The Road Home Read Online Free Page A

one arm he grabbed the edge of the hole. He looked right into her eyes, and then she saw his face turn into a skull, and his bony skeletal fingers reached for her. Just as they touched the car door, the edge of the hole broke, and the man disappeared under the water once more. There was a thrashing underneath the surface, and more water splashed out. Then, finally, everything was quiet, and the surface of the water became smooth and still.
    Jenny felt the cold creep into the car. Then somebody was with her in the car, and she felt as if she were being covered with warm feathers.She turned to look, and she wasn’t in the car anymore. She was lying on a bed in a small room. A woman was lying on the bed with her. Jenny tried to cuddle up to her and get warm, but the heat was gone from the woman’s body. The man who had drowned was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, weeping. Ashtrays full of half-smoked cigarettes and empty bottles were scattered around the room. On a stand by the bed was a spoon with some brown liquid and a piece of cotton in it. The woman had something tied around her arm. Jenny was crying. Suddenly the woman’s eyes opened, and she looked straight at Jenny.
    â€œI’m sorry, Jenny,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean for all this to happen. I just wanted the pain to stop.”
    The woman looked up at the ceiling. “Dear Jesus,” she prayed, “please look after my little girl.”
    Then everything began to get all mixed up. She was back in the car, and then she was being carried through blinding snow. She was freezing, and then she was wrapped in something warm and soft. Now she was somewhere in a dark room. She was being held next to a warm, beating heart, and she felt moisture dropping on her face. She opened her eyes and looked up into the beautiful face of another woman. The woman was holding her close and weeping. Her body was shaking with sobs. It was Mama! And then as she looked, Jerusha’s face turned into the face of the woman in the small room. The other woman’s skin was cold and blue. Her eyes opened, and she looked at Jenny.
    â€œJenny, come find me. I’m lost, so lost,” she said, and then the skin began to melt off her face, and she was just bones and the bones were death, and Jenny fell into the water, and the man who had drowned came up from below and grabbed her leg with bony fingers and began to pull her down, down, down…
    Jenny sat up in bed and screamed. “Mama, Mama, where are you? Come find me, Mama!”
    There was the sound of hurried footsteps in the hall, and Jerusharushed into the room, holding a lamp. “Jenny, darling, what is it?” she asked as she came to the side of Jenny’s bed.
    â€œA dream, Mama, a horrible dream,” Jenny sobbed.
    Jerusha put the lamp on the stand by the bed and sat next to Jenny. She took the girl in her arms and kissed her forehead. “I’m here, my darling, I’m here.”
    Jerusha held Jenny close, and Jenny felt the beating of her mother’s heart.

C HAPTER T HREE
    Johnny

    J OHNNY THE C ANDYMAN WOKE UP out of a deep sleep and sat straight up in his bed, moaning and holding his head in his hands. Strange images and faces and…horses, yes, horses and plows, like a weird kaleidoscopic farm movie, were all mixed together in his mind. Finally his dazed thoughts cleared, and he opened his eyes. As he slowly came back to reality, he shrugged and thought, The drugs. It was the drugs I took last night .
    Johnny rubbed his eyes and looked around the room. The walls were brightly painted with clashing primary colors that strobed and flashed and made his head ache. Large posters of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi were pinned on the wall over the bed. The room was decorated in the quasi-Edwardian mode that was all the rage in the Haight-Ashbury.
    An overstuffed brown, furry couch and a brass floor lamp with a shade fringed with strands of