In The Rift by In the Rift (epub)

Author:In the Rift (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-two

Kate woke up muddled. She felt like she'd been on a ship all night, a ship that constantly rolled forward and back and from side to side—a ship that fought its way through the turbid waters of a restless sea. She rubbed her eyes and tried to clear her head. The room was too dark, and she could see a single slit of brilliant white light coming from entirely the wrong direction through utterly opaque curtains. Ah, she thought, as realization dawned. Hotel

All her life she had hated waking in unfamiliar places. Always those times brought back the memory of waking in her grand' mother's house when she was ten, with her grandmother sitting in the kitchen waiting for the phone to ring. Lying in that darkened Florida hotel room, Kate could still smell her grandmother's coffee percolating on the stove; hear the clock down the hall; see the light through the half-opened door, hear the phone ring, and hear her grandmother pick it up before the first ring had even died away; the soft bubbling of the coffee and the creaks of the old house and her grandmother's voice, roughened with fear, asking "How is he?" and the silence that seemed to stretch forever, forever; then the sound of her grandmother crying. Soft sobs, and between the sobs, "I'll get her up and dressed. No. No. I won't tell her. I'll wait until you're here."

Her grandmother didn't need to tell her, though. Kate knew Jackie was dead. Jack, her brother, twenty-one months older than she was, funny and handsome and smart and athletic, who had gone swimming with some of his friends and who had told her she couldn't come because she was a girl. He and his friends had raced away on their bicycles, laughing, while she stood in the yard, furious at not being included when she could do anything he could do as well as he could do it ... and most things . . . better.

And he had never come back.

All her life, she'd thought, If I had been there, I could have saved him. If I had been with him, he would still be alive. Lying in the Florida hotel room with people who didn't even belong in her world, she still thought, If I had been there I could have saved him. I would have.

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