Page 34 of Deja Who
SIXTEEN
My name is Isabella Mowbray.
Mother is desperate and angry, and hides both behind tight smiles, and so it’s time for the nasty treats. Isabella doesn’t mind; she has been waiting for such things.
Isabella had eight siblings; they are dead. She had two stepsiblings. They are dead. Her grandmother is dead. Her father is dead. Her stepfather is dead.
They had weak stomachs. All her brothers and sisters and her father and her grandmother, and her stepfather and stepsiblings, who were no blood relation, which made Isabella wonder if weak stomachs were contagious, they were all cursed with weak stomachs and they are dead, and Isabella’s stomach has hurt for two weeks and she bleeds when she pees.
She doesn’t mind. It’s lonesome and nerve-racking with just Mother; her strained smiles are terrifying. So is her belly, which is bigger every month. For a while Isabella thought the familystomach weakness had finally caught her mother, too, but eventually realized what was happening and felt better.She’s growing my replacement. When I die she won’t be lonesome.
So that was all right.
Isabella knew what was happening to her more or less from the first headaches. She was only ten, but she had always been an observant child. “Owl’s eyes,” her mother teased, “always watching me.” Dreadful pounding headaches like someone was sitting on her chest and hitting her on the top of her head with a rock over and over and over. At first, her greatest fear was that the headaches would kill her, kill her and leave Mother alone. Then her greatest fear was that they would not.
Head pain, nasty poopies, and tired, all the time tired. Even thinking was exhausting; it was so much easier to lie there and wait for... for whatever. Her hair started to fall out, her lovely long dark hair just like Mother’s, and sometimes her body would flail and shake out of her control and that would leave her even more drained, and if she wasn’t so tired she might be scared.
It would be more frightening if she hadn’t seen it before. This would all be so terribly terribly frightening if she hadn’t seen it before. Like Father, like Daddy George, like Grandmother, like Michael and Jenny and David and Laura and John and Leah and the little ones whose names she no longer remembered.
If only it didn’thurtso much. That’s the only thing, really the only terrible thing. Not the smell or the mess or the weakness: the pain.
She hasn’t been able to leave the bed for two days; she messes the sheets again. She sees the blood in her mess; she calls her mother over. “It hurts,” she says. Not a complaint. More like an explanation.Here is my problem. I thought you would like toknow.And it seems Motherdoesknow. She nods and she bustles back to the kitchen and returns with another small plate of nasty treats: homemade donuts—the whole house smells like hot frying fat and cake dredged through lots of powdered sugar. Isabella’s favorite treat, once upon a time.
“These will make you feel better.”
Isabella knows this for a lie, she knows Leah and Jenny and David and Laura and the little ones were told the same lies. But what to do? Not obey? Unthinkable.
Like the rest of her dead family, she eats.
