Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter

Author:Michaela Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

The lines were somehow soothing. Weren’t we all dead men? Weren’t we all drowning? The question was how to spend the time that remained.

She counted the Franklins, the Grants, and the Jacksons—all the faces upright, facing front, the bills smallest to largest, the way she’d learned to stack her cash at the club. The order suited her. It gave her a small thrill and made her feel her life was in fact hers to arrange as she pleased. There was a little more than a thousand. Too much for Mexico. She took just the Franklins—founding father with his long hair and his pursed smile, wild Franklin of the naked baths in the wind and the kite flying to catch the lightning—and tucked the wad of five bills into the front pocket of a pair of jeans. She’d wear the jeans to Mexico and keep the money on her. The rest she closed in the book she slid back in the shelf.

Fifi’s shock collar was on the dresser. She’d need it, too, in case they had to leave her in a hotel room. It resembled a medieval torture device, with its two metal prongs strapped against her throat, but it worked. It kept her quiet and calm. The double-A batteries were old and most likely dead, but so long as the collar was on her, she wouldn’t dare bark. Gwen put it on the bed.

What else would she need? It was warm in Mexico, wasn’t it? She found a bathing suit, a sundress, a clean towel, flip-flops, her notebook and her pens—if there was a beach nearby she would be ready. And water, as always she would need plenty of water. Baja was a desert. The thought of the dust and the crowded streets of Tijuana made her thirsty already.

There was one more thing she wanted with her, in case the place got torched.

She searched under clothes in the closet. She looked under her bed, in her dresser and bedside table, between her sweaters. The cigar box, the one that had been her grandfather’s and then her mother’s—it had to be here, here in this room. She glanced at the desk. The piles of rejection slips, of poems returned, the drafts she’d abandoned. She didn’t care if they went up in flames. In fact, she had an urge to burn them herself, all the pages. Even the poems that had come to her quick, like small gifts, the poems she almost liked. She wanted to start fresh. A clean desk, a clean mind. She swept off the papers, sending Leo’s arrangement of old stuff tumbling. The tennis racket and the violin case clattered to the floor, where she let them lie beside the empty suitcases.

There was

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