Blame: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

to use the bathroom. Once, when they met each other in the hall, Patsy brushed past as if they were strangers. All the liquor had been cleared out from all of her hiding places—her father’s handiwork. He knew the drill firsthand.
    Patsy lay in the dim, pleated shadows beneath the sheet, perfectly still, because to move hand or shoulder was to stir up the new facts of her life, which arrived anyway, in waves, to their own inexorable rhythm. Arc of steering wheel, booming car hood, a terrible tumult in the dark. The rasp of soft ridges, like corduroy. And with them, a horror without bounds.
    •
    They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, mother and daughter. They’d been walking down her driveway, having left two tabloids rolled in the handle of the screen door. Patsy hadn’t been going fast. Her car, a 1963 Mercedes sedan so dark green it looked black, weighed forty-eight hundred pounds, according to the registration. Two and a half tons! The girl died at the scene, the mother some hours later in intensive care.
    Patsy pictured them again and again, as if they were borne on a conveyor belt from some charred storehouse of memory: young and older, two ink-blue skirts and sodden, moonlit blouses, sensible shoes, hair thick and rippled over the ground, faces pressed into deep black grass.
    •
    She had taken her car out before the accident only once that she remembered, when she and Brice Court were breaking up. Although he had disappointed her constantly, she could not bear the thought of not seeing him or talking to him. When he would not answer her phone calls one night, she took the keys from the tiny drawer in the antique coffee grinder and drove to the Lyster. She’d gazed up at his lit rooms, their high plastered ceilings, the curt edge of a mantel, a shifting shadow most likely cast by him. He was alive, and she knew where to find him. She drove home weeping but satisfied and returned the keys to their musty box.
    •
    Her father came down for the weekend to speak to her,
do something
with her. This was bound to happen, Pats, he said. After a certain point, our disease takes us only to hospitals, jails, or morgues. C’mon, let’s go to a meeting.
    Then Wes, the chair of her department. God help us, Patsy, this could happen to anyone. Your students are taking a collection for your legal fees . . . And her best friend at Hallen, Sarah. I hate that this has happened, Pats, I can only imagine how you feel. Now, Patsy, please talk to me, look, a pot of tea . . . And her brother, Burt. Shouldn’t we turn on the French Open? More people filed in, wraiths from her former life, their voices buzzing across the divide from the everyday world, a place she now knew as cheaply constructed, brazenly false.
    The foot of the bed sank, and a certain voice opened her eyes: Brice himself, who now looked as spurious as the others. Poor husk and wastrel, his big-nosed, well-bred looks were never so useless.
    I have something for you, Pats, he said in a luring tone she never could resist. She hoisted herself on an elbow to see, in the cup of his palm, two jewel-red capsules. And here’s water to wash ’em down.
    He held the back of her neck as she drank. What? What’d you say?
    Leave the others. I know you have more.
    Brice laughed. Not on your life, baby girl, he said. Not on your life.
    Her life. A rathole.
    At least Brice, that chronic charmer, understood what she wanted: to feel neither better nor worse, but nothing at all. He held her hand,not minding that she did not clasp his in return, no doubt preferring it. As she watched, shadows gathered around him like a dirty cloud, cloaking his shoulders, chest, neck, and chin until only the big hook nose floated in the darkness.
    •
    She awoke to hear her mother snoring in the other bedroom. She rose and peed and felt her way down the hall. In the kitchen, she opened the utility drawer, located the black-handled shears. Slipping a thick rubber band from around the kitchen faucet, she