A Map of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

his crooked smile, would come to the house and stab me with his pocket knife. I put my hands to my face and whispered, “Lizzy, don’t do this.” I fumbled with the phone, trying to make the sticky rotary dial turn.
    “Dan Collins,” he said, before the first ring was complete, as if he was sitting in his office waiting for a thing he feared.
    “Dan.” A choking noise came up my throat and went down the receiver.
    “Hello? Is someone there?”
    I didn’t want to tell him, wouldn’t tell him, would make something up. I put my head against the dirty kitchen window. I saw myself taking Lizzy from Theresa, instead of the box of pea pods, the rummage sale clothes, and the diaper bag. After Theresa goes I latch the door. There we are looking out from the screen, out to the yard and the lane, where Lizzy wants to go if I would only let her down. Emma shouts from the bathroom while I stand at the door and stand at the door, breathing in the unbearable sweetness of Lizzy’s sweaty head.

Chapter Two
    ——
    T HE MORNING L IZZY FELL into the pond stretched through three calendar days. In the hospital, in the lounge that had no windows, there was no signal to distinguish day from night except the sound of the meal carts coming and going, the smell of eggs, or broth, or breaded veal cutlets. Now and then, with the need to mark time, I listened for a change in the steady hum of the fluorescent lights. I thought I might hear a clue about where we were in the circadian cycle. When there was no fluctuation, I put my ear to the carpeted wall, straining for the night sound of crickets, the possible day sound of cicadas. It was too early for cicadas, I knew, and yet it was hot enough to perhaps fool an insect that lived most of its life underground as a nymph, as a sightless mass of white protoplasm. I clutched my ribs to warm myself as the chill air blew up from the basement heating ducts, up from what I assumed was the archetypal morgue with its neat rows of surgical tables, cold gray feet sticking out from the sheets with labels around the toes. Time and seasons were for others, for bankers and bus drivers, teachers and storekeepers. We would wait. We would wait, hour after hour in the subzero maroon-and-blue enclosure, with a rubber plant for oxygen.
    On the way to the hospital the sheriff asked me how many minutesLizzy had been missing. I couldn’t think how long I had dug in the freezer for the butter, how long I had looked at my map of the world, how long I’d called through the house. Was it possible that I’d been moving through the brittle heat in slow motion, without realizing, and that it had actually taken me hours to find my suit? As I called for Lizzy I had been thinking of Claire, wondering if Claire had swallowed pennies, if her stomach was like the tiled bottom of a wishing pool that is littered with coins. I had no idea how long I had labored above Lizzy’s clammy chest. I knew, with a certainty I didn’t often feel, that Lizzy had been dead. Then, by the pond, the paramedics had performed a wondrous mechanical feat, something quite like the jump start. They had given Lizzy life again, and to us they gave a dazzling hope. Doctors could fix everything, they could and they would, and it was wildly impossible that they wouldn’t have her up and about in a day or two. I was sure they would revive her, despite the fact that medicine had failed to save my mother and my Aunt Kate and my father. The staff would rise to the occasion for a two-year-old because there was so much at stake.
    “Ah, Ma’am, how long was she missing?” the sheriff had had to ask again.
    Ten minutes? Could it have been longer? I turned to him and whispered, “Seven?”
    I was told to stay in the lounge when we got to the hospital. I remember glancing across the room and noticing Robbie Mackessy’s mother. Robbie was a kindergartner at Blackwell Elementary, one of the few children who paid regular visits to the nurse’s office. He was