5/7/2023 0 Comments Enigma antonymIt's amazing that seeming calmness can issue from such a crazy cauldron of confusion and fear.I love you and everything is going to be all right. I love you,he says, surprised at his voice. When she raises her hands to wipe them away, her fingers leave appalling streaks of blood Abbalah-doonThe tears course down her cheeks. ![]() Ty's gone,Judy says.Gorg fascinated him and the abbalah took him. and down will come Tyler, cradle and all. Well, he thinks, maybe on the Fox Network He can feel her trembling from the inside out. He sits down next to her on the bed, puts his arm around her, and simply holds her. Nerves, heart, and mind, it wrenches at himīut he loves her, has loved her from the first week he knew her, helplessly and completely and without the slightest regret ever after, and now love guides him. It is an exhausted, lost sound that wrenches at him. Then her face cramps in a fresh agony of grief and she begins to weep. For a moment he sees gratitude in her eyes. She knows where she is and who is with her. Fred cannot call it sanity (no matter how much he would like to), but it is at least some sort of marginal awareness. She looks up at him and something comes back into her eyes. It's emptiness, as if something inside her has slipped aside and exposed a black hole She raises her head, and when he sees the terrified look in her eyes, he loses what little breath he has left. His heart is hammering in his chest, his nervous system is redlining with adrenaline overload, and his mouth tastes like a burnt fuseįor a wonder, she does stop. He doesn't want to see how badly she has hurt herself until he has to. Her hands are clasped below her knees, out of sight, and Fred is glad. He can't see her faceher hair is screening itbut she's wearing shorts and he can see dapples and streaks of blood on her tanned thighs. The bed itself has been yanked away from the wall. The sheets are heaped in the corner, along with the pillow. Judy Marshall sits on the bare mattress of her son's bed. Some of the scratches are dappled with drying spots of blood In the spot where the picture of Judy and Ty in the hospital had hung, the paper has been torn almost completely away, and he can see where she scraped at the wallboard beneath. And she has been at the wallpaper behind half a dozen. Glass litters the hall in sparkling sprays. Some, like the one of the farm, have been thrown down. Most of these framed photographs have been taken down. What is he supposed to do? When you discover that the woman you love has gone madhad a break with reality, at the very leastwhat are you supposed to do? How the hell do you deal with it? This is like coming into a horror movie halfway through the show, discovering it's real, and not knowing what to do. ![]() I see that now.She pauses, then cries:Abbalah Abbalah-gorg, Abbalah-doonHer tongue comes outcomes out to an impossible, cartoonish lengthand swipes spittishly across her nose. Fred sprints the length of the upstairs hall with glass crunching under his loafers is there not such a thing as mother's intuition? Ty is with his friends he told Fred just last night that he, Ronnie, T.J., and the less-than-pleasant Wexler boy intended to spend the daygoofing off.If the other three boys go somewhere Ty doesn't want to be, he has promised to come directly home. And he actually believes this, in spite of his continued blind confidence in his son's safetyĮven though he's sure Tyler is fine (certainly Fred has had no premonitions today, unless we count his rosy sales prediction about the new Hiler roto), he feels a shudder course through him at the sight of those streaks, and it is not Judy's condition that causes it but what she's just said: Ty's gone. Well, he thinks, carrying her out the door (her arms have crept tiredly up and locked themselves around his neck), I'm over that little misconception. Preoccupation with work was part of it a stubborn refusal to let go of the idea that things were basically all right was the rest of it. How could I not have noticed? But he knows. She's lost maybe twenty pounds since the last time I picked her up like this, he thinks. He picks Judy up in his arms and is appalled all over again, this time by how light she is.
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