Читать книгу Alone: A Love Story - Michelle Parise - Страница 30

I can tell you this. When The Bomb first drops, it feels like the hand of God reaches down and pulls everything out of me — entrails, guts, what’s left of my heart, my breath, all sound. I am motionless, airless, frozen, everything has exploded and yet, I am in some kind of cryogenic state. Life is an instant blurry, swooping mess, like I’m underwater.

I open the car door and run out into the thick snow. We’ve pulled over to the side of the road, into the entrance of the cemetery where my grandmother is buried, and my uncle, and my cousin who died too young. The weirdness of this is not lost on me, even in the shock. It’s freezing out, my coat is open and I have no mitts or hat or scarf, but I just run and run to the cemetery gates. They’re locked.

I feel like throwing up into the snow. I can’t stop shaking, or crying, or screaming. Alternately I just stand there mute, thinking, it’s not true, it’s not true, this can’t be true. It is so unbelievably cold, the two of us like that, ankle deep in the snow, facing each other beside the massive iron cemetery gates, surrounded by tall twisty trees that sway in the wind, scratching the sky with their bare branches.

This isn’t happening.

But it is. Scattered all over the snow is everything inside of me, torn up and then spit out by this hyena of a man. Right there, at the most awful moment of my life, I suddenly recall a dead moose I saw in a national park once as a teenager — it was nothing but bones in the snow, and fanned all around the bones was its hair.

“Why is it like that?” I asked, and the Park Guide said the wild dogs tore into the moose fast for meat, spitting the hair out while they were tearing it to shreds. This is the image I think of in those first few moments of shock. I am just bones in the snow, everything has been torn out.

The next day I call our real estate agent. Staring right across the dining table at The Husband, I say into the phone, “We need to sell the house. We need to sell it this week.”