Cry Me a River Read Free Page B

the wind rattled Grace’s window, threatening to pry off her roof, and shook her to her bones. Gus complained a bit about it but she urged him to lie across her feet, and then she kneaded his thick neck with her toes, and that soothed him. As she drifted, she had a dream about Leon Cooley, brought into her life by Earl and, as it turned out, a friend of her since-deceased sister, Mary Frances. Grace had run over Leon while driving drunk—or hadn’t; it turned into a dream or a vision or something. Kneeling beside him, performing CPR, she had asked God for help.
    Then and there Earl had appeared before her, informing her that he was her last-chance angel, and warning her that if she didn’t mend her ways she was going to go to hell. It had turned out that he was Leon’s last-chance angel, too. Grace didn’t know if Earl had accomplished his mission with Leon—Earl said he had—but she did know Leon was dead, and that her own brother, Johnny, who was a Catholic priest, had arranged for his burial.
    But in her drifting dream, Leon was still alive, and he wasn’t wearing prison clothes. He looked like a regular bald person, not a dead felon. He had on the same long-sleeved shirt and trousers that he’d worn to Clay’s baptism, and she thought her heart would spill out of her chest: He had started out so well and ended up so badly.
    The gray winds were blowing, threatening to twist into a tornado, and her purple kite was plastered against the slanted, shingled roof of his house. It was a little house, and it looked suspiciously like hers.
    Then it transformed into a house made of bricks. Then into one of sticks; and one of straw. The straw flapped in the wind, rippling like a yellow curtain, too insubstantial to withstand the air current. But it was still topped by a brick chimney, and her kite was still stuck to it.
    “It’s a dream,” she said.
    “Life. Life is but a dream,” he told her. Then he opened his arms and flew like an angel to the straw rooftop, grabbing up her double triangle of thin, fragile paper. If someone put a hole through that, the weather would shoot right through it, pour right out of it like gray blood … so much blood … red blood.
    I lost that kid. He died beneath my hand
.
    “Hey, Leon, you can fly now,” she said.
    “I shed my burdens. But you haven’t. So be careful not to fall. And don’t jump into a bottomless pit without a parachute, you got it?” Leon said as he let go of the kite.
    The purple triangle drifted toward her. Grace grabbed it and held it against her chest, then raised her free hand up to Leon, who was still crouched on the straw roof.
    “Let me help you down,” she said.
    “You got your hands full.” He gestured with his head at the kite. “Besides, once you’ve had up, down’s just not the same.” He grinned at her with his boyish gappy teeth. The house became brick again, solid and substantial, more appropriate for someone who weighed as much as Leon.
    “Where you are, is it good?” she asked.
    A fierce gale blew, scudding clouds between the two of them; Leon and the house disappeared, and Leon’ssmile was the last thing to go. As the force died down, Grace found herself on a wide dusty plain surrounded by elms. The Survivor Tree was an elm; it had survived the Oklahoma City bombing, and had become a beloved symbol of the city’s endurance. The inscription read:
    The spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us
.
    I don’t have faith
, she thought.
I’ve seen too much
.
    Then a shot rang out, sounding for all the world like a jag of lightning, and Grace rotated in a circle, looking for its source. Strangely, she was not afraid. Somehow she knew the bullet was not meant for her.
    I put that girl in a coma
, Grace thought, remembering the zing of gunfire before Coma Girl’s aka Neely’s shit-head boyfriend put a bullet in her brain.
I tried to talk to her and she got shot in the head to keep her