Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Read Free Page A

Whoever this Jimmy Pryce was, he hadn’t sent them a card or flowers when Jonah died. The parade of faces at the funeral were a blur to her—she couldn’t remember who had been there or not—but the cards and flowers she recalled perfectly.
    “No? Jimmy thought you were pretty hot when you transferred in from New York.” He smiled, and perhaps for a moment there was a glimmer of hope and life in his eyes, of happier times. It dimmed, as it always would, forever after.
    “Anyway, we camped out down by the tracks one night. Spent the whole time scaring the crap out of each other with flashlights and telling ghost stories. When you’re a kid you believe that stuff, deep down, even though you’ve gotta act like you’re too mature to believe it, and too tough to be scared by it.”
    Sarah pretended to smile; a kind of peace offering. Then she went back to the flavourless risotto with Paul studying her closely. Their conversations had been infrequent in the past few weeks, and often tense. They talked around and above things and never addressed what lurked below.
    Jonah would never hear the story of the Three-Eighteen. He would never camp out by the train tracks and tell ghost stories, never go trick-or-treating or have a friend like Jimmy Pryce, whose antics he would look back on fondly when fatherhood and dreaded maturity came along and the hard climb toward forty had begun.
    Forty
. At thirty-two, Sarah felt ancient. Sometimes she thought about what it would be like to be truly old and abandoned, stashed in some nursing home, all her passions diminished or taken away, waiting for it all to end. Waiting to die. This didn’t feel much different.
    “Why do you ask?”
    The tone of the question, the awkwardness in his voice, put a chill between them. It should’ve had the opposite effect. Here he was, trying to have a civil conversation about something more than the weather or perfunctory work-related trivia, but it felt so forced that Sarah only tensed up further.
    “No reason. I heard someone talking about it today and was surprised I’d never heard it before.”
    “You were fifteen by the time you moved here. Probably too old for ghost stories.”
    Again she forced a smile.
    Paul took another bite of risotto and they descended into the sort of funereal silence to which they had become hideously accustomed.
    Jonah had had his father’s eyes.
    Sarah managed a few more bites and then endured several minutes more at the table before allowing herself to rise and bring her dish to the sink. “I’ll clean up later. I’ve been wanting a bath all day.”
    She’d been taking a great many baths of late. Paul had remarked on it only once, two weeks earlier, and she had told him tersely that she needed the alone time. He’d had no response for that. Once she might have confided in him, told him what she really did during those long evening baths with the radio playing up on the shelf—that sometimes she touched herself and tried to remember what it was like to be alive and in love and full of lust, and sometimes she used the edge of a razor blade or her tiny scissors to scratch and lightly cut her flesh, trying to discover if she had the courage to cut deeper and let herself bleed.
    Either way, whether searching for passion or pain, she cried. With the water hot and steam rising, sometimes she even pretended that there were no tears.
    Her eyes snapped open and she inhaled sharply. Something had woken her, tonight. It took a moment for her mind to make sense of the thumping bass coming from a car passing by at the end of the street. God, that was loud. Some kind of post-modern blues-funk like Amy Winehouse, and it wasn’t drifting off the way it should have been. The car had stopped for some reason.
    Rubbing her eyes, Sarah slipped from beneath the covers and went to the window. She pulled the curtain aside and tried to peer out into the dark toward the end of the street. Not much breeze, but the night pulsed with the