Threshold Read Online Free PDF Page B

and then she’s hanging up the phone, receiver back into its cradle, and her stomach growls again.
    There’s a lamp on the bench and she switches it on, squints at the 40-watt brilliance filtered through the cloth shade, and it only makes her head hurt worse. Small pool of light now against the hallway gloom, and Chance glances up at the grandfather clock across from the bench; a quarter before ten, so it hasn’t been dark long, but she’s slept the whole goddamn day propped up against the front door, sleeping off the drunk, sleeping off exhaustion, and it’s a miracle she doesn’t feel a lot worse than she does. Another stomach rumble, but she’s a lot more interested in aspirin than food, a lot more interested in brushing her teeth, Colgate toothpaste and Listerine to get rid of the soursweet bourbon taste. Maybe then she’ll think about food. One thing at a time.
     
    Half an hour later, and Chance is sitting on the floor in the study, cross-legged on the rug and her headache a little better, but she’s still not up to chairs and tables. She’s switched on one of the Tiffany reading lamps near the back of the room, dustyellow light spilling from beneath stained-glass branches, stained-glass wisteria drooping in luminous purple bunches. And all the shelves rising up around her like the book-lined walls of a fortress, safe in here, always safe in here from the world, guarded by books and all the secrets inside them, all the things hardly anyone else will ever care to learn.
    Chance takes a bite of her cheddar cheese and mustard and tomato sandwich, chews slowly as she stares at the lamp, at the books, all these things that are hers now. Her study because her grandparents are dead and that’s what the will said, her house, her half acre perched on the side of Red Mountain. “So you’ll always have a place to live,” her grandfather had written, words put down on paper in life and sent back to her from a dead man. Chance takes a sip of root beer, the aluminum can sweatslicked with condensation, corn syrup and sassafras to wash away the sharp tastes of cheddar and mustard.
    Another bite of her sandwich, and I’m an orphan again, she thinks, if you can even be an orphan when you’re twenty-three years old; something worse, perhaps, when you’re twenty-three, something there isn’t a specific word for, so there can’t be a specific solution, either. She glances up at a tall curio cabinet, shadowy things inside, only a little light from the lamp getting in there, and she wouldn’t know what any of it was if she hadn’t spent so much of her life hiding in this room. The lumpy, indistinct silhouettes that she knows are diamond-blade sliced and handpolished chunks of Ordovician algae, Devonian corals, Paleozoic treasures salvaged off this very mountain or from quarries and road cuts as far away as Georgia and Tennessee. Treasures from lost and ancient seas that Joe and Esther Matthews taught her how to read as plainly as the books on the library’s shelves, taught her how to understand, when anyone else might only see a rock—perhaps a pretty or unusual rock if they bothered to look closely enough, but still just a rock. That cabinet is locked, and Chance wonders if she can remember where her grandfather kept the key.
    She puts the uneaten half of her sandwich down on the rug, no one left to yell at her about the crumbs now, anyway; she takes another sip of her root beer and lies down, stares up at the ceiling for a moment before she closes her eyes, then stares at the nothing behind her eyelids, tasting the pastysharp ghost of her cold supper and wishing that she could stop thinking about Elise. That she could stop thinking about the dreams of her, the loss of her, and feeling guilty because she’s hardly even cried for her grandfather, Elise still too fresh to grieve for anyone else, any thing else; surely only so much hurt she can feel, can be expected to feel. And then the sudden, uninvited image of a train