Nine Women Read Online Free PDF

forgetfulness.
    “They thought it was a matter of money, too. So they reminded me that the insurance would continue paying the bill. Rehabilitation, so to speak.”
    “Of course.” This was a good beginning. Nothing like dollars and cents to settle people down.
    “They decided that if I wasn’t hurt physically I had to be injured mentally.” She smiled pleasantly. Just a trace of fluttery vagueness now.
    “Were you?” Too abrupt. Careful, he thought.
    “No,” she said quietly.
    “I read somewhere that common carriers are liable for their passengers’ safety.”
    “I suppose so.” She did not sound interested. “My brother Stephen took care of that. It does seem to be quite simple. A price list, really. How much a person is worth, up to a limit of some sort. I don’t exactly know how, but it seems that everyone pretty much agrees how it’s got to be done.”
    A price list. Her choice of words disturbed him. He took another sip of his drink. Awful. And then he saw the label on the small soda bottle: TONIC. He was drinking Scotch and tonic … He wondered whether to tell her and decided not to.
    The phone rang again. “Yes, Stephen, I’m just about to leave for the airport. Yes, in a very few minutes. Just as soon as Mr.—What was your name?… Flanders—leaves. No, you don’t want to talk to him. Really, Stephen, you do get so excited. Yes, of course. Good-bye, Stephen.”
    A quiet return to her seat. “He is a nice man, my brother. He hates to see me disturbed.” She smiled, waiting for him to speak.
    Sam Flanders said, “I’m a little surprised that you’re still flying, and so casually. I imagined you’d think more about it.”
    Her eyes were a deep blue, shiny as tears, but there were no tears there. “I have to fly. And I do think a great deal about it.” Abruptly the bright blue eyes lost their glitter. They grew dull and slate-colored and flat as frozen pond ice. “I will tell you,” she said, “but I wonder if you will understand.”
    He took a short breath; you’d think he was afraid. “I could try. If you could tell me.”
    “When the plane crashed, a flame came down the aisle, a pillar of flame; no, not even that, it didn’t have a real shape. It was just a light in the center of the plane and people were reaching for it, to touch it. And then there was a pause.”
    She looked at him. “I’ve thought about ways to explain it to other people, to myself too. It was like there was a drum, beating very fast, very even, without emphasis. Then one of those beats was missing. Sometimes I imagine it written on a sheet of music, that one missing beat.”
    “Yes,” he said, “yes.”
    “And I was tossed out, right there.”
    She nodded to herself, emphatically. “I should have died, you see.”
    He was beginning to believe her. He was beginning to be as crazy as she was. No wonder the psychiatrist wanted her to stay in treatment.
    “There was no way I could have survived,” she said flatly. “Everybody told me that.”
    That was true, he thought. She was alive, and she ought not be.
    “At first—in the hospital—I thought I was dead. I expected to fall down any minute. I thought there was just some sort of delay, a temporary suspension.
    “But it wasn’t that.”
    Her eyes had the funny color of newborn babies’, the no-color of darkness.
    “When I kept on living, then I began to understand.”
    “What?” he said. “What?”
    Now she spoke rapidly and mechanically, as if she’d thought about this so often it no longer interested her, it was just a fact learned and repeated like a child’s multiplication tables. “Time is smooth and steady. Usually, that’s the way it is, but not always. There are flaws in everything, even time. I fell through one and was left behind.”
    He sat silent, watching the blue color return to her large round eyes.
    “You know,” she said, “I think you believe me.”
    “You know,” he said, “I think I do.”
    She smiled at him,