Too Close to the Edge Read Online Free PDF Page A

reporter was too unnerved to notice. “Jason Hillerby,” he said, then headed hurriedly, gratefully, up the sidewalk behind me.
    I watched him go, then waited until the others began to amble off before I shoved the chair forward. I had seen Liz angry many times. But her forgiveness of this adolescent awkwardness was something I hadn’t witnessed before. I wondered if this, too, were part of her public performance.
    “Use the driveway here,” she said. We were on Dana now. “This is my block. Dammit, look at this! The airhead who lives there”—she pointed to a Victorian on the corner—“locks his bike to the sign post and leaves it halfway across the sidewalk.” I glanced from the protruding rear wheel—out just far enough to make it impossible for the chair to pass—to Liz. In the tight set of her jaw, I could see the toll her restraint had taken. Her pain, at least, was no performance. The bicycle owner was lucky to be elsewhere.
    “Does it every time,” Liz grumbled, as I pushed the chair down a driveway. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told him, explained what the problem is, but do you think he can keep it in his head for a week? He’s always sorry when I complain. He doesn’t do it intentionally; he just doesn’t think. But what difference does that make? I could keep on him, but, you know, you just get tired. I’m tired of having to spend two hours getting up and dressed in the morning. I’m tired of having to arrange my time so I can have the catheter in or out, so I don’t get infected, so the infection doesn’t shoot up into my kidneys, so I don’t die.”
    She didn’t look around. I wasn’t sure she could turn that far. But now she kept her gaze ahead, and I had the impression that this admission, so unexpected and uncharacteristic of the public Liz Goldenstern, of even the Liz with whom I’d had cappuccino, was my thanks for the push. And I knew her well enough not to reply.
    “Over there.” Now her voice was crisp. “The white stucco triplex.”
    I pushed the chair across the street to the redwood ramp that sloped up to an alcove and two doors, one to an internal stairway and the other to the first floor flat. A thirty-foot California fan palm stood in the yard, its wind-rustled fronds making finger puppet shadows on the white stucco building. Alongside the ramp, a wisteria twined, and yellow, red, and violet freesias swayed in the window box. The building was typical of the Bay Area. Its white stucco had a vacation look about it, but the dark wood trim of the triptych windows in both flats gave it a more serious presence. At the top of the ramp the candy-sweet smell of the freesias met us. When Liz’s windows were opened it would fill the apartment.
    As Liz reached for her key, a dark-haired boy of eighteen or nineteen loped across the lawn. The day pack on his back bounced with each step. “You going in?” he called to Liz.
    “The officer is helping me. I’m okay.”
    The boy stopped, stared from her to me. His soft hair settled against the sides of his head. He spun quickly and raced back the way he’d come.
    Liz turned the key.
    I shoved the chair forward and, once inside the living room, turned it toward the back.
    “No,” she said. “Just leave it by the phone. I have to run my messages.”
    “You want me to turn the machine on?” I asked. Immediately I was sorry.
    Liz hesitated. “Thanks.”
    I looked down at Liz. Her ashen face was drawn. There was no ember of the normal fire in her eyes. I had seen her after hours of picketing in the damp cold, but I had never seen her look this deflated. And I had never heard her let another person do something she could manage herself. “Can I get you anything? Maybe a brandy?”
    Her eyes half-closed; her first two fingers pressed hard together. “Thanks, but no.” For the first time she met my gaze. “Sometimes I think it would be nice to have someone around again, someone I could count on to do things I need. Of