Read Online The Divide by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online

girls who had been on the street a long time and they talked about hooking or turning tricks, but those words didn’t apply, either. Not that she was too good for it: it was just that her mind veered away from the topic. She was
surviving.
Being paid for sex… it just wasn’t something you thought much about, before or during or after. And when you stop doing it, you don’t
have
to think about it. And so it goes away. It doesn’t show. No visible scars… although sometimes, in her paranoid moments, Amelie wasn’t so sure about that. Sometimes she developed the urge to hide her face when she rode the buses or waited on tables.
    But by and large it was something she could forget about, and that was why Roch had pissed her off so intensely.
Reminding
her of that. Worse, acting like it was something she might do again. As if, once you do it, you’re never any better than that: it’s what you
are.
Trained reflex. Go fetch. Lie down and roll over.
    But really, that was just Roch. Roch always had a hard time figuring out what anybody else was doing or thinking. One time, when he was nine or ten, Roch asked a friend of Amelie’s named Jeanette how come she was so ugly. Jeanette turned brick red and slapped his face. Roch wasn’t hurt, his feelings weren’t hurt, but he was almost comically surprised. Later he asked Amelie: what happened? Did he break a rule or something?
    All Roch wanted was a little cash, a loan. He hadn’t meant anything by it.
    She was too sensitive, that was all.
    What was
really
frightening was the question of how Roch might respond to the beating John had given him. Because, the thing was, Roch could not forget a humiliation. He harbored grudges and generally tried to pay them back with interest.
    But, Amelie told herself, there was no point in dwelling on it now.
    She dried the dishes, put the towel up to dry, joined Benjamin in the main room. The TV was a black-and-white model Amelie had bought from a thrift shop, attached to a bow-tie antenna from a garage sale. The rooming house didn’t have cable, so they watched sitcoms on the CBC all evening. Benjamin didn’t say a word—just folded his hands in his lap and seemed to watch, though his eyes were foggy and distracted. Sometime around midnight, they went to bed.
     
     
    She was almost asleep, lying on her back in the dark room listening to the sound of the rain against the window, when he said:
    “What if I went away for a while?”
    She felt suddenly cold.
    She sat up. “Where would you go?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about that part of it.”
    Everything seemed in sudden high relief: the faint streetlight against the cloth curtains, the coolness of the bedsheets where they touched her thighs. “Is it connected with this woman?”
    Saying it out loud at last.
    He said, “She’s a doctor.”
    “Are you sick?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Is it about—” Another taboo. “About John?”
    He nodded in the darkness, a shadow.
    Amelie said, “Well, I don’t want you to leave.”
    “But if I have to?”
    “I don’t know what that means—‘have to.” If you have to, then you just do it.“
    “I mean, would you be here for me.”
    His voice was solemn, careful.
    “I don’t know,” she said. Thinking: Christ, yes, of
course
I’ll be here! He was the best thing in her life and if there was even a chance of him coming back… but she couldn’t say that. “Maybe,” she said.
    He nodded again.
    He said, “Well, maybe it won’t happen.”
    “Talk to me,” she said. “Before you do anything.”
    “I’ll try,” Benjamin said.
    And then silence. And the rain beating down.
     
     
    They woke a little after dawn and made love.
    There was one frightening moment, when Amelie looked into his eyes, and for a second—not longer than that—she had the terrifying feeling that it was John looking down at her, his cold and penetrating vision a kind of rape… but then she blinked, and the world slid back into place; he was