Goodnight Blackbird Read Online Free Page A

meager pizza in front of her, her appetite vanishing. "Kevin, it's been a long day."
    "If you're going through another... if this is like the depression you had...." He sat down at the kitchen table across from her. "I just wish you'd tell me. Because you do know how this appears to everyone, don't you? Your refusal to even consider selling this place... it's like you're punishing yourself, rubbing your nose in what happened."
    "Maybe I like the house. Have you ever considered that?" The stridency in her voice surprised her. It seemed to surprise Kevin as well.
    "Then we'll get one just like it. I saw one for sale on Belwood a couple blocks away. Same kind of ranch, but it had an attached garage. Bigger lot, too. How about that?"
    Jacqueline said nothing.
    "You're not making any sense at all," Kevin said. "I offer to get us a better house, but you don't want that. It's irrational."
    "And maybe I think your inability to stick it out here is pretty damned irrational. Do you think if we just pick up and move to some other house the bad memories will magically disappear?"
    "No, but I think it's healthier than living in a goddamned crime scene." His voice was hoarse, close to breaking. He stood up and raked a hand through his thinning hair. For a moment he looked at the pool—the scene of the crime—before returning his gaze to Jacqueline. His face was puffy and lined, and there were more than a few grey hairs at his temples. The double chin that he sometimes got when he grimaced now seemed to have become a permanent feature on his face. (Or maybe there was just so much more to grimace about.) A small part of her wanted to touch his face and comfort him. He was growing older, his wife was fading away from him and the life he had envisioned for himself fifteen years ago was dissolving all around him like a sand castle at high tide.
    It would have been so easy to get up, take him in her arms and tell him okay, let's start again.... The look of relief and hard-won joy in his eyes would have been heart-rending.
    But she couldn't bring herself to do it. His wife may have been fading away from him, but Kevin was fading away from her as well, like a man standing on a pier as a ferry spirited her away. The affection she felt for him was morphing into something lukewarm and, at best, sisterly. It wasn't a deliberate choice on her part, but at some point during the separation Kevin had stopped feeling like home to her.
    He stood by the stove, his back to her. "I don't suppose you've given any more thought to what we talked about last month."
    Jacqueline wished she had taken some aspirin before coming home. "Kevin. I don't want to have another baby. And I'm not sure you do, either."
    "Do you think I keep bringing it up just to fill time between the awkward silences? I'm serious about it."
    "I think you just want to paper over Michelle." She said this as gently as she could but she knew it was going to hurt him anyway. Everything she said or did nowadays seemed to hurt him—like little inadvertent slices with a razor blade. "I think when it comes to having children, you should want to have them rather than need to have them."
    "What does that mean?"
    "Sometimes I see you looking at families in a restaurant or on the street. You have this desperation in your eyes. To find some way to get back what you—what we—lost." She had the image of a gambler who's lost his shirt at the tables and can't sleep, obsessed with getting back to the casino floor to try to win it all back. "I don't think that's the best frame of mind to be in when it comes to having children."
    "I didn't realize all your time alone here has given you the ability to read minds and provide dime-store psychological insights."
    "Kevin—"
    "No, you've had your say, I'll have mine. You can't see into my mind, Jacqueline, so don't pretend you can. If you want to reduce me down to a few pitiful pop psychology motives, I can do the same to you. How about this? You won't leave the