Bad Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
    access road.
    “Go fi nd him,” I said. “Get the names of anyone he might have
    told where he stashed his gear.”
    She looked up at me. “And then?”
    “And then,” I said. I tapped the car twice with the fl at of my hand,
    and she drove away.
    The front door to the restaurant was open, other front-of-house
    staff busily arranging chairs out on deck, but I walked around the
    other way and went in through the portal I’d spent most of the day
    replacing. I reached out as I walked through, and gave it a shove. It
    felt very fi rm.
    There’s something good about having rebuilt a door. It makes
    you feel like you’ve done something. It makes you believe things are
    fi xable, even when you know that generally they are not.
    C H A P T E R 4
    What can you do, when things start to fall apart? Let us count the
    ways. . .
    Not panic, of course, that’s the main thing. Once you start, it’s
    impossible to stop. Panic is immune to debate, to analysis, to ear-
    nest and cognitively therapeutic bullet points. Panic isn’t listening.
    Panic has no ears, only a voice. Panic is wildfi re in the soul, vault-
    ing the narrow paths of reason in search of fresh wood and brush
    on the other side, borne into every corner of the mind by the winds
    of anxiety.
    Carol wasn’t even sure when it had started, or why. The last
    couple of months had been good . For the fi rst time she’d started to feel settled. The apartment began to feel like a home. She got
    a part-time job helping at the library under the dreaded Miss
    Williams, tidying chairs and putting up posters and helping or-
    ganize reading groups. Work more suited to some game oldster or
    slack-jawed teen, admittedly, but gainful employment all the same.
    She walked to the library and back and yet still managed to put on
    a few pounds, having regained something of an appetite. She made
    acquaintances, even put tentative emotional down payments on a
    B A D T H I N G S 29
    couple of potential friends, and generally quit acting like someone in
    a witness protection program.
    Sometimes, she even just . . . forgot. That had been best of all, the
    times when she suddenly remembered—because it proved there had
    been a period, however short, when she had not.
    At some point in the last few days this had started to change. She
    woke feeling as if she had sunk a couple of inches into the bed over-
    night. Instead of vigorously soaping herself in the shower, she stood
    bowed under the water, noticing fl ecks of mildew between a pair of
    tiles and wondering how she could have missed them before, and if
    she’d get around to doing something about it—or if it would just get
    worse and worse until she was the kind of woman who had grubby
    tiles and nothing could be done about that or the state of the yard
    or her clothes or hair. Chaos stalks us all, gaining entrance through
    cracks in trivial maintenance, the thing left undone. As soon as you
    realize how much there is to do to keep presenting a front, it becomes horribly easy to stop believing, and start counting again instead.
    It was better when she got out into the world, but still it felt as if
    her momentum was faltering. Books slipped from her hands, and she
    could not fi nd things in stores. A bruise appeared on her hip from
    some minor collision she couldn’t recall. Annoyingly, this reminded
    her of something her ex-husband used to say: that you can always tell
    when your mood is failing, because the world of objects turns muti-
    nous, as if the growing storm in your head unsettles the lower ranks
    outside.
    And then, three evenings before, she had found herself returning
    to the front door after locking it for the night.
    She knew it was shut. She could see it was shut, that the bolt was
    drawn. She remembered doing it, for God’s sake, could recall the
    chill of the chain’s metal against her fi ngertips. That night, these
    memories were enough. The next, they were not, and she returned
    twice to make sure.
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