing more; she was left knowing what Char looked like when she lost her powers, abdicated. Sandy drowned, with green stuff clogging his nostrils, couldn’t look more lost than that.

    Before Christmas the news came to Mock Hill that Blaikie Noble was married. He had married the lady ventriloquist, the one with Alphonse and Alicia. Those dolls, who wore evening dress and had sleek hairdos in the style of Vernon and Irene Castle, were more clearly remembered than the lady herself. The only thing people recalled for sure about her was that she could not have been under forty. A nineteen-year-old boy. It was because he had not been brought up like other boys, had been allowed the run of the hotel, taken to California, let mix with all sorts of people. The result was depravity, and could have been predicted.
    Char swallowed poison. Or what she thought was poison. It was laundry blueing. The first thing she could reach down from the shelf in the back kitchen. Et came home after school—she had heard the news at noon, from Char herself in fact, who had laughed and said, “Wouldn’t that kill you?”—and she found Char vomiting into the toilet. “Go get the Medical Book,” Char said to her. A terrible involuntary groan came out of her. “Read what it says about poison.” Et went instead to phone the doctor. Char came staggering out of the bathroom holding the bottle of bleach they kept behind the tub. “If you don’t put up the phone I’ll drink the whole bottle,” she said in a harsh whisper. Their mother was presumably asleep behind her closed door.
    Et had to hang up the phone and look in the ugly old book where she had read long ago about childbirth and signs of death, and had learned about holding a mirror to the mouth. She was under the mistaken impression that Char had been drinking from the bleach bottle already, so she read all about that. Then she found it was the blueing. Blueing was not in the book, but it seemed the best thing to do would be to induce vomiting, as the book advised for most poisons—Char was at it already, didn’t need to have it induced—and then drink a quart of milk. When Char got the milk down she was sick again.
    “I didn’t do this on account of Blaikie Noble,” she said between spasms. “Don’t you ever think that. I wouldn’t be such a fool. A pervert like him. I did it because I’m sick of living.”
    “What are you sick of about living?” said Et sensibly when Char had wiped her face.
    “I’m sick of this town and all the stupid people in it and Mother and her dropsy and keeping house and washing sheets every day. I don’t think I’m going to vomit any more. I think I could drink some coffee. It says coffee.”
    Et made a pot and Char got out two of the best cups. They began to giggle as they drank.
    “I’m sick of Latin,” Et said. “I’m sick of Algebra. I think I’ll take blueing.”
    “Life is a burden,” Char said. “O Life, where is thy sting?”
    “O Death. O Death, where is thy sting?”
    “Did I say Life? I meant Death. O Death, where is thy sting? Pardon me.”

    One afternoon Et was staying with Arthur while Char shopped and changed books at the Library. She wanted to make him an eggnog, and she went searching in Char’s cupboard for the nutmeg. In with the vanilla and the almond extract and the artificial rum she found a small bottle of a strange liquid. Zinc phosphide . She read the label and turned it around in her