Read Online All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen - Free Book Online Page B

offering her mother a cup of the liquid, which would surely taste bitter and earthy. Honey, perhaps she could add honey, if Moira needed a sweetener.
    Isabella made the preparations necessary to spend a weekend away with Moira, booking a motel that she could not
afford, hauling her down the stairs and into the car, tugging the seatbelt tight around her bulk. Moira was collapsed on the couch at the motel now, her body hidden in the great flowered folds of her dress, the non-paralysed side of her face working with effort at the donuts in the box, one eyelid tugged downwards by the frozen waterfall of her face. After the potion had been prepared, the Elcarim would pour through the massive body in a thin stream, for good or for harm working its way along the veins. Her mother would nod, give thanks for such a dedicated and loving daughter. And then she would die.
    Isabella stopped short. She had not expected this thought to occur to her. Before her, in the middle of the road, as if dropped from above, lay a shrew caught in the surprise of death, its paws in the air, its whiskers a fan of dewdrops. She crouched down to look at it. Patches of skin shone through the short grey fur gathered with moisture. Her mother’s scalp showed in the same way when she washed her hair. Under the shrew’s pointed snout a tongue like a pink grain of rice stuck out above teeth that were sharp and dirty brown.
    Once upon a time, Isabella’s mother had been Moira Delacourt, the lounge singer. Never a beauty, her charms lay in her voice, husky with cigarette smoke. Moira’s attentions flew about like thistledown. She delighted in everything, forever exclaiming, taking people by the arm, walking a few steps with them. A bee, she went from flower to flower. The acidic tongue she saved for home, and for Isabella.
    What recipe, what formula had Moira followed to bring Isabella up? None, just a selfish kind of blundering, until
surprised by age and illness, she found that she had to rely more than she had imagined on her grown child. And Isabella’s life? Not much to tell really, theatre school, work as an extra, a time of famine, bit parts, a lucky break, musicals that toured summer festivals and Shakespeare plays in parks, lovers of both sexes who came and went on the tide of the theatre seasons.
    Isabella straightened up, and hurried on leaving the shrew behind. The roadway led uphill under maple trees that leaned in overhead making an enchanted tree cathedral, the ideal place for a wedding procession of children bearing poles tied with ribbons and hoops entwined with roses. She smiled to think how those children would dance and sing, making way for the happy couple.
    Espérance was a large log cabin with a roof of shingles that had blackened with age. A sign on the door requested that Isabella take off her boots and respect the spirit of the place. Isabella put her head in at the door and looked around.
    â€œBonjour, hello?” she called out.
    A moose head regarded her from high up beside a fieldstone fireplace of immense proportions but the reply came from behind her, from a young man holding an armful of firewood.
    â€œOne minute,” he said.
    He brushed past her skirt, crossed the room and knelt down to stack the wood beside the fireplace. She watched him from behind, admiring his buttocks in the khaki shorts. He was not the crone she needed, but maybe he was better: a shape-changer, a thief or an angel. He was cute, whatever he
was, small and slender, with yellow brown curls, a light beard, and round glasses that reflected the panes in the window and the plane of light that was the lake beyond.
    They shook hands, so formal and polite. His name was Pascal. Breathless, because it was such a relief to talk to someone, she told him the story, how her mother was a retired jazz singer taken first with paralysis of the face and now with cancer, how this potion, this Elcarim offered a cure, how there was a recipe, written down