Too Much Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page B

world—she seemed to be saying this to somebody, probably to Mrs. Sands—what was she here for if not at least to listen to him?
    I didn’t say “forgive,” she said to Mrs. Sands in her head. I would never say that. I would never do it.
    But think. Aren’t I just as cut off by what happened as he is? Nobody who knew about it would want me around. All I can do is remind people of what nobody can stand to be reminded of.
    Disguise wasn’t possible, not really. That crown of yellow spikes was pathetic.
    So she found herself travelling on the bus again, heading down the highway. She remembered those nights right after her mother had died, when she would sneak out to meet Lloyd, lying to her mother’s friend, the woman she was staying with, about where she was going. She remembered the friend’s name, her mother’s friend’s name. Laurie.
    Who but Lloyd would remember the children’s names now, or the color of their eyes. Mrs. Sands, when she had to mention them, did not even call them children but “your family,” putting them in one clump together.
    Going to meet Lloyd in those days, lying to Laurie, she had felt no guilt, only a sense of destiny, submission. She had felt that she was put on earth for no reason other than to be with him and to try to understand him.
    Well, it wasn’t like that now. It was not the same.
    She was sitting in the front seat across from the driver. She had a clear view through the windshield. And that was why she was the only passenger on the bus, the only person other than the driver, to see a pickup truck pull out from a side road without even slowing down, to see it rock across the empty Sunday-morning highway in front of them and plunge into the ditch. And to see something even stranger: the driver of the truck flying through the air in a manner that seemed both swift and slow, absurd and graceful. He landed in the gravel at the edge of the pavement.
    The other passengers didn’t know why the driver had put on the brakes and brought them to a sudden uncomfortable stop. And at first all that Doree thought was, How did he get out? The young man or boy, who must have fallen asleep at the wheel. How did he fly out of the truck and launch himself so elegantly into the air?
    “Fellow right in front of us,” the driver said to the passengers. He was trying to speak loudly and calmly, but there was a tremor of amazement, something like awe, in his voice. “Just plowed across the road and into the ditch. We’ll be on our way again as soon as we can, and in the meantime please don’t get out of the bus.”
    As if she had not heard that, or had some special right to be useful, Doree got out behind him. He did not reprimand her.
    “Goddamn asshole,” he said as they crossed the road, and there was nothing in his voice now but anger and exasperation. “Goddamn asshole kid, can you believe it?”
    The boy was lying on his back, arms and legs flung out, like somebody making an angel in the snow. Only there was gravel around him, not snow. His eyes were not quite closed. He was so young, a boy who had shot up tall before he even needed to shave. Possibly without a driver’s license.
    The driver was talking on his phone.
    “Mile or so south of Bayfield, on Twenty-one, east side of the road.”
    A trickle of pink foam came out from under the boy’s head, near the ear. It did not look like blood at all, but like the stuff you skim off from strawberries when you’re making jam.
    Doree crouched down beside him. She laid a hand on his chest. It was still. She bent her ear close. Somebody had ironed his shirt recently—it had that smell.
    No breathing.
    But her fingers on his smooth neck found a pulse.
    She remembered something she’d been told. It was Lloyd who had told her, in case one of the children had an accident and he wasn’t there. The tongue. The tongue can block the breathing, if it has fallen into the back of the throat. She laid the fingers of one hand on the boy’s forehead