Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Read Free Page B

beat of that song. There came a laugh, the slam of a door, and then the car roared away. Some kind of mischief going on down there—the kind of thing she and Paul might have gotten up to, once upon a time.
    Paul had left the window open wide and Sarah backed away and hugged herself tightly, shuddering. Even without a breeze, the night was cold. The weather had shifted again, but New England was always like that.
    With a frown, she realized she had been unconsciously rubbing the bandage on her forearm. She had gotten a bit carried away with the scissors in the bathtub tonight.
That’s one way to look at it
, she thought, sleep still clouding her mind. Her arm ached where she’d cut it, and she hoped it had not become infected. If Paul noticed, that would be difficult to explain. Of course that was an enormous ‘if.’ He barely saw her any more. She might as well be made of glass—a window where a woman used to be.
    The clock ticked loudly on the nightstand. Once they had kept a baby monitor there and the sound of Jonah turning restlessly had kept her alert. But now there was only the clock and the soft breathing of the automaton who had taken the place of her husband.
    Sarah watched Paul sleeping. He had mastered the emotionless mask that he wore during the day, but could not control his unconscious mind. His features were tight with sorrow and consternation. His dreams brought him the nightmares he spent the days attempting to evade.
    Beyond him, the clock on the nightstand read 2:13 A.M. Sarah blinked and stared at it and the display clicked over to 2:14. She turned toward the window. The gauzy curtain seemed like a veil, now, but though she could not see as far as the Kenyon River from here, she did not want to look out across the town toward the river.
    She climbed back into bed, sliding deep beneath the covers. On her side, she pressed her eyes closed and slid one hand under her pillow, an exaggerated pantomime, as though she could fool her body into thinking it was capable of falling right back to sleep. But experience had taught her better.
    For fifteen or twenty minutes she lay there, stubbornly persistent. When she surrendered to the inevitability of her insomnia, she opened her eyes at last and glanced around at the moonlit glow of her bedroom. Paul breathed softly beside her.
    Sarah wanted to scream. If only her sleeplessness could have been made incarnate, turned into something she could kick and punch and claw. But it could not be fought. Especially tonight. Just as she had been pretending that it would be possible to simply fall back to sleep, she had also avoided acknowledging the conversation she and Martin had had in the foyer of Sterling Software that morning.
    Again, she glanced at the clock: 2:37, and Paul still sleeping, so peacefully.
    Sarah slid from bed and grabbed her blue jeans, pulled them on. She’d been sleeping in a light blue t-shirt she sometimes wore to the gym and didn’t bother with a bra, just pulling a fuzzy red sweater on over it. With another glance at Paul, she took a pair of socks from the drawer in her nightstand and went quietly downstairs.
    She paused only once, while tying her sneakers, to wonder what exactly she hoped to accomplish. Her chest tightened with anticipation, a kind of giddy excitement that might have been hysteria. Then she went out the front door and pulled it quietly closed behind her. Her own car was parked inside the garage and the automatic door opener made a lot of noise, so she took Paul’s Cherokee.
    As she pulled out of the driveway, her hands were trembling. She didn’t click the headlights on until she reached the end of the street and turned onto the main road. The dashboard lights cast an industrial gloom inside the car and the radio played low as she drove away from home, following the same course she took on her way to work.
    The clock on the dash read 2:49.
    Sarah hit the gas and the car lurched forward, speeding up. She couldn’t be