Moon Music. Faye Kellerman

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       8

       Exercise. Exorcise.

      Stomping furiously on the treadmill, sweat dripping down—pouring down—as if her entire face were crying. Her wet palms were barely able to hold on to the handgrips. In a minute, they’d slip off and she’d go flying into space. Off the belt and into a wall like some Hollywood slapstick stunt. So as long as she could, she pumped her legs, running aslant on the instrument’s full tilt. She felt it in every vertebra of her backbone.

      To keep her mind off the pain, Alison thought of her research. The green book. All the answers were there if she’d just take the time to look in it. If she could only get off this blasted treadmill and concentrate on her research.

      It drove her crazy. To have to run. But she did it because she was too afraid not to do it. If she stopped, terrible things might happen. The nasty voices could come back. The horrid visions might return—flashing images of blood and guts and sticky stuff. They never came when she was busy. Why leave anything to chance?

      Running.

      Running to nowhere.

      An adequate assessment of her life.

      To run, run, run without any fun, fun, fun.

      But she stopped short of bludgeoning herself. She had come so far. It used to be that the fear kept her in bed almost twenty-four hours a day. Steve had to carpool, Steve had to cook meals, Steve had to shop and go to parents’ conferences and do everything.

      Now she could function. She could shop and pick up the kids from school … smile at the teachers and say hello. Often they’d smile back and say hello, too. And when she left the house, she made sure she was well groomed and presentable.

      At times, she was oh so normal. A normal woman doing normal things. But then there were the other times …

      So that’s why she ran.

      If Mama had run, she might still be around today. But Mama hadn’t run and that had been the problem.

      The steady whir of the machine’s motor buzzed through Alison’s head. Her leg muscles contracting and expanding, the exertion building up her lungs and heart and stamina. The exercise was making her strong.

      If only Mama had run.

      But of course, in her own way, Mama had run. But not in a healthy way. Her strange forays during the night. Two, three o’clock in the morning, she’d be gone. Her disappearances had terrified Alison as a child. Papa had been no help at all, as he had been frantic with worry. Sometimes Mama had stayed away for days in a row. And when she returned … the way she had looked. There had been times when Alison had wished that Mama hadn’t come back—this stranger so silent and sullen, her eyes feral and always bloodshot.

      Drinking maybe.

      Because her breath had turned fetid. As if she had lived on carrion.

      The ensuing arguments. Papa asking her where she had been. Mama saying she didn’t remember. Papa accusing her of lying. Mama going hysterical. Papa begging her to see a psychiatrist. Mama stalking out of the house.

      The scene repeated over and over until finally it became moot.

      Mama’s nighttime escapades. When she was ten, Alison had asked one of her own psychiatrists about them. Dr. Jones had called them fugue states. Alison looked up the word fugue in her junior dictionary.

       A musical form or composition in which a theme is taken up and developed by the various instruments or voices in succession according to the strict laws of counterpoint.

      Had Mama been playing music all this time?

      The СКАЧАТЬ