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Signs of Life

Surely this house is darker than most. The lack of light can be explained in any number of ways – small, recessed windows, for instance, or the scarceness of overhead fixtures – but Peggy prefers the mystery. Give her a simple answer, and she’ll wave it away, reach instead for the improbable or even the impossible. In this case, she attributes the darkness of the house to the adobe bricks from which it’s made. They soak up the night and release it indoors, so that instead of being a refuge, their home becomes a container. All of them – Peggy, Sophie, Ian, and Sophie’s friend, Tamara – float in this dense, dark night. Light a match, then, and you’ll find Peggy treading slowly toward the bedroom, a slight figure weighted down with a bottle of rum, drifting in and out of all the rooms along the way. She’s hoping to hide her burden, though not in the dirty clothes hamper, or inside the linen closet, or stuffed underneath the dog’s bed – all too obvious. Briefly, she considers Ian’s room, but her twelve-year-old son might come across it, and then what? Every gesture a mother makes is fraught with unintended consequences. She can just see him at an aa meeting twenty years hence: “Mother invited me to drink by hiding liquor in my room. She never loved me as much as she loved my sister, Sophie.” As it happens, Peggy is too weary to outsmart her daughter, which means she’ll have to sleep with the damn bottle. If Sophie ferrets it from under Jack’s pillow, then perhaps she deserves a drink, despite the fact that she’s so clearly underage. Sophie is precocious, dangerously so. At long last, Peggy’s begun to realize this fact.