Annabel: A Delirium Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

told.
    But all the time, love grew inside me like a delicious secret.
    It was exactly that way later, when I was pregnant first with Rachel, and then Lena. Even before the doctors confirmed it, I could always tell. There were the normal changes: the swollen, tender breasts; a sharpening sense of smell; a heaviness in my joints. But it was more than that. I could always feel it—an alien growth, the expansion of something beautiful and other and also entirely mine. A private constellation: a star growing inside my belly.
    If Conrad remembered the skinny, frightened girl he’d held for one brief moment on a frigid Boston street corner, he showed no signs of it when we met. From the beginning, he was polite, kind, respectful. He listened to me, and asked questions about what I thought, what I liked, and what I didn’t. He told me once, early on, that he liked engineering because he enjoyed the mechanics of making things work—structures, machines, anything. I know he often wished that people were more easily decoded.
    That’s, of course, what th ffone cure was for: for flattening people into paper, into biomechanics and scores.
    A year before Conrad died, he got the diagnosis: a tumor the size of a child’s thumb was growing in his brain. It was sudden and totally unexpected. The doctors bad luck.
    I was sitting next to his hospital bed when he suddenly sat up, confused from a dream. Even as I tried to urge him back against the pillows, he looked at me with wild eyes.
    “What happened to your leather jacket?” he asked.
    “Shh,” I said, trying to soothe him. “There’s no leather jacket.”
    “You were wearing it the first time I saw you,” he said, frowning slightly. Then he sagged suddenly back against the pillows, as though the effort of speaking had exhausted him. And I sat next to him while he slept, gripping his hand, watching the sun revolve in the sky outside the window and the patterns of light shifting on his sheet.
    And I felt joy.
    Conrad always held my head—lightly, with both hands—when we kissed. He wore glasses for reading, and when he was thinking hard about something, he would polish them. His hair was straight except for a bit that curled behind his left ear, just above his procedural scar. Some of this I observed right away; some of it I learned much later.
    But from the beginning, I knew that in a world where destiny was dead, I was destined, forever, to love him. Even though he didn’t—though he couldn’t—ever love me back.
    That’s the easy thing about falling: There is only one choice after that.

now
     
    I count three seconds of air. Then a blast of cold and a force like a fist, driving the breath from me, pummeling me forward. I hit bottom, and pain shoots up my ankle, and then the cold is everywhere, all at once, obliterating all other thought. For a minute, I can’t breathe, can’t get air, don’t know which way is up or down. Just cold, everywhere and in all directions.
    Then the river shoves me upward, spits me out, and I come up gasping, flailing, as ice breaks around me with a noise like a dozen rifles firing at once. Stars spin above me. I manage to make it to the edge of the river, and I slosh into the shallows, shivering so hard my brain feels like it’s bouncing in my skull, coughing up water. I sit forward, cup my hand to the water, and drink through frozen fingers. The water is sweet, slightly gritty with dirt, delicious.
    I haven’t felt the wind, truly felt it, in eleven years.
    It’s colder than I remember.
    I know I have to move. North from the river. East from the old highway.
    I take one last look at the looming silhou nnt>
    Beyond the Crypts, I know, is the old, dusty road that leads to the bus stop—and beyond that, the gray sludge of the service road, which extends all the way on-peninsula and eventually merges with Congress Street. And then: Portland, my Portland, gripped on three sides by water, nestled like a jewel on a small spit of