Extraordinary Adventures by Daniel Wallace

Author:Daniel Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

DAY

THIRTY-SEVEN

ONE

He had no one to share his news about Sheila with but his mother. After work the following day he visited her, a day earlier than he had planned. He couldn’t wait.

She was screaming when he walked in, not an uncommon occurrence.

“Stay away from me, Bettina! I know what you’re up to!” Then silence, as if whatever Bettina had been up to was done. He closed the front door behind him—accidentally slamming it—and Bettina arrived, investigating, and was not impressed.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“How is she?”

This was what he asked Bettina every visit before entering his mother’s lair, skittish to walk in there and see for himself. He liked a warning. He wanted to be prepared.

“She is losing her damn mind is what,” Bettina said. “Every day a little bit more. Every day it’s something. Yelling about something. It’s going to be too much for me soon. She’s taking too many pills, Mr. Bronfman. They’re clouding her up. She didn’t know who I was for a little while this morning. Mornings are hardest.”

“What were you up to just now?”

“Up to?”

“She said, ‘I know what you’re up to’ when I came in.”

“Water,” she said. “I was giving her a glass of water.”

* * *

It was like in a horror movie when the man is going into a room where he heard something but isn’t sure what it is, and the camera is right behind him as he slowly opens the creaking door into the frightening shadows where the possibility of evil resides.

“Hi, Mom,” Bronfman said.

She was in bed, all propped up, hair brushed back, her face thickly painted with orange pancake.

“What a surprise,” she said. “My sweetie sweet come to see me. Come over and give me a kiss! On second thought, don’t. You might have something. I might have something. Who knows.”

He was fine with that.

She smiled at him. “I just got back from the Kmart in the sky.”

“Really?”

“Well, I’m rearranging the house, so—”

“Ah.”

“Ah? Ah? What’s that sound mean? Methinks I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.” She shook her head. “No regrets, Edsel. What’s done is done. My time machine is broken anyway. The demons are out of the house now.”

“You seem confused, Mom,” he said. “There are no demons here.” For some reason, he felt this fiction needed to be countered with the facts: there were no demons. And it worked. Just like that, she snapped back. Her eyes cleared up. She knew who he was and, more important, who she was.

“Of course there aren’t,” she said, her voice so soft now, like a girl’s. “I don’t know what the hell I’m saying sometimes. What I’m thinking. That’s me for you, Edsel. Your mother. This is what I’ve become.” She smiled. “I still have something inside me, though. Something real. It comes and goes. Like one of those little silver Fourth of July sparklers. Psssshhhhhh. That’s the sound they make. Then it goes, all burns off.”

He sat on the edge of her bed, next to her feet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.