The Delphi Room by Melia McClure Read Free Book Online

slightly hysterical about being jobless and behind in my rent. But, as usual, he smoothed everything out. He called his friend Mrs. Wong, who owns a photocopy place, and told her to call up her brother and tell him that she had found the perfect waitress for his new café. So that’s how I got the job. Davie saved the day again. Then he wanted to talk about his relationship problems—as per usual. And yes, the owners, Harry and Carrie, are Chinese, but they felt that the Vancouver market was a little saturated with Chinese restaurants.
    I miss Davie so much.
    Brinkley—who have you left behind? I didn’t have many friends, except for Davie. I had a mother. I miss them so much sometimes I can’t breathe and I wonder what would happen if I stopped breathing in this place. I did a bad thing. Do you think they hate me? I was only doing the inevitable—I had been hunted for so long.
    How can we stay here, Brinkley, with the weight of missing those we will never see pressing us between invisible stones?
    Sincerely, Velvet
    P.S. I understand the desperation of wanting to organize the closet. I feel the same way—although I was never an exceptionally organized person in general, just a lady who was very particular about how her couture collection was arranged. All right—now that I’ve reached the P.S. part of the letter, I’ll come right out and ask, since you must want me to, or you wouldn’t have brought it up—you wash your
dresses
in scalding water? Or did you mean your mother’s dresses? It seemed like you were talking about your own clothes. Were you a drag queen? Or like the film director Ed Wood? His wife said that he derived maternal comfort from angora in particular. I get that. Or did you own some sort of doll collection?
    P.P.S. My sheets here have rainbows and clouds on them, just like when I was a little girl. I still like them, too.

    I cuddled myself between my rainbow and cloud sheets. True: I did still like them, but in a different place, a place with working clocks and people. (Why did I long for people? I was never great at communicating with them in life, and the man that haunted my lonely hours was not exactly a fuzzy friend and chucklefest travelling companion. And, naturally, I suppose, he was still coming around to make my life—or non-life—a living Hell.) But here, the bright pink pinkness of them, the insistent cheer, together with the smiling glassy-eyed faces of plush toys, was sinister, a menagerie of longing. I stared hard at the ceiling so I wouldn’t have to look at the Chinese screen and think of my mother, and started to count the little plaster bumps, my old habit.
One, two, three, four, five—
no, wait—
one, two, three, four, five, six
—no—
one, two
—The old splintery club of pain thwacked behind my eyes, bludgeoning my focus. My fingers clutched at my bellybutton, trying to push the panic down toward spastic toes.
One, two, three
—all the dots melt together, red food colouring overtaking a glass of clear water. The counted and the uncounted mix together; there is no way to know which ones I must get to. Hands a flesh-clamp over the eyes, to keep back the tide of bumps.

5
    S wish, swish, went my lashes against cloth—eyes comparing the dark beneath my lids to the dark of the eyeshade. I had found it, the eyeshade, in a tiny drawer hidden on the right side of my writing desk. Hot pink satin, fringed in feathers and brought to life by cartoon eyes, it fit snugly and blocked the ceiling bumps from view. So there was some grace in this place.
    I was curled on my side, the only position in which I could ever lie comfortably on a bed, despite many attempts at reforming myself into a back-sleeper to prevent early-onset crow’s feet. I listened to the silence. Not the quiet, or the polyglot strains of white noise from the relaxation tapes I once tried, but the true, utter, ten-thousand-leagues-below silence of my pink room. I lay in the dry heart of the sea.
    I imagined the