Sweet After Death by Valentina Giambanco

Author:Valentina Giambanco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2018-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

There would be other times in her life when Alice Madison would experience fear—many of those early in her career in the Seattle PD and some very recently, side by side with Brown. Nevertheless, by that turning in the road, when she was twelve years old, holding on to the handlebars of her red bike as if they were the only thing anchoring her to the planet, Alice felt a jolt of panic that punched right through her. What had she done? How could she have assumed . . . ? Adrenaline scrambled her thoughts, and the pit of her stomach ached with it. Every rotten notion, every frightful idea that she had been holding back since she had snuck out of her house and caught the ferry fell on her like ice.

Alice was alone in the world. She would not go back, and now she didn’t even have a place where she could sit down, rest, think, sleep. Suddenly she wanted to sleep more than anything else; she wanted to fall asleep right there, standing up at the end of the dirt path.

Alice got off her bike—she was shaking, and she knew that she’d fall if she tried to pedal anywhere. I’d get a great big concrete smooch, she thought, as her skateboarding friends back in Friday Harbor would say.

She could walk off to the right or to the left, and it didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. This simple notion was terrifying. Alice reached for any strength she could muster, turned left, and pushed her bike slowly along. Her brain had gone through some kind of short circuit and she found it difficult to get together anything resembling a coherent thought.

After a few minutes she found that she had traced her steps back to the bus stop and the center of the small town. Without any real decision to do it, Alice walked to a bench by the water and sat down. The pretty lake had a name, but she couldn’t remember what the heck it was.

Great, she thought, my life is falling apart and I’m losing my mind, piece by piece. By the end of the week I’ll have forgotten my own name.

The water was a flat sheet of blue, and above it rose a huge mountain of snow and rock. Alice sighed. I should know the name of that.

She sat back against the bench and dug into her pack for the ham sandwiches. She ate them both, watching the people go past, the little kids playing in the fountain, and a dog running after a Frisbee on the grass. She envied the kids, and for a brief, absurd moment she even envied the dog. She went through the bag of Cheetos too, and once she had finished she pressed her index finger into the bottom of it to catch any stray crumbs. Her chocolate milk was not fridge-cold anymore, but she didn’t care—the comfort of that sweetness was all she craved.

The sun was warm on Alice’s skin and, little by little, it worked like an icebreaker through her panic.

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