A Map of the World Read Online Free PDF

pumping and forcing air down Lizzy’s throat, of their own accord.
    I don’t remember stopping or looking or breathing until a man in navy pants hauled me up and pushed me to Howard. I could see now, that the ambulance was in the lane, that the paramedics were as thick as thieves.
    “What happened?” Howard was shaking my shoulders. “What’s happening? How is she?”
    In all the time that has passed we have never once talked about those moments, when I called and called, and he heard me and came running, and saw, and went back to the house, phoned the rescue squad, waited for their arrival, held the girls at bay. I do not know if I tried to resuscitate Lizzy for five minutes or five hours. The scene is always with me, shimmering in the distance. When I least expect to have to look I find myself seeing: It shines right in my eyes, the pond, the lifeless girl on the ground, Howard standing over me. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his hat was covered with bits of clover. He had white creases around his eyes, where the sun had been unable to penetrate. Take Howard’s nose or eyes or chin andtack it on any matinee idol and his movie career would be ruined. Still, the cumulative effect of all of his irregular features is a handsome man. I love how he looks. In those days he was rugged and tanned, belying the fact that he is unusually sentimental. I thought him an alarmingly good person, solid, beautifully silent, thinking, working through problems and ideas, his mind humming with thought.
    Lizzy seemed to be dead. But she couldn’t be, with her eyes open. She couldn’t have died in our pond. Emma used to stare at the wall at night. She didn’t know enough to close her eyes and go to sleep.
    “Tell me, Alice. Say something.”
    I put my hand to my mouth and bit down hard across my second and third fingers. Without moving my lips I said, “She’ll be fine.”
    The men would save Lizzy. They would find her pulse with no trouble because they were calm and well trained. Howard shook me, trying, I thought afterward, to shake the truth from me.
    “Don’t,” I cried. I didn’t want to tell him, had to get out of his clutches.
    “We need to call Dan,” he said.
    He meant that I should. “I know, I will,” I panted. Anything to wrench myself from his grip.
    “If she’s hurt—”
    “I’ll call him,” I puffed, “I’ll go now.” I was already tearing past the ambulance in the lane, running and tripping.
    Audrey and Emma were standing on the porch, watching me come. The song, “Cruella Deville” was drifting from our bedroom window, from the tape recorder, along with Claire’s piping voice. I had never gotten around to closing up the house.
    I knew what I had to do first. The air was no good for breathing. It stung, like the dry, pricking heat in a sauna. I thought of tall Dan, Lizzy’s father, with his stomach rolling over his swim suit, and his maroon and blue-framed glasses. City Dan, whose claim to fame was building a dairy exhibit for the museum in Blackwell, “the Dairy Shrine,” it was called, to commemorate the dairy industry that had once been so strong in the southern part of the state. Dan made birthday cakes for the family, and canned bushels of sweet corn to the music of his favorite CD, The Great Ladies of Jazz . Lizzy had run to the pond and splashed in. It had felt goodon her hot feet and she kept running and then she was pedaling and pedaling. She tried to grab hold of the water, pawing for the metal bar, a ladder rung, her mother, but there was nothing. She clutched and flailed. She opened her mouth to cry “Mama.” Her lungs filled with water and she sank. Maybe she saw the great white light and felt the intoxicating warmth of God, like some say happens before death. She sank. The trout that Howard had stocked in the pond swam along through the dark water. They noticed Lizzy out of the corner of their eyes. They had inherited the knowledge of that look, and they knew it by heart.
    Dan, with