Nell Read Online Free PDF

only and entirely that they would not find any little furry body, living or dead, mingled with the children’s litter.
    Nell put a plate with two peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and a banana and apile of cookies in front of her son. Jeremy had Nell’s reddish-brown hair and eyes, her pale freckled skin, and he also had her lean body, which on his ten-year-old frame looked gawky, scrawny, and almost painfully thin. He was all knees and elbows and energy.
    “How was soccer, Jeremy?” she asked.
    “Fine,” Jeremy said. He took a bite of his sandwich, then grinned at his mother. “Hey, Mom,” he said. “What’s hard and red when you put it in, and it comes out soft and pink and wet?”
    “Jeremy!” Nell said, aghast, dropping the butter knife on her foot. “May I remind you,” she said sternly, “that your sister is only eight years old?”
    Hannah laughed at Nell. “I can guess that joke, Mom,” she said. “Duh. Bubble gum.”

Two
    At two-thirty the next morning, Nell was roaming through her house in the dark, barefoot in order not to wake the children, carrying an enormous glass full of water. She had drunk too much alcohol at her dinner party. She had fallen asleep when her guests left just after midnight, but she had tossed and turned and finally awakened with bad dreams. Terrible dreams. Now she was caught in one of the nighttime frenzies she had come to call her Panic Nights, a state of irrational alarm, when she worried desperately about money, her children’s mental health, her own lonely life, the fact that she was growing older, the years she had wasted in her twenties … everything.
    These spells had begun just after her divorce and for a few months were so overpowering that she had developed insomnia as a defense against them. The insomnia had left her exhausted and wired up at the same time, which made the Panic Nights even more gripping. At last she had seen a doctor, who prescribed a tranquilizer for her, and it had helped immensely. She still had a vial of the small yellow tablets in her medicine cabinet, but she used them only as a last resort, only in states of real desperation.
    She would not use one tonight. She knew that now her nervous state was due to having too much alcohol in her system. She was dehydrated. So she wandered around in the dark, going into the kitchen or bathroom for glasses of water, staring out different windows, hoping the gentle moonlight on the lawn would eventually calm her.
    Some nights she loved being the only one awake in the house. In the winter she would often sit up in bed as if summoned, instantly lucid and pleased, because the moon was full and shining on the snow and the outside world gleamed magically. Then she would pull her gray robe over her and curl up on the floor, her head on the windowsill, gazing out at the moon-illuminated world that surrounded her house, elated by the mysteriousness of the natural universe, all this lovely silver air that went on and on in spite of her petty life. On some nights in the summer she would creep out at three or four in the morning and sit curled up on the wicker porch swing, smug to be alone and awake, listening for the first bird calls, watching for the first lights of morning to come silentlysliding across the horizon and down through the trees onto her lawn. Her children had often found her there in the morning, asleep on the wicker swing, and when she awakened, she would be damp and shivering from the misty morning, but rested and optimistic, as if the night air had provided some kind of mental cure for her.
    But this was a night of a different sort, an unpleasant stretch of time she had experienced before, too often: a Panic Night. Tonight when she walked through her house, she looked out the window and saw that the back steps off the kitchen were still broken. Last fall, running up the steps to answer the phone, her left leg had hit the rotting wood just the right way so that the wood gave and her leg