Signs and Wonders Read Free

four and two hundred pounds, her son, yet still managed to be the most fragile human being Kathleen had ever known. No wonder he’d been drawn to turtles; he too should’ve been born with a shell. Overly sensitive to the world, he had had to swathe himself with drugs so as not to feel it too much. Now, sober, he was unsheltered, exposed. One look at his father and he burst into tears, shuddering against Kathleen, his spine curling. If he could feasibly have crawled into her lap, she knew he would’ve done so. Cradling his huge shoulders in her arms, Kathleen cried too. His grief was the knife that sliced through her own numb skin.
    “It’s going to be okay,” she murmured to him, over and over.
    “It is?” Steve said wildly. “How? When?”
    “We just have to wait,” she said. “It’s a waiting game.”
    He wanted to know if he should put off his move to California, to the better zoo with more kinds of turtles. She forbade it. Shetold him Terry would want him to go. Which, if he had any brain activity inside the sleeping carapace of his body, he did.
    The car was recovered in a wooded area off the interstate. Its windows had been left open, and the interior was colonized by raccoons—Terry had thought that patronizing McDonald’s made him a man of the people—and soaked by rain. As a crime scene, it was less than pristine. Because the pterodactyl-seeing man had been wearing a ski mask; because the sole witness, the guy at the hospital, had been drinking; and because even violent crimes are just passing deeds in a world overflowing with them, the carjacking case did not get solved. At first the police called Kathleen regularly; she went to the station, reports were filed. Gradually she found herself calling them; eventually they stopped returning her calls. At night she sometimes dreamed of the hallucinating carjacker, and he was always riding the pterodactyl, hanging on to its leathery neck, laughing as it flew him up and away.
    Steve loaded his possessions into a U-Haul and drove west, calling every day, then every other day, to report on his progress and new life. Her departmental colleagues, initially so solicitous, stopped visiting, and then their calls dropped off too. “End of the semester,” they said apologetically. “You know how crazy it gets.”
    She was left alone with the breathing, silent body of her at-one-time-soon-to-be-ex-husband.
    Only one person, of everyone she knew in the world, didn’t seem to forget her, and this, horrifyingly, was Fleur Mason. She’d been part of the first departmental visit, and in that flurry of conversationKathleen had been able to ignore her, though she suspected her of having left behind the white teddy bear holding a mug that read
Get well soon!
But she was unavoidable when she came alone, a week later, with a box of chocolates and basket of specialty teas. She stood next to the bed and said cheerfully, “He doesn’t look so bad, does he? I think he looks better than last week.”
    Kathleen missed her job, her students, her son, and, most of all, the sense of a future without constant irritation opening up before her, a future that—like Tantalus and his grapes—seemed to have been ripped away just as she was about to grab it. But of everything she’d gone through, being alone with Fleur Mason in a hospital seemed the most intolerable. And while she’d realized that her irritation was merely a substitute for other hatreds, that didn’t mean she liked the woman any better. She still found her presence, her clothing, her voice, her manner—in short,
her—
as intensely aggravating as before.
    So she didn’t say much when Fleur showed up, just glared—figuring it was her prerogative to be rude. And she also figured that it was better to discourage Fleur now, based on the same principle she used as a strict, even harsh grader on the first paper of the semester, so the students would know she wasn’t a pushover.
    If Fleur got the message, she didn’t