The Suicide Motor Club Read Free Page A

taking a dream so seriously. It had to be a dream, because she thought monsters with shining eyes had taken Glendon. Monsters! It was ridiculous. A black man’s broad face loomed down at her, kind and wise. She thought she smelled pot. She laughed.
    Then everything went away.

2
    SHE WOKE UP AFTER A LONG DITCH OF NOTHING.
    Her eyes wouldn’t open all the way.
    The lights, the tray with a water pitcher, the curtain, all suggested hospital. The next face she saw staring down at her belonged to her little sister, Patricia. She wore a shirt Judith didn’t recognize, a pretty coral-colored shirt with a frilly collar. It took Jude a moment to remember that she didn’t live at home anymore, that she wouldn’t know when Mom got Patsy a new shirt. Nobody in the Eberhart family had wanted to call her Patsy; it was the kind of name to invite teasing, with its connotations of gullibility, especially for a girl like her, but she had preferred that to Patty or Pat, introducing herself as Patsy from the age of five. She wasn’t a little girl anymore, but she lived at home. She would always live at home. How old was she? Twenty? Older? Judith was starting to remember something else, something troubling.
    â€œUm,” the young woman said, looking agitated.
    Judith tried to say her name, but it came out
Passy
.
    â€œUm. Jude. Mom’s not here.”
    Judith just watched her. Something horrible was trying to assert itself in Jude’s memory, but she fixed on the bright coral fabric of her sister’s shirt.
    â€œMom’s in the bathroom. She’ll be right back.”
    Patsy looked to the hallway, looking for their mother. There was something Judith needed to know, something Patsy didn’t want to tell her. Her mother would say the words. Or the man. What was the man’s name? Robert. There was a word for what Robert was to her, a word like
lover
or
buzzer
or
hug
.
    It would come to her later.
    Patsy looked at her now, then looked down, shifting from side to side. She liked Patsy’s face. A little like hers, framed in shoulder-length black hair, but thicker in the jaw, her nose turned up. It was a plain, trusting face, the face of a girl who would never stop liking milkshakes. The eyes heavy-lidded and brown, not blue like hers. Like the boy’s.
    What boy?
    â€œUm. Mom’s coming right back, okay? Okay, Jude?”
    â€œOkay,” she managed.
    â€œYour face is bruised a lot.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œI don’t like how much your face is bruised. It’s green. Except your eyes are black like you been in a fight.”
    â€œI guess it’s good I can’t see my face.”
    â€œIt’s bruised bad. And it’s cut.”
    â€œIt’ll get better.”
    â€œI know. Mom said.”
    Patsy rested her head on Jude’s shoulder, touched her cheek with her fingers. Lightly, so lightly. Was anyone as loving as Patsy? She’d never deserved the ugly words other kids had used about her. Jude had never tolerated those words. Billy Verne had shouted
mongoloid
from his bike just across the street from the Sacred Heart Academy and sat there looking tough with a cigarette, but Jude had pushed him off that bike and kicked him with the hard toes of her polished MaryJanes. Kicked his shins so hard they bled through his khakis. She got suspended for that, but Billy Verne never shouted anything at Patsy again, not from his bike, not from a school bus, not from a second-story window. When Mother asked Father Grogan to talk to her about what she did to Billy, he said, “I’m sure you know our Lord Jesus, who told us to turn the other cheek in the face of violence and ignorance, never would have done such a thing.” Then added, “But, if I’m honest, I doubt he would have stopped you.”
    People who knew Patsy loved her.
    Especially the boy.
    The boy with the coloring book.
    â€œOh God,” she said, her eyes welling up.