Close Your Eyes Read Online Free Page A

night with the daughter of a Dallas judge, Alex took me out for pancakes and suggested we spend spring break in New York. We could go to some awesome parties, he argued, and then “hoof it upstate.”
    Something broke in me. “He killed her,” I said, startling the waitress, who slid our plates to the table quickly and did not return even after we emptied our coffee mugs. “He’s not … a good person.”
    “He didn’t do it,” said Alex.
    Sadness curdled into fury, and I put down my fork and knife. They were coated with syrup from cutting my pancakes into shreds. “I can’t even look at you,” I said. “You’re so stupid. You know as well as I do what happened, you stupid fuck.”
    “I was there,” said Alex.
    “But you didn’t see anything!”
    “No, I didn’t. Did you?”
    I bit my lip. “I don’t remember …” I said. I had not even told Alex about my dream, about swimming into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night.
    “Lauren, I know him. I’m telling you, he didn’t do it. He couldn’t have done it,” said Alex.
    “Oh, really?” I said, sounding a bit unhinged even to myself. “You know what an asshole he could be! He was angry about those fucking shoes from Dr. Schwickrath, I bet.” I held my breath, having finally voiced my theory, which I had never mentioned to anyone before.
    “He isn’t capable of it,” said Alex, sounding rehearsed. He seemed not to have heard my idea, or perhaps he had chosen to ignore it. “I know it, Lauren. I know him.”
    “Then who killed her?” I asked.
    Alex didn’t answer, just looked at me pleadingly. “Who the hell did it?” I said, too loud. A football player was sitting at the next table with his parents, all of them staring, and I was both enraged and humiliated. I bent close to my brother and whispered, “I never want to see you again.” Then I left the International House of Pancakes, crying all the way back to my room at the sorority, telling my roommate I was hungover to explain why I spent the rest of the day in bed.
    Alex graduated from Harvard and sent blank postcards as he traveled from Europe to India to Africa. We did not speak for three months.
    Remembering the sadness of the time without him, the move to Houston with the wrong boyfriend, the small room on West Campus—I had been so forlorn I finally bought a turtle just to have something to say good night to—I put my hand on my brother’s shoulder.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I love you.”
    Alex set his jaw and looked at the road. I sighed. He didn’t want to believe it, but the facts told the truth: our father had hit our mother in the head with a glass decanter, cracking her skull. He had left her to die on the bedroom floor. It was a crime (the prosecution said) of passion. It was what could happen if you were a certain type of person, and you fell too much in love.

3
    Gramma was disappearing. Pops, my grandfather, had been gone for seven years, and it was as if Gramma just wasn’t interested in a world without him. She was with us bodily, but she often wore a preoccupied expression, as if she were listening to terribly important things happening just outside our range of hearing. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but it seemed to me like Gramma was living in a better time, a time when she was a young mother with her life ahead of her. To live there fully, I guess, Gramma had to abandon the present day. She was leaving us slowly, maybe to make up for my mother’s abrupt departure. I missed her.
    After the three-hour drive, Alex parked at Cypress Grove Retirement Village. When I climbed out of the car, the heat flattened me immediately. In Houston, the humidity made summer an absolute hell. If you could help it, you didn’t go outside at all. The beach would be sweltering and miserable. Worse, oil residue in the water turned into tar balls that stuck to your skin after swimming. Most hotels had tar-removal wipes next to the little shampoos and