Recalculating Read Online Free PDF Page A

There was nowhere to walk in their brand-new excuse for a town, no path through the woods that surrounded their house, and their street was miles away from any kind of restaurant or bar.
    She would tidy the den once they were gone, washing their wineglasses, emptying the ashtrays (neither man smoked, but John was fond of burning strange-smelling incense while they talked). Pleased to have the house to herself for once, she’d heat herself a mug full of milk, pour in a little brandy, top it with cinnamon, and sit on the couch, watching the old movies she loved that Tommy couldn’t stand. Once she fell asleep there, only to startle herself awake, heart pounding, certain that she’d heard something screaming in the woods. A second time she’d jerked awake from a dream in which Tommy and John had been standing over her, both of them in black robes, like monks.
    She listened for the voice, the small one that sounded a bit like her sisters. It spoke to her almost every day.
Be patient
, it would tell her.
Your time is coming.
Tommywas growing thinner, more drawn, the flesh of his face evaporating to reveal the skull underneath. Thinner and crueler. Instead of once or twice a month, the pinching sessions came once or twice a week, then almost every night.
You like that?
he would croon, putting the clamps in place, watching her with his cool eyes. He showered every morning, and again at night, but up close, she could smell the rot and decomposition coming from his skin, a bland, almost sweet stink. Tommy was dying … but not fast enough. He had tightened her leash as he’d gotten sicker, taking away the one credit card he’d let her keep, quizzing her about her day and how she’d spent it, watching her as she moved throughout the house.
    Little things started going wrong. The dishwasher broke, spewing soap-scummed water over the kitchen floor, and they’d had to replace both the floor and the dishwasher. Someone had stolen her credit card from her wallet while she was visiting the library and had charged three thousand dollars’ worth of stuff at Target and Sears; it had taken her days to straighten it out. One morning she reached for her hairbrush, which she’d always kept in the top drawer in the bathroom, and found that it was gone. She put her favorite blue blouse in the washing machine, but when she took the clothes out to put them in the dryer, the blouse was gone. She would catch Tommy watching her from the corner of his eyes, tracking her from behind his newspaper or magazine, studying her coolly as she cooked and cleaned and drove him to the hospital, like she was some kind of new disease, a mutated cell trapped under a slide slip. Something, most likely a raccoon, knocked over the garbage cans on trash day, and left a half-chewed sanitary napkin stuck in the middle of their driveway, like an accusation, until Maureen, still in her bathrobe, had scurried outside to pick it up. Tommy watched and pinched, and just when Maureen was sure shecouldn’t stand it anymore, the voice said,
Tonight’s the night
, and it told her, step by step, what to do.
    * * *
    “The number you have called … has been disconnected. No further information … is available.” With a muttered expression of frustration, Maureen shook her head, hung up the phone, and looked at the instructions that had come with her Ouija again. She’d dialed it right, she was sure of it … but she thought she’d dialed correctly the previous four times, and each time she’d gotten the same message. When she’d tried to find the Ouija website, all she got was an error message, telling her that the site was under construction, so no help there. Finally she called Liza and told her what she’d planned on telling the customer service representative, had one of them bothered to answer: that her GPS had adopted the male voice, without her telling it that’s what she wanted. She’d decided that the rest of it, the part about it calling her bitch and