Fear itself: a novel by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

I’m hungry.” No response. Missy pulled the covers back, saw that a watery coffee-colored stain had spread across the seat of Ganny’s long white nightgown. “Uh-oh.” Now she understood—it was Ganny who had made in her bed and was so embarrassed she was pretending to be asleep. Missy had done that once herself, when she was little, and Ganny had gone along with it, stripped her jammies off, carried her into the bathroom, cleaned her up, changed the bedding, tucked her back in, never said another word about it.
    Missy decided to handle this situation the same way—sort of. She crawled out of bed, pulled the covers back up over Ganny’s accident, and left the room to give Ganny a chance to clean herself up in private.
    But when Missy returned to the bedroom, after what seemed to her to be a very long time—long enough to polish off a six-pack of little powdered doughnuts—Ganny still hadn’t moved. Quietly—somehow Missy understood she was in the presence of something solemn, though she wasn’t quite sure what—she walked around the side of the bed and saw that one side of Ganny’s face, the side she was lying on, was black and swollen, and that although Ganny’s eyes were open, she wasn’t looking out from inside them.
    Horrified, fascinated, not quite ready to let herself understand yet, Missy edged a little closer and saw that Ganny’s slightly parted lips were crisscrossed with cobweb-thin threads of cottony white dried spittle, as if little fairies had been trying to sew them back together.
    “Poor Ganny,” she said, as softly as she could—Simon was always telling Missy that she talked too loud. She knew she had to do something—but what? She couldn’t call the police even though she knew how to dial 911: Simon had drummed it into her head that if the police ever came to the house, they would end up taking her away from him or him away from her, and in either event, she was bound to end up in an institution for the feeble-minded.
    Feebleminded: that was the exact word he used, every time he gave her the speech, and Missy had come to fear the speech so much that she’d often be crying by the time he got to “in either event.” Then he’d stop, and dry her eyes, and promise to always be there for her, and she in turn would promise him that she’d never, ever call the police.
    Nine-one-one was out, then. But she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, either. At times like this, there was only one person Missy could turn to—only one person she was allowed to turn to: Simon.
    The first thing to do was get dressed. No, undressed first. Missy stripped off her jammies, then dumped the contents of her valise onto the sofa bed. Picking out undies was easy—they were all white and the label went in the back. Socks were also easy—it didn’t matter what foot you put them on, so long as you picked out two of the same color.
    As for pants and shirt, Missy knew you had to match them with the weather if you were going outside that day. With some difficulty she managed to unbolt the kitchen door, then stepped out into Ganny’s sunlit backyard wearing only her socks and panties, and felt the warmth of the autumn sunshine on her bare skin. Shorts and T-shirt weather for sure—sunglasses, too.
    Always grateful for a chance to wear her sunglasses—which not only were pretty, with thick pink rims and lenses shaped like sideways teardrops, but hid her eyes so strangers couldn’t tell right off that she was a Downser (or so she sometimes thought)—Missy padded back inside, leaving the door open. She picked out a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and a Special Olympics T-shirt from the pile on the sofa bed and took them back into the kitchen so she could look at the flowers in Ganny’s garden while she finished dressing. There were purple morning glories climbing the back fence, glowing in the sunlight, and golden sunflowers taller than Missy, just starting to go to seed.
    It took a few tries to get her