Before He Finds Her Read Free Page B

proves you need to think it through some more.”
    Underneath the table lay a rust-colored rug. She could make out the discolored blotch where as a flu-ridden child she’d vomited. She remembered that illness more than any other, lying on the sofa and watching game shows and soap operas for a week. Sipping ginger ale, nibbling on Saltines, throwing up into a trash can. Her aunt laying cool rags on her forehead, holding her, taking her temperature. Being there for her. Always being there.
    Outside, the change of seasons caused migrating birds to sit invisibly in trees and caw at obscene decibels. Soon the leaves would change. But nothing ever changed inside these walls. Her aunt and uncle had furnished the hastily rented trailer with only two criteria: expediency and thrift—hence the Goodwill furniture, Walmart bookshelves, discount rug remnants. They assumed that their time here would be temporary. Once their initial panic had melted into a lasting, dull fear, they saw no reason (and had no money) to furnish the place a second time.
    But it wasn’t only the furnishings. The three of them—how they were around one another; the countless ways they’d arranged their lives so as not to be overtaken by their deepest dreads… a whole life could pass this way.
    “It’s always going to be like this, isn’t it?” Melanie said. She wasn’t feeling argumentative anymore. Rather, she was seeing the truth about her future, maybe for the first time. “No matter how old I am, or how old you are, or how long it’s been. Nothing will ever change, will it?”
    “When he’s caught...,” Wayne began. At one time he must have said these words with conviction. Now they sounded perfunctory. Their life in Fredonia was all she knew and, more and more, all her aunt and uncle knew, too. The three of them hardly ever referred to the past at all, let alone to the “he” at the center of it. “When he’s caught...,” Wayne began again. But he didn’t seem able to finish the sentence, because it would have been pure fiction.
    As if coming to the same realization, he frowned and poured himself a mug of black coffee. He set it on the kitchen table and steam rose into the air. Melanie willed herself not to gag.
    “In other words, never,” she said, her hand moving instinctively to her belly. She wanted to rub it, soothe it. The past couple of weeks, she’d been doing that in class, in bed, in the car. But she wasn’t going to give up this secret—not yet—and so she lowered her hand again.
    “When he’s caught,” her uncle said.
    Midafternoon, Melanie was still feeling upset by the morning’s argument with her aunt and uncle when, in her required math class, the instructor got to talking about fractals, mathematical designs that repeated at every scale. “Like how a head of broccoli has those florets,” he explained, “each one containing self-similar smaller florets, which in turn contain even smaller ones.” He was projecting images from his laptop onto the whiteboard behind him. “Or how the shoreline has the same basic windy shape whether you’re standing on the beach and looking at a few yards of it, or if you’re up in a satellite looking down at the whole coastline.” He spoke slowly, with an air of strained mystery, as if he were a sorcerer and not a middle-aged community college instructor who wore the same blue blazer to each class session.
    The fractals made for beautiful images, equations made visual and color-enhanced, and then an idea struck Melanie with such devastating force that her palms started to sweat.
    “That’s me,” she muttered under her breath, staring at the projected image. “I’m a fractal.”
    “I beg your pardon?” The instructor stared at her. Melanie never spoke up in class, and the humming of the projector drowned out her voice. “Miss Denison, did you say something?”
    She kept looking at the geometric shape, amazed because it was so obvious and true. She hid in her small