We're All in This Together by Owen King

Author:Owen King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

14.

On the ride back to Dr. Vic's house the sound of approaching thunder alternated with the slamming of windows against the coming storm, and made me feel as though I were being chased, but that I was winning, that I was ahead.

I tried to think of what I needed to say to them. The breadth of the treaty I was prepared to make astonished me. I felt big and strong lunged. I was going to give them a chance. They would want to hug me; I was willing to let them hug me. They would cry; and I was willing to cry, too. These movements were as plain and clear to me as the things I saw at the far end of the rifle's scope, so clear and so plain that a child or a foolish person might attempt to reach around and touch the magnification with their fingers.

The thickening humidity fell over my shoulders like a wool shawl. Garage doors began to jerk closed as I sped past, as if my wheels were tripping invisible wires.

I was drenched in sweat when I reached the driveway and jumped off my bike running, letting it crash in the grass. At the top of the porch, I looked back and noticed that the windows of Dr. Vic's BMW were down. My legs were pulsing, but I ran over anyway, and rolled them up tight.

As I stepped into the house, my yell caromed through the high, spacious rooms. "Hello? Hello? I'm back!"

I ran down the hall and threw open the door to the living room. "I'm back!" I yelled again, the words crossing my lips even as I saw that there was no one here either, just the drapes lapping in the open window, and a trapped fly buzzing around the suitcases lined up against the wall.

The fly circled and abruptly dropped down onto the handle of the first suitcase in the line, my mother's indestructible old Samsonite. The portmanteau's baby blue facing was dented from all the Greyhound luggage compartments that I had kicked it into, cracked from all the third-floor apartments whose stairs I had used it to sled, and patched so neatly with duct tape that it could almost pass for whimsical.

The careful tape job had always irritated me. I remembered watching as my mother sat on the floor of the apartment we rented in Boothbay, a dreary little box of a place stacked on top of a diner, where the stench of bacon rose up from below, continuously, with the substance of an awful, unceasing fart. Even at age eight, I was astounded by the sight of her crouched on the ochre-colored shag rug, wearing her pajamas and a pair of rhinestone sunglasses, as she went about the meticulous process of trimming off the strands at the end of each piece before laying them down like strips of papiermache. Did she actually believe there was any repair she could make to this thrift store luggage that would fool someone

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