Recalculating Read Free Page B

he’d say to her, clamping each clip in place, making her writhe in pain, making her feel like her skin was screaming.
Fat. Fat. Fat.
    That night, after he’d fallen asleep, she’d lay in bed, bruised in half a dozen spots, each one of them its own planet of agony, and a voice had spoken up inside of her head. This voice sounded a little like her mother’s and a little like her sister Laura’s and a little bit like her own.
You know he’s going to kill you if this keeps up.
    Maureen’s eyes fluttered open, then slipped shut again.
So what?
she thought.
Let it be over. Let this end.
    He’s going to kill you—unless you kill him first.
    She had laughed out loud, shaking her head. Kill Tommy? Unthinkable. It was like pretending that you could kill … well, that you could kill God.
    But he’s sick
, said the voice … and then Maureen remembered an old joke, a bad one, but one somehow appropriate to the situation.
A doctor calls a woman into his office. “Your husband is very ill. Terminally ill,” he says. “The only chance of saving his life is if he gets three home-cooked meals a day, he gets to watch sports or whatever he wants on the TV all day long, and you give him regular massages and blow jobs whenever he wants them.” The woman nods, takes notes, then walks into the waiting room, where she’s left her husband sitting. “What did the doctor say?” the husband asks, and the woman answers, “He said you’re going to die.”
    * * *
    “Turn left,” said the pleasant female voice of the GPS. Maureen put on her blinker, looked both ways, then turned. “Follow the road to … ” A slight hesitation. “White Horse Pike. Then bear right.”
    “It’s amazing,” she murmured, and Liza, in the passenger’s seat, clapped her hands in delight. “But what if I don’t do what it says?”
    “Try it,” Liza said. So Maureen drove past White Horse Pike, watching as the little virtual car on the GPS map ignored the big red arrow. The screen blanked out.
    “Oh, no, I broke it!”
    “Just wait,” Liza cautioned as the voice said calmly, “Recalculating.” An instant later, the map was back online, with a different route plotted, another red arrow indicating the next turn.
    “Wow,” said Maureen.
    “See, Ma, you can do it. You’re going to be fine.”
    Maureen had spent the next week fiddling with her GPS—the GPS from Beyond the Grave, as she sometimes thought of it—and she’d pleased herself with how quickly and with what little effort she’d mastered the system. She’d plugged in all of the places she went—her hair salon, the Y, where she did Aqua Aerobics twice a week, the grocery store, of course, and the cemetery where Tom was buried. Just lately she’d taken to typing in the names of places far away, places she’d never seen. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Carmel-by-the-Sea. San Francisco. The Arcadia National Park in Maine. The voice of the Ouija, the ghost in the machine, never told her she was stupid or dreaming to think of these places, to look at the mileage and the routes; it never called her
fat-ass
or
lardbucket
or
dumb-bunny dyke
.
Calculating
, it would say in its cool and somehow bemused female voice. Then
Route found
. Tommy had been dead for six months and seven days, and with every moment that passed Maureen believed more and more that one of those trips might be possible. She was fifty-four, and fifty-four was a long way from dead. She could put the big house on the market, maybe move in with Laura, whose children had also left the nest. The two of them could go on road trips, as they had when they were teenagers, with the Little Playmate cooler full of ice and beer and Diet Coke in the backseat, with tote bags filled with beach towels and suntan lotion, and a boombox and a few cassette tapes, Juice Newton and Linda Rondstadt singing “It’s So Easy to Fall in Love.”
    A week after she’d found the box in the attic, she’d called her sister and asked if she wanted to meet for