The Fainting Room Read Online Free Page B

so without waiting for an answer she hurried down the drive, nearly tripping on the gravel in her haste to get to the car.
     
    But he was right, she thought later, sitting in the parking lot. He was exactly right. I was out of my mind. Because she’d run out of the house, gotten in her car and turned on the engine. Then sat there in the driveway and thought, Even this car is too nice for me. And it wasn’t even that nice a car, not like Ray’s Saab with its real leather seats and racy engine; her car was a ten-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass, a huge boat of a car that had belonged to Ray’s mother until she died. Evelyn got out of the Olds again and stood in the driveway, not knowing what to do next. She didn’t want to go back in the house. She wandered around to the dark backyard, breaking off bits of hedge and throwing them away. The house stood quietly over her, warm yellow light illuminating one upstairs window like a storybook drawing. The house was perfect too, and she was like some bad guest, moving through it and messing things up. She stooped down, picked up two of the rocks at the border of Ray’s herb garden. She wished she had learned to juggle one of those days back in her life before she knew him: she would have liked to see those rocks arc in rainbow-shaped trails in front of her face, would have liked to feel them falling, hard, into her palms with a little sting.
    Idiot, idiot, idiot , she thought, the words in her brain a tune she could not get rid of, and then she found herself turning and throwing one of those round rocks as hard as she could toward the room with a light in it, as if that yellow glow were a target. There was a crash, a faint thud and then silence.
    For a second she wasn’t even sure what had happened. The first thing she became aware of was that the punishing voice in her head had stopped. She took a deep breath; the air was soft, full of spring dampness. The silent backyard opened out around her, dark and full of peace.
    And then she noticed there were spring peepers starting up again, and then Ray was calling her name from somewhere in the house. His voice sounded bland, mildly curious, as if he were wondering whether she’d accidentally dropped a dish. She looked up. In the big window on the second floor, the fancy curved one, there was a horrible jagged space.
    She ran around to the front of the house with no clear idea besides getting away, jumped in the Olds and drove. Ray was probably still down in the kitchen, and perhaps he would interpret the sound of breaking glass as just some curious night noise. If he didn’t go upstairs before she got back with the milk, she could get him to bed without him discovering the broken window, and then after he fell asleep she’d assess the damage. Maybe she could even keep him out of the study over the weekend, maybe she could get the glass fixed Monday while he was at work and he’d never have to know.
    Fine. But Evie Lynne, you threw a rock through your own window.
    In the supermarket she bought a gallon of milk and paid for it without noticing. She got in the car and drove home again. When she passed the police car on Old Adams Road, it didn’t register. Not until she pulled into the driveway and saw the lights on all over the house and yard did she catch her breath, her chest squeezing into a fist as she ran inside. Only when she found Ray standing dumbly in the study with a cup of tea in his hand and dried blood on his face and blood-soaked gauze taped over his eyebrow did she realize: he’d been in the room. She might have killed him.
    “Oh, God,” she whispered.
    Ray was gesturing with his bloodstained hand at the rock on the carpet, the shattered window, the smashed lamp.
    “The cops think it must have been some kids from town who threw it,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the desk.
    Did he really believe this? Did he really think she hadn’t done it?
    “That could have killed you,” she said. She was shaking. She