Disintegration Read Online Free Page A

didn't resist as the needle entered the inner crook of his elbow.
    "Mattie
is
in the hospital, Jakie," Renee said.
    Numbness crept up his arm, rushed into his head, and the drug massaged his brain with its icy fingers.
    "On the bottom floor," Renee said, as Jacob slipped back into the grotto, surrendered once more to the black soothing liquid of unconsciousness.
    He drowned at Renee's last words: "In the morgue."

CHAPTER THREE

    R enee didn't know what was more terrible, burying an older child or burying an infant.
    Mothers should not outlast their children. Mothers should go first, by any rule of the universe, under any decree of a caring God.
    She wiped her eyes and the dishwater stung. She only had three plates, and they were all clean, but she washed them again anyway. Same with the coffee cup. She had scrubbed it until no hint of brown remained. If she rubbed the cup any harder, she would wear through its ceramic skin.
    The apartment was devoid of any personality. Beige couch, matching armchair, solid oak table in the kitchenette with matching benches. Bare walls of antique white, a drab sea of gray carpet. Perfectly lifeless.
    She was afraid she would never feel alive again. Sure, her lungs inflated and her heart pumped blood, her fingers and toes moved, her eyes blinked. But life was more than the sum of working parts.
    Once, while making love to Jacob in their first year of marriage, she had the sensation of floating outside her body. She saw the two of them below, Jacob on his back, her with blonde hair dangling as they moved in a smooth and careless rhythm of hips.
    "How happy and alive they look," the disembodied part of herself had thought. Even without her glasses, she could see with great clarity from her ethereal vantage point. A voyeuristic guilt tugged her back into her flesh and the sensation had passed, but not the notion that she was totally and absurdly right where God had wanted her to be.
    She experienced that same discorporate sensation last year when the tractor was lowering Christine's coffin into the rectangular, red hollow of the Earth. There had been no pleasure in the sensation that time, only an aloof split, and then she rose like a polluted balloon. She swept over the scene on a September wind, cold, brittle, bound for the dead of winter. The cemetery stones jutted like broken icebergs, the greater part of their mystery unseen beneath the surface. The ancient maple by the steel gate had already lost its leaves and stood as helpless as the priest while the tractor's engine whined. Jacob stood in a dark wool coat, holding Mattie against him. Mattie wore black mittens, and their ends were damp because she had wiped her nose with them.
    The tractor stripped a gear in its winch box and the coffin jerked, the chain from which it was suspended digging into the well-shined surface. Lawrence McMasters, the funeral director, kept his lips pursed in practiced, stoic sorrow as he tried to usher the grieving family away.
    The Renee she'd left behind on the ground couldn't take her eyes from the coffin, which began to spin awkwardly two feet deep into its final resting place, knocking against the earthen sides of the grave and raining dirt. The tractor operator cursed and Father Rose crossed himself. Jacob called Renee's name and then Christine's, and Renee was grateful that the main service had been at St. Mary's and that the graveside service was restricted to immediate family.
    A family whose membership was now reduced.
    She witnessed the debacle from the distant safety of the sky, and remembered looking down at herself with pity, though part of her was glad to be momentarily free of the pain.
    She had no delusions of being an angel. In that bleak stretch of impossible perspective, she saw herself as she really was: scared, fragile, clinging to the threads of a reality whose fabric threatened to unravel.
    It wasn't at all how she viewed herself in the mirror, when vanity battled insecurity and the face