Alice Close Your Eyes Read Online Free Page A

unnaturally wide. He limped in circles, tearing at the skin of his flanks, stretching it, letting go, biting again, drawing blood. He flopped to the ground like a fish, stiffly one way, then the other, crying. Crying. At last his body flexed so far sideways that it stuck that way. He didn’t roll then, he simply lay there, strangling, a string of sandwich-flecked foam oozing out the side of his mouth.
    The filmy eye rolled back and locked on me, and the life dimmed from him like a flame sinking into wax.
    I walked into the woods, sat down on a stump and rocked forward and back, one arm clamped around my stomach, the heel of my hand shoved into my mouth. My teeth dug small blue trenches into my skin, then drew blood.
    My mother came in that night and said she’d heard the Kukal’s dog had been poisoned.
    “Poor old guy,” she said. “How could someone do a thing like that? They’ve had that dog since he was a puppy. I remember when they brought him home from the pound.”
    Nana was in her chair, watching TV and working on a crossword puzzle. She looked up slowly, looked right at me, and winked.
    * * *
    The gray house sits like a stump in the grass at the end of a long suburban street on the south side of the island, slightly apart from its neighbors and surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence and a tangle of weed-choked shrubs. The miniblinds in the front window are dented; the tumble of bricks in the side yard has not been moved. The house looks the same today as it did when my mother and I moved in a dozen years ago.
    In the park across the street, I sit alone in a rubber swing, rocking idly forward and back, forward and back, an exhausted pendulum.
    Sometimes I leave the park and walk through the neighborhood, past the small elementary school where Danny and his friends used to torment me, past the salon where my mom and I once got the two most awful haircuts, to the corner where the ice cream shop used to be. Ice cream was our Saturday ritual after my soccer practice. My mom liked to get a scoop of butterscotch and one of bubble gum, which seemed like an odd combination to me. But she always laughed and gnawed on the rock-hard nuggets of gum and said, “Don’t judge.” And she would dot the tip of my nose with ice cream and kiss it clean.
    The ice cream shop was bought by Starbucks a few years ago, its pink candy-striped awnings replaced with ubiquitous green. On rainy days, I go inside and sit at the window with a caramel macchiato, which tastes a little like butterscotch if you try hard enough.
    Sometimes, when no one’s home, I go up to the gray house and peek in the windows. The blinds are always closed. There is nothing to see. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
    The house didn’t feel so sinister when my mother lived there. True, it broke our hearts to leave Nana’s trailer after she died, but my mom had a new boyfriend who had invited us to live with him.
    “I need the help, Alice,” she said. “If we stay here, I’ll have to go off-island to get a second job. And who will be with you?”
    “I can stay by myself.”
    “You’re nine. What if something happened?”
    “I could go to Sarah’s...”
    “Sarah’s mom hates me,” she said.
    “But—”
    She sat down on my bed. Her factory uniform was rumpled, name badge askew. The freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out so clearly against her pale skin that they looked as if they’d been stamped on, one by one.
    “Trust me. This is going to work out, I promise. There’s a school right down the street, and Ray has a good job. You like him, right?”
    Wrong, I thought. I didn’t like him at all. He was ugly and big, with hard, rough hands and a laugh so loud it hurt my ears. He left tracks in the toilet and distressing smells in the air.
    “Sure,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.
    We moved in with Ray the next week.
    A Honda pulls up now at the gray house, and behind it a small U-Haul truck, which ambles past,