Waking Up Gray Read Online Free Page A

ocean today.
    Instead, after arranging a make do office in the corner of the other upstairs bedroom, she sent emails to some friends and family, letting them know she had arrived safely. When she was finished, she shut down the laptop. The day was already beginning to turn balmy. She closed all the windows in the house and started the air-conditioning again.
    Lizbeth felt like being a tourist today. She went upstairs, undressed and slipped into her black one-piece bathing suit. She threw on a pair of gray cotton shorts over the suit and rolled them down at the waist. Before leaving the bedroom, she coated her fair skin in sunscreen and then deciding she might need it, threw the bottle into a canvas bag that she planned to take with her. She also added an over-shirt, just in case the sun became too intense. She found her straw sunhat, retrieved her sunglasses and wallet from her purse, and stepped into her flip-flops. She stopped to look in the mirror. Not bad for forty, she thought, and smiled at her reflection.
    Lizbeth took the bike off the back porch and checked the tires. Satisfied they were sufficiently full of air, she dropped her bag in the front basket and rode off down Howard Street. At once the happy tourist, Lizbeth stopped along the way at several shops run out of cottages. There were quilts, candles, handcrafted pottery pieces, jewelry, paintings, so much in fact, that Lizbeth had to tell herself she didn’t need to try to see it all in one day. She had months to take it all in.
    She left the shelter of the shady lane and ventured out into bumper-to-bumper traffic around Silver Lake Harbor. She peddled unhurriedly, not bothered by the cars around her. When people came to Ocracoke, they needed to slow down. Even if the driver wanted to go faster, it was impossible because the road was jammed with pedestrians, bikes, scooters, and motor vehicles, all on a narrow strip of asphalt.
    Lizbeth cycled over to Lighthouse Road, following it to the white squatty tower. The Ocracoke lighthouse, the second oldest operating lighthouse in North Carolina, was built in 1822. It replaced an earlier lighthouse built in 1798 in the shape of a wooden pyramid, which lightning burned down in 1818. The present day lighthouse, standing at a height of seventy-five feet, shone a stationary beam visible for fourteen miles. Lizbeth found the lighthouse and keepers quarters captivating, as she always had. It fascinated her that the exterior of the lighthouse had originally been coated in a formula of lime, salt, ground rice, whiting, and clear glue, which had been mixed with boiling water and applied to the bricks underneath while still hot. It gave the structure an adobe like appearance.
    The white painted surface of the lighthouse glowed in the mid-morning sun, as Lizbeth reached out to touch it. Objects like this lighthouse held time still for Lizbeth. It represented happy memories of family and friends. Even as everything else had changed, this lighthouse stood timelessly unaffected, holding her memories. She spent a few minutes letting her thoughts wander back through the past. It seemed all of her happy memories were from before she found out about James’ infidelity. After that, she had only gone through the motions of life, never really feeling happy again, until now.
    If a brain injury was severe enough, a doctor placed the patient in a drug-induced coma. Lizbeth put herself in an emotional coma, just so she could function through her injuries. Her wounds may not have been physical, but she was battered nonetheless. She was just emerging from more than a decade-long sleep. Like a butterfly, she was spreading her wings after lying dormant for too long.
    Lizbeth peddled back out onto the highway. She headed north, stopping to buy a sandwich and some water at Jason’s Deli to take to the beach. Her destination was the beach near the airport. She could not ride the bike to the beach through the thick sand of the Point Trail, and it was