The Suicide Motor Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

eye at her. How many loops had that goddamned fish made while she was sitting here? How many would it make in the months or years before the good doctor found it floating at the top of the tank? Was there an angel in charge of angelfish who knew that number? Would there be two numbers, one for clockwise, one for counterclockwise?
    The doctor was working his lips because they were about to dilate and birth another question disguised as an imperative. He was going to say,
Tell me again about the people with the shining eyes and the sharp teeth.
They were forty minutes into their hour and that was when he usually tried to get her to talk about her car monsters. She had begun to say that she wasn’t sure she saw them, that the trauma of the accident and Glen’s disappearance must have made her remember things that weren’t there. This was the answer he wanted to hear, but he wanted to believe her and he didn’t yet.
    She would scream if he made her lie again. She would scream if he asked her another question of any kind right now. She needed at least one more fish-lap before she got another arbitrary, time-wasting prompt from this overeducated, overpaid, deeply sad man.
    His lips parted. The tip of his tongue mashed up against his palate,he was about to manufacture the
tuh
in
tell
, and if he did, she would shriek so loud the angelfish’s brain would swell, it would leak blood from its head and circle the tank leaving a murky wake, a depth-charged sub, a shot-up fighter plane, a car rolling on the desert floor throwing coins and potato chips.
    She had to intercept that
tuh
.
    They spoke simultaneously.
    â€œTell . . .”
    â€œI want to be quiet now. I just want to sit here and be quiet.”

5
    THE DREAM WOKE HER. SHE GASPED. SHE LIFTED HER HEAD FROM THE PILLOW she had wet with drool and looked around her room. Morning’s first light bled in through the curtains, just too bright for her to blame the streetlamps. She found herself bunched up to one side of the bed as though she still had to share it with her husband, but he was three weeks in a box. Her T-shirt clung to her here and there where she had broken out in a night sweat, but she heard the fan on the dresser and felt it cooling her. The dream had made her sweat.
    A man had been in her bed, but it wasn’t Robert. Then the same man had been hitchhiking, but it wasn’t the black man who pulled her out of the car. It was a dead man, long dead, his skin fish-belly pale and an almost pleasant stink on him like faraway skunk. But when he opened his mouth, fireflies came out. What was he doing in her bed? Was that why she had pushed herself over to one side, to give this corpse room to lie with her? Perhaps they had been speaking. It didn’t seem to have been a sexual dream, but she couldn’t reason out what had made her sweat. It had all the ingredients of a nightmare, but something about it made her feel . . . what? Alive, perhaps. Whatever had passed between them, he had gone out the window and started walking away from her toward the highway with his thumb out. Hisfireflies went with him and left her in darkness so profound and hopeless that she gasped.
    Judith went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. The face that stared back at her struck her as some relative’s face, an older cousin’s face. The stitches were out, but the scar traversing her nose and cheek still looked pink and raw, like a slash of war paint in a bad western. She wouldn’t be doing any face cream commercials soon. Or ever. But she wasn’t hideous. Her mother would be glad of that, at least. Her mother worshipped at the church of grandchildren and even now, even with Glendon barely cold, if cold he was,
    I’m in the trunk, Mom! I’m in the trunk but there’s no rush.
    the old woman would already be sizing up Judith like a brood mare. It made her want to march down to the hospital and demand a