Red Light Run by Baird Harper

Author:Baird Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CAUGHT IN THE CHEMISTRY

He was about to speak, Allie could tell. He was about to make one of his suggestions, which she would then ignore. She was already ignoring it, whatever he was about to say. Andrew’s expression said enough—his worried brow, his slowly opening mouth.

He’d been following her around the house all morning, helping locate her phone and purse, handing her the keys to the Range Rover. He’d listened to Allie announce that she was really going this time, in the car, because what was so hard about driving to the grocery store and back? Then Allie went into the garage and sat in her car. She put the keys in the ignition, adjusted the seat, the mirrors. She could feel her husband eavesdropping from the mudroom, his lean shadow on the open door. She adjusted her seat again, looked for her sunglasses. Where the hell were her sunglasses? So she got out again and went back into the house and sat down on the couch to read a magazine instead.

Andrew hadn’t been in the mudroom after all. His shadow had been the coat rack. He’d been upstairs getting dressed, but now he was coming back down the steps with his anxious brow, his slowly opening mouth.

“I can tell you’re struggling with this first anniversary,” he said in the quiet, halting voice he now always used when making suggestions. “Forget about the store. It’s time for you to visit the grave.”

The Grave, Allie thought, with capital letters. This was how people rendered the memory of her sister. The Grave. The Day. The Spot. A series of vaguely ominous phrases they used—everybody used—to talk around the details of Sonia’s death.

“You could even visit Victor while you’re down there,” Andrew added.

“Visit him?” she asked. “Victor didn’t like visitors when Sonia was alive.”

Her husband pressed forward into a lunge. He’d developed a habit of performing light calisthenics during their conversations. “It might actually make you feel better,” he said. “Both of you.” Everything that came out of Andrew’s mouth lately was an invitation to feel better, to better oneself, to self-help. What about seeing a psychiatrist, he’d ask. How about reading a book about the steps to recovery? What about meditation? Let’s shake things up with a raw diet! You could start running again. Yeah, running is what you need. Don’t you miss running? You should go for a run! But it was only Andrew who took these suggestions, with his charity races and his weekend yoga, his self-improvement manuals cluttering the house.

“I’m the one who lost a sister, Andrew. Why can’t you support me in a more conventional way? Like other men?”

He looked startled by this. “What does that mean?”

She wasn’t certain what it meant. But her husband was standing in the living room in capri pants drinking a kale shake, looking healthy and organized to such an alarming degree that Allie was beginning to view it as an act of aggression. What had happened to the man who’d once hollowed

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