Never Wave Goodbye by Doug Magee

Author:Doug Magee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Twenty-two

As she woke, Lena was in free fall, untethered, dropping through space. She felt helpless, dizzy. She thought she might be sick. She got out of bed and made it as far as the door to Sarah’s room. It wasn’t nausea or vertigo. She wasn’t in danger of toppling. She began to realize that the accumulated weight of days of uncertainty, days without facts and signposts, had hollowed her and left her vulnerable to the deep anxiety of nothingness.

She picked up Sarah’s pillow and buried her face in the enveloping cushion of its softness. After a minute of soundless embrace, the panic subsided and Lena found herself breathing again. As she put the pillow down, Sarah was suddenly there, in the bed, ready to go to sleep. Lena recoiled from this illusion and left the room.

She went into the kitchen and started to make coffee. She put a bagel in the toaster oven, more out of duty than appetite, and then took a sip of her coffee. It tasted like a watery soup, almost papery on her tongue. She got the butter out of the refrigerator and smelled something on the shelves that was off, maybe rotten. The smell made her queasy. She buttered the bagel when it was toasted and brought it to the kitchen table. She remembered then that about forty-five hours earlier she had sat at that table, with coffee and a bagel, and the doorbell had rung. She could still hear that doorbell. Would she hear that for the rest of her life?

Then something gripped her stomach and she knew she was going to be sick. She got up quickly, went into the bathroom, and just barely got the door closed and the toilet seat up before a strong vomit poured from her mouth. A couple more retches followed before her stomach settled and she knew she was finished. She mopped up the toilet rim and the floor wondering if this sickness was the result of her earlier sense of free fall. But that feeling had passed completely. Maybe, she thought, she was coming down with something or perhaps had some food poisoning. She was about to take her temperature when she looked at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. She stared and had the feeling her reflection was speaking to her, asking her to look deep inside herself.

Suddenly she knew that she wasn’t sick, wasn’t the victim of food poisoning. She opened the medicine cabinet and found the home pregnancy test kit. She hadn’t used one of those test strips in well over a year. She took one out of the box without thinking, without anticipation. She was on autopilot as she sat on the toilet and peed onto the strip. She didn’t really have to read it. She knew. When the positive plus sign popped up almost immediately, she stared at it until she heard David coming from the bedroom. She knew he would be heading straight for the bathroom as he always did. She dropped the strip into the toilet, stood, and flushed.

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.