The Resident: An Odd Man Out (part twelve)

 

 

 

The Resident

Chapter Four

An Odd Man Out

(part twelve)

 

 

 

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They didn’t have blinds on the windows; blinds became a place to start. The soft light of a wooded lot, well off the road, where no one saw inside…

Claudie had loved waking up to it. But she was going to make curtains. She was going to sew, as a thing. “I’m writing it down. I’m getting it organized.”

She was propped on pillows, John at the bed’s foot.

Aura had printed a list for him.

 

Blinds or shades on all windows. Measure first. Can your mother help, does she do decorating?

What will you tell your mother? Decide with Claudie.

Get traverse rods and real drapes for the downstairs. You won’t regret it.

Buy sewing books and cookbooks; don’t buy gardening books if she asks for them.

See she doesn’t run out of gauze bandages and rubbing alcohol.

What will you do about her being alone during the day?

 

“All I want is to have this home, and live this life. I don’t want to be sick.”

“But…are you?”

“No,” she said. It was the third day out.

Of course she hated hovering. Claudie complied, when hovered round by Aura… Whose voice behind closed doors was a reminding one. Complied, stood at windows, cried a little. She and Aura no longer spoke by phone.

Hang blankets for the time being, Aura had told him.

“So freaking dark in here,” Claudie said.

John asked a question he had called the library about. “People can be allergic, to the sun? Have I read that?”

“Have you? Do they turn green and grow bumps? Why wouldn’t they? Oh, you must be tired of me… But the reason I don’t explain, John, is because it’s illegal. We’ve gone too far. I should not have a husband, I should not have friendships, most of all not with Aura and Teconieshe. I have a notebook somewhere.”

He stood, patting bedclothes, helping. He shifted a granny-square throw to the floor. Under the bed? He rose from his knees and found her holding the notebook out, open. She tapped a written word.

Tithonians.

“We are all.”

“I. I don’t know. I never heard of …”

“Think of what you would understand if I said I was from another country. No, you’ve never heard of this one. Think. Really.”

Different language? Culture? Food? But think… She turns green. He eyed Claudie’s hands and wrists, to mid-forearm wrapped in gauze. “It’s genetic,” he said. “Something about ‘your people’.”

In quotes as he’d inflected it, the term brought a misspoken fear, of letting this stand; equally, of seeming to protest.

But Claudie said: “We are not all related. What I have has been fixed, in fact. I’m just too early. Other… I’m not going to use the term.” She tapped Tithonians for him again. “I can’t take the chance you’d pick up the habit of saying it. It should never be said. But others who might have moved back a hundred years before me, might also have started a hundred years later.”

 

 

47

 

 

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Tithonians

An Odd Man Out (part one)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2022, Stephanie Foster)