The Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

maybe, but how fair was life anyway?
    Right then, Matthew was trying to pump himself into the sky on a swing at the park five blocks from their house. When he came home from elementary school, she had asked him what they could do together on her day off. She’d suggested the Paris Theater, a misnomer at best, sarcasm at worst, that had been screening Spider-Man 2 in second run for the last month. He’d said no, he wanted to go to the park, and she suspected he chose this location because none of his schoolmates would be there to identify him as the nine-year-old who still played with his mother.
    And of course, no one else was at the park, because in addition to the drizzling rain that had been falling for hours and soaked her red hair into a clowny frizzle, the park was also covered in snow. Feet of snow were piled all over Bedford; on lawns, up high on the sides of driveways, and atop roofs where it fell to the ground in little increments, making thudding sounds all winter long. They found the swings because they had spotted the points of the ten-foot-tall supporting bars. With mittened hands, they had dug for an hour, inter-spersed with snow angel breaks, until they cleared a path for the arc of one of them. And now, victorious, Matthew pumped his feet with a look of grim determination on his little brow, under the apparent impression that if he swung high enough, he might actually get somewhere.
    Cabin fever, she thought. He’s got cabin fever. She felt the same way.
    For most of the year in Bedford, you forgot that there were seasons, or that in other places, you did not need to warm up your car for a half hour every frigid January morning. But at the end of winter, when the sting of cold air lost its bite, you remembered. It happened not only in her own house, where Matthew and her father paced the rooms at night without the concentration to read or even watch television, but all over Bedford, and it felt like a bubble of latent energy, suppressed for half a year, about to burst.
    This rain right now was a prelude, a warning like the dull mist over a humidifier. By tonight it would come down hard, flooding the banks of the Messalonski River, the streets, and the bridge to the highway, as it had done every year for as long as she could remember. And in seven days, after it was over, the world would fill with color and she’d trade her snow boots for a pair of flip-flops.
    Georgia looked up into the sky. Dark clouds were not so much floating as swarming overhead, and she thought that the hard rain might be coming sooner than she’d expected. “Hey, Matt?” she called.
    “Yeah?”
    “Time to go home.”
    He whined and said he wanted to stay, couldn’t they stay for a half hour longer? Fifteen minutes? Five minutes? One minute?
    “Fine,” she said, looking at her watch, “One minute. You have one minute.”
    “Let’s just go, then,” he grunted.
    They lived five blocks south of Main Street, a safe mile away from the Halcyon-Soma Tent and Trailer Park. Things by the trailer park were strange. People who had gotten funds from the Salvation Army had set up camp there. Some of them owned scraggly dogs or cats that roamed the streets, their fur clumpy. Georgia did not touch those animals. They had a hungry look. Occasionally, she saw Susan Marley down by the trailers. Susan lived in a rented apartment near there. Georgia never said hello. Susan had a hungry look as well.
    Georgia had dreamed last night of Susan Marley. In it, she’d been walking down Main Street on her way home from the Chop Mop, when suddenly the sidewalk had turned soft and sticky. She’d tried to run, but her feet sank into the ground. Around her, the trees had turned black. She’d wanted to scream, she distinctly remembered wanting to scream, but when she opened her mouth nothing came out. The rotting trees surrounded her, and the ground sucked her deep inside. And then in the distance Susan Marley had walked toward her, leaving a snaillike