Carter Clay Read Online Free PDF Page A

portico’s shade.
    But wait: M.B. stubs out her cigarette and makes fists with both hands. The points of her fingernails bite into her palms with perfect familiarity. Alive. She gives the hair at the nape of her neck a discreet yank.
    Alive.
    Unless pain endures even after death. Everything endures after death: the dull ring that sounds when the child drops her empty pop can, the sick-sweet smell of diesel fuel from a passing bus. No relief, ever. But wouldn’t that be hell? M.B. feels certain this can’t be heaven, but suppose she is in hell?
    Hell feels just like life?
    In an effort to regain her equilibrium, she forces herself to eat her pink doughnut and drink the carton of orange juice. Calm down , she whispers to herself. When this does not help, she tries to put the same words in the voice of Lorne— Calm down, M.B. —but the fact that she cannot make that voice move out of memory and into her ears is merely painful.
    She lights up a second cigarette and, for occupation, begins to pull the items from the black plastic bag at her feet: Colored pencils held together by a rubber band. Hairbrush. Binoculars. An army surplus backpack, upon whose drab canvas someone has boldly drawn a maze that has as its goal the name JERSEY ALITZ . A little red book with pagodas and flowers and tiny people and boats stitched into the cloth cover, and a pattern of roses pressed into the binding: the girl’s diary, M.B. realizes with a start and immediately sets the book down. Half-empty box of chocolate chip granola bars. Binocular case holding an unused postcard from a place called Arles’ Mineral Springs. A book containing graphs, and drawings of noses and apes, and diagrams that explain the fertilization of the egg by the sperm—a coloring book, apparently, though its heavy paper and schoolbook illustrations and text look nothing like what M.B. remembers buying for Kitty (pulpy things whose themes were fancy-dress weddings or movies like Oklahoma! and The Swiss Family Robinson). Sometimes M.B. herself used to “color” with Kitty—though when M.B. looked up from her own careful work (opalescent watered silk one of her finest effects), often as not, she found Kitty across the room, working logic puzzles or reading some book brought home from the library.
    Footfalls. This is what M.B. registers first. The footfalls come to a stop in front of her. Without raising her head, M.B. looks at their owner’s enormous shoes, then sneaks a quick, upward glance: the big bearded man in the red bandanna.
    Trkkh, trkkh. The man’s breath labors above her. She lowers her eyes to his timber legs, then raises them to the chest broad as a sidewalk; then—frightened—she looks off to her left, her right. Where are her witnesses? The lady in the silk dress now makes her way through the hospital foyer while the young mother has herded her children across the drive—
    Trkkh, trkkh. M.B. looks up again. The man shakes his head. Little chick feathers of blond hair stick out from under his red bandanna. His eyes wobble—with tears?
    â€œI”—the man leans down. With a hand covered in gauze bandaging, he picks up the army surplus bag at M.B.’s feet anddumbly holds it out before M.B. “Where’d you get this?” he asks.
    Does he take the bag for a purse? What? A wild noise escapes M.B.—a snort that would embarrass her greatly under other circumstance—then, thank heaven, like a blessing, the hospital’s doors are flying open with a gassy chunk. One hand on his holster, a tiny gray-haired security guard hustles toward M.B. and the man in the bandanna. “Say, fella, unless you got business here,” the guard calls ahead of himself, “I suggest you move along!”
    M.B. does not want to hear or see what happens next, and so she stares down at the coloring book in her lap, a page labeled “Sickle-Cell Trait: Defense Against Malaria.” This is a