Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

tricked him—” Relief flooded in, exactly as when she managed to set up the winning move in checkers, and she watched like a spectator, enjoying the beauty of the move as poor Sarah squirmed. She could be sorry for Sarah if she let herself, could even ruin the move for compassion’s sake; but she resisted the temptation. Let Sarah sacrifice. Somebody had to lose.

Sarah stood up, retreated toward the window. “Joan, this is crazy. Please, I’d like you to go.”

“I want you to tell me everything you do.” She saw that in a moment Sarah would be crying, and she was tempted more strongly than before toward compassion, but again she held firm, thinking, You’re beaten, Sarah. I know why he loves you, but somebody has to lose.

“I can’t tell you. It would hurt you. I know you, Joan. I know you better than you think.”

“Yes. It will hurt me. But we have no choice.”

Sarah swept her hair back and pretended to gaze out the window at the rain. “I can’t tell you. But you’ve won. I’ll stop seeing him.”

Joan stood up, moved toward her, then paused, six feet away. “It’s not enough, Sarah. There’s someone else like you, somewhere.”

There was a long silence. At last, crying, Sarah nodded.

It had not been by Sarah’s techniques that she had won him, or if it had been, Joan Orrick would be the last to admit it; but she knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how to keep from hurting him, how to show the love that had made her cling to their life.

“Am I becoming a better person?” she would say. He would look at her, shaking his head as if in wonder, and she was happy. She began to feel confident. She was never afraid of him now, and not often afraid for him. For no reason that she could exactly explain, he no longer drank, or, rather, drank only now and then, at a party, and even if he got himself so drunk he couldn’t walk, he never turned on her—never in icy rage called her “catshit,” or stormed off to walk or gallop like a maniac on his horse or, worst of all, drive crazily off through the mountains. When he was roaring drunk, he did impersonations of famous men, and often, as in the past—but more joyfully than in the past, it seemed to her—he and Paul Brotsky did famous conversations, for instance between Czerny and Beethoven, or Shakespeare and Marlowe, or Wilbur and Orville Wright:

“It won’t fly, Wilbur.”

“It’ll fly. Now just get in the fuckin airplane.”

“No. My shoe’s untied.”

“Never mind your shoe’s untied, get in the airplane!”

“I think we should’ve made it of aluminum.”

“Aluminum’s not even invented yet. Just get in the—”

“Wilbur, I’ve got an idea.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s invent aluminum.”

“Orville, you Goddamn clown, we spent two thousand dollars and nine years of work and—”

“Wilbur?”

“Yeah?”

“You fly it. I’m too young.”

Even Evan and Mary began to grow confident, began, that is, to believe that the changes were permanent. “Daddy’s different,” Mary said one night, and had a cautious look much like Martin’s.

“How?” she said, knowing, wondering if Mary would dare say it.

“His eyes crinkle. His mouth never smiles, but—”

“We’re all of us different, honey,” she said.

She refused to think about the fact that her insides were changing too. Sometimes, when the pain was really bad, so that all she could do, despite the drugs, was lie in bed and cry—Martin would come and lie beside her and hold her, telling her he was sorry, wishing there was anything at all he could do—she would be frightened, so frightened that she’d begin to sweat, though she refused to think what frightened her. (“Have you noticed, Mr. Mixiedough, that the world is becoming increasingly dim?”) When she slept, she had nightmares: Sarah came with word that Paul Brotsky was dead, and when Joan went sobbing to find Martin and tell him, he was gone, no one had been in his study for what looked like years—his leather chair was rotten, there were cobwebs on the typewriter. She called out in terror to Evan and Mary. The house was empty, silent except for the ticking of a clock. Even the dogs were gone, had left no trace. When she looked out at the mountains, gray, unstirring in the winter rain, she knew her family was not there either. The clock ticked on. “Martin!” she would scream, and would wake up shaking violently, and he would be holding her, out of breath from running, telling her, “Joan, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

Life is fleeting, he wrote, even the worst of life is fleeting.

“Martin,” she whispered once, “it’s not all right.” And at the look that came over him, she knew she must not mention that again.

Once Evan frightened her as badly as she’d ever managed to frighten herself. They were in a restaurant in Japan, at the New Japan Hotel, the four of them eating and laughing, a picture-book family no one would believe—and as Evan was telling some endless story, Martin smiling politely, looking past him with glazed eyes, waiting for it to finish—Evan suddenly stiffened and gave a faint cry of terror and reached toward Martin as he’d have done if the floor had suddenly dropped from under him. “Evan, what’s the matter?” Martin said, and caught him in his arms.

“Daddy, I saw something!” Evan said, white.

“What did you see? There’s nothing.”

Evan was looking around the room as if lost, the way you look around a room when you wake up and don’t know where you are. “I saw something,” he said again. Mary, too, was looking around, afraid.

“It’s all right,” Martin said, and held Evan tighter.

“You were looking at me,” Evan said a little later, “as if I was dead, or invisible, and then—” But he couldn’t remember what happened next.

She remembered her grandmother, and Martin’s uncle George, and she clenched her hands into fists to make the trembling stop. She remembered that Martin had said one time, “I’m