Johnny Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

to celebrate anything. There was nothing to celebrate or enjoy, nothing to smile about. Their house had been deadly quiet for the past month. They all looked exhausted and drained, and sick. And they were. Just surviving each day was like climbing Everest, and when they met at the dinner table every night, it was shocking to each of them to see how bad the others looked.
    Alice had lost fourteen pounds and had dark circles under her eyes. And she admitted to Pam Adams, when she called every day, that she literally no longer slept at night. She fell asleep around six in the morning every day, and was awake again an hour later, by seven or eight. Sometimes she fell asleep in a chair. And Jim lay on the couch, drinking all night until he passed out. Charlotte cried constantly, as they all did. She didn't want to leave the house, and had missed the entire month's baseball games. Bobby hadn't been this withdrawn since he nearly drowned. They were all in extreme pain.
    And Becky was no better, Pam said. She wouldn't get out of bed for the first week, and when she finally went back to work, she was so upset they sent her home. She had finally managed to work part-time the week before, she seemed to cry constantly, seldom ate, and said that she wished she had died with him. The rest of the Adams children were sad for her, and worried about her, and they missed Johnny. He had been their friend too.
    “You've got to get some sleep,” Pam said to Alice practically. “You will eventually. The same thing happened to me when I lost Mike. But you don't want to get sick before you start sleeping again. What about sleeping pills?” She had taken them for a while, but she didn't like the hangover she had all day, so she had finally just toughed it out, which was what Alice said she wanted to do.
    “Will I always feel like this?” Alice asked, feeling panicked again. It was hard to imagine spending the rest of one's life in that much pain.
    “I think it's different with a child. And you never forget. But it changes eventually. You learn to live with it. Like a limp.” She hadn't gotten over Mike yet, and it had been two years. But she managed to get up every day now, and laugh sometimes, and take care of her kids. She didn't tell Alice that there was no longer any real joy in her life. Her friends were still telling her that there would be again one day. “It won't be this bad forever. Alice, it's only been a month. How are the kids?”
    “Charlie started playing baseball again yesterday, but she left halfway through. The coach has been really great about it. He says she can do whatever she wants, play, sit it out, just watch if she wants. He lost a sister at her age, and he says he knows what it's like.”
    “What about Bobby?”
    “He seems completely shut down. He just lies on his bed all day. He won't even come downstairs to eat. I have to carry him. Jim thinks I shouldn't baby him, but,” she broke down in sobs again as she tried to explain it to her friend, they were closer now than they'd ever been, and Alice had come to rely on talking to her every day, “in a way, Bobby and Charlotte are all I have left. Jim is never here, and when he is … well… you know how he is … he just anesthetizes himself so he doesn't have to feel anything. He doesn't even want to talk about him. He thinks I should clean out his room and give everything away. I just can't do that yet. Maybe I never will. I go in and sit in there sometimes. It's as though, if I sit there long enough, and wait for him, he'll come home. I haven't even changed his sheets. That must sound crazy to you,” Alice said apologetically, but Pam knew it only too well.
    “I kept Mike's clothes for over a year, and I still have some of his favorite things.”
    “I just wasn't prepared for this,” Alice said miserably. “Maybe I never will be. It never occurred to me that he could die, that something like this could happen to us. This happens to other people. I never