You Should Have Known by Korelitz Jean Hanff

Author:Korelitz, Jean Hanff [Korelitz, Jean Hanff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Added and taken away, plus and minus: but without a prayer of canceling each other out. All of the new people in her life—police detectives and murder victims—not making up for the person unaccountably gone. And not some other war but my own war, she understood, squeezing shut her eyes. My very own.

Chapter Fourteen

Rushing to Its End

Somehow, she slept. By the next morning she had traveled from her own side of the bed to Jonathan’s, as if over those ragged, uncompromising hours she had begun to doubt that he was gone and needed to be sure no one was there. No one was there—no head (dark curling hair, dark growing beard) making its customary dent in the soft pillow, no shoulder, rising and falling over the duvet, no presence at all. Grace woke in the same traumatized clothing she had put on twenty-four hours earlier, when she had been merely concerned, merely annoyed. How wonderful to feel merely those things now.

It was just after six and not yet very light. She dragged herself upright and did all of the necessary things, dressing herself, washing to the extent she could. The room looked disheveled, with the sheets and duvet half twisted off and her shoes on the floor. The strange shirt and the condom in red foil seemed to glow in some malevolent way from where they had been deposited in front of the closet, as if they had been outlined—like the way a dead body might be outlined—but in neon. She kicked them aside as she went to the closet, then threw down her own shed clothes on top of them, as if to hide them from herself. She put on a new sweater, a new skirt, both close in style to what she had worn the day before (because it hurt to think about clothes), and then she did a couple of things that also hurt to do, but which she had fallen asleep thinking about doing, and had woken up thinking about doing, and saw very clearly that she had to do.

So, with her laptop open on the bed before her, she canceled every one of her appointments that day, and every one of her appointments the next day, Saturday morning, which was as far as she felt able to look ahead. For explanation, she cited only a “family illness” and said she would be in touch to reschedule. Then, bracing herself against her own distaste, she called J. Colton’s number and left a message saying that she would be unable to speak with the writer from Cosmopolitan this afternoon and to please not schedule anything for her for the next week because she was dealing with something in her family, and she would be back in touch as soon as she could be. “Thank you!” she told the dead silence of the tape recorder—though it wasn’t, of course, a tape recorder. There no longer were any tape recorders.

When these two things had been accomplished, she felt as exhausted as if she had toiled, physically, for many hours.

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.