Blame: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

fuck up.
    But then nobody else said anything.
    Really, you guys. What’s up? Why the faces? I can’t remember a thing.
    Try, suggested Peterson.
    Patsy pulled out a chair, sat, and tried. Monday morning survey, America 1865 to the present. Office hours. Personnel committee dinner at Anne Davis’s house, blankness setting in around the soup course, not her fault, the wine so cheap and bad. What time is it, anyway?
    Noon.
    Day?
    Wednesday.
    Shit. When’d I come in?
    Last night.
    So she’d missed the 9:00 a.m. survey that morning. They’d finished Reconstruction on Monday and were to start the Gilded Age today. I lost Tuesday, she said.
    Across from her, Ricky Barrett snapped the elastic band on an accordionfile, a battered and cloudy-brown thing, the corners worn to white. Patsy couldn’t help but read the word felt-tipped on its side. HOMICIDE .
    The taste of wet metal filled her mouth, and fear hit. She thought perhaps she’d misread, and looked again. HOMICIDE . Yes, but it was an old file, probably used for something else now—used for whatever county sheriff detectives detect: stray dogs, rabid skunks, backyard keggers gone rowdy.
    Something like this was bound to happen, Patsy. Now Benny was speaking, darling, patient Benny. We’ll-get-you-off-this-time Benny who, in fact, never had. She should probably fire him, should’ve done so two cases ago and saved herself some big fines. But he had the clumsy charm, if also the legal facility, of a Labrador retriever, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. The way you were going, he was saying now, you had plenty of warning. There’s what, three priors? A suspended license?
    Is that it? she said. Was I driving again?
Moi?
Sans license?
    The men gazed at the nicked and thinning oak veneer as if they were poring over a war map, as if, again, she were not in the room.
    Okay, what’d I do? Or do I have to beg? Benny? What, are we going to play twenty questions? Or can we behave like adults here? She was almost shouting, then caught herself. But really, they were so grim-lipped and obtuse. What is it? I really
don’t
remember. Did I kill someone?
    Peterson’s mouth did something—a wince, or a smile suppressed.
    Understanding flooded her. Oh, you guys! You
guys
. You’re just trying to scare me. Damn! You really had me going there!
    Then Ricky Barrett, the hopelessly unerudite plodder whose childish, big-shouldered handwriting she recalled from ill-argued essays, reached into his battered file and extracted a sheet of paper. Using his usual word-by-word, finger-pointing method, he began reading aloud.
Jane Robin Parnham, female Caucasian, aged thirty-four, massive contusions to ribs and right arm, cause of death, crushed pulmonary cavity, suffocation. Jessica Elizabeth Parnham, female Caucasian, aged twelve, contusions to rib cage, shoulder, spleen, and kidneys crushed, cause of death, extensive internal bleeding.
    The words flew at her like bats, but before she made any sense of them, and before everything else that was to follow—arraignment, indictment, preliminary hearing, sentencing—and even as guilt stood poised to swallow her in a towering black wave, she took one swift,light-washed sweep through her Pomelo Street home: the red Formica kitchen table and gleaming toaster in the breakfast nook, a blue vase stuffed with homegrown daisies on the baby grand, the front yard’s white-limbed sycamore and deep grass, all of it simmering, soaking in the thick yellow sunlight of late afternoon.
    That life, she thought, that beautiful life is over.

2
    Patsy’s mother came down from Bakersfield, posted bail, and drove her to Pomelo Street. Patsy went immediately into the shower, then slid into her bed, under the covers, turned her back to the door, and refused to open her eyes or say why she’d left the water running or what she wanted to eat.
    For a week she did not speak or look at anybody. She barely ate, and waited until her mother was asleep or on the phone