Cradle Lake Read Online Free Page B

respond, but it was futile. She could do nothing, it seemed, except stare at the blank wall across the room. Touching her hand was like touching a mannequin’s. A nurse had disposed of Heather’s slacks, which were apparently soaked in blood. None of the doctors could give him a suitable reason for why any of it had happened.
    Out in the hospital corridor, Alan stopped one of the nurses whom he’d recognized going in and out of Heather’sroom. She was a heavyset black woman with a lacquered coiffure and neon orange talons for fingernails.
    â€œI want to see it,” he said.
    The nurse said she didn’t understand.
    Calmly, Alan said, “Then I will explain it to you.” And he did—that he wanted to see it, needed to see it. Where was it?
    â€œWe don’t do that.” She seemed disgusted by the idea.
    â€œThen get me someone who will,” he said and waited.
    Other nurses filtered by, and some of them tried to give Alan coffee or take him down to the cafeteria for something to eat. Tried to distract him, change his mind. But he wouldn’t be distracted, wouldn’t change his mind. He wanted to
see
it.
    Eventually, a grizzled old doctor with rimless glasses and hair like a nest of copper wires approached. He spoke in a low voice. His breath reeked of onions. He used phrases like
highly unorthodox
and
would not change what happened.
    â€œI know that. I’m not a fool,” Alan said. “I want to see it.”
    The doctor nodded. “Then follow me.”
    He would suffer nightmares from what he saw that afternoon in a small room at the end of the long corridor. A very clean, antiseptic room. The thing itself was in a clear plastic bag, vacuum-sealed and with a biohazard sticker on it. He could
see
it … the suggestion of delicate limbs, the misshapen cranium, the vagaries of all the things that make humans human. A single foot, tiny toes splayed, five of them, all five …
    Back at the apartment, Heather refused to leave the bedroom. She quit her job and spent her days in bed, readingtrashy romance novels and watching daytime television with the volume turned all the way down. She refused to come out for dinner; like a prison guard, Alan simply left food on the nightstand.
    For two weeks he slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. A needling white-hot pain began to spread in his guts. He thought of nonspecific cancers and ravenous tapeworms; of African orphans with bloated bellies whose faces served as banquets for giant, flesh-hungry flies. He thought, too, of exploding fireworks and bloody stool. Half-dreaming, half not.
    Then one night he was jarred awake on the pull-out sofa by something that may or may not have been a dream. He crept down the hall to the bathroom. A sliver of tallow light radiated from beneath the closed door. Gently, he knocked. “Heather?”
    No answer. It sounded like someone shaking a single maraca on the other side of the door.
    â€œHeather? Honey?”
    The maraca stopped.
    Alan tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Pushed it open …
    She sat naked on the edge of the tub, her hands between her knees clutching a bottle of pills. The pills shook as her hands shook: the maraca sound. She looked up at him, her face blotchy and indistinct, her eyes messy in their sockets. There was a slight tremble to her lower lip.
    He rushed to her, dropping to his knees while simultaneously grabbing her head in both hands. The plastic bottle of pills fell to the floor and rolled against the toilet. Hesobbed into her hair. “Christ, hon …”
    â€œI didn’t take any,” Heather said, and it was the voice of the recently deceased. Her hands continued to shake. Her eyes could not focus on him—could not focus on anything. “I thought about it but I didn’t take any.”
    â€œShhhh,” Alan said into her hair, gently rocking her. “Shhhh, babe. Shhhh.”
    And the next morning she was