Bury Me Deep Read Online Free PDF Page B

fine,” Louise said, smiling broadly. “That’s fine. Do you have them here?”
    Marion plucked them from her pocket and handed them to Louise, who smiled like Christmas morning.
    They went to her locker and Louise put the pills in the heel of her spare shoe.
    “Ginny, she likes to take pills, pills like that?”
    “Well, don’t she. She suffers mightily, Marion, and who would hold a little peace against her?”
    “Not I,” she said, twisting her ring around her finger. “My husband, he…”
    “Oh, I’m sure, as a doctor, he sees such things all the time. I’m sure he understands that in these gloomy days one must pass out glimmers where one may. Isn’t that so, Marion?”
    “He does understand that,” Marion agreed, thinking of her husband, hand covering his face, covering it from her as he lay on his hospital bed, sat on the bench in the county jail, walked in from five days missing, eyes hooded from her, not bearing to touch her. “Yes, he does.”
     
    T HE DARK SPOT on his brain. That was how Dr. Seeley explained it to her long ago. It was like a dark spot, pulsing. He said were it not for the dark spot the size of a thumbprint, a baby plum, he would be living the life of the man he so clearly was. Intelligent, stalwart, respectable. The town doctor, the trusted citizen. The doting husband. The kindly father.
    The dark spot, shaped, perhaps, like a crooked star, a pinwheel, a circle fan.
    What it was, exactly, he could not explain, even to her, even ashe cried in her arms in hospital wards in three states. It was his private curse.
    He had not even known of its presence until age twenty-nine when, while seated in the audience of the Savoy Theatre in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a large eave of plaster ceiling fell upon him, upon his leg and hip, and twenty other audience members. The picture was called A Love Sundae, he always remembered that.
    He was in the hospital for four days and, a young doctor himself, he knew his injuries were far from critical. But his body, the way it moved, never felt the same again. And the medicine they gave him, why, it was a wonder, shuttling his body to Kubla Khan, and there was nothing else like it. Nothing at all. He tried. There was nothing.
    Shaking hands, some stolen medicine found in his automobile, that little girl’s jaw set wrong. He knew he had to stop. But he could not. That was when he became aware of the dark spot. Its pulsing points, the way it lived in his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.
     
    M R. J OE L ANIGAN had many reasons to be at the clinic. His pharmacies, three within city limits, brought him into business with Werden and they knew him well. He was there in Dr. Milroy’s office and there was no reason to be surprised, to be struck. Marion heard his voice first, the big quality of it, like he was on a stage or in a pulpit.
    “…that’s the stuff. That’s the future right there. All the doctors back east are using it. Just back myself and that’s what they all said. Chicago. Cleveland. Philadelphia. Boston. Even New York City.”
    Dr. Milroy stuttered a reply Marion couldn’t make out and then it was Joe Lanigan again.
    “…ammonium chloride with codeine and, if the cough is loose, the heroin of terpin hydrate. Call me old-fashioned, Doctor, but you can use those ultraviolet contraptions till we’re all moon men and it won’t shake the rug without some fine chemical assistance.”
    They talked some and Marion stood by the door with her legs trembling and she felt silly about herself, she a grown woman with legs trembling from some big-voiced man. But what could she tell her body? Nothing. Her body knew things she didn’t and it shook like a spring toy and then the door began to open and she saw him there and he saw her.
    “Why, Mrs. Seeley, my New Year’s baby,” he said, his eyes dancing, his body, cloaked in brush-soft flannel, still and easy.
    She said