Read Online Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry - Free Book Online

about the blood thing, Ty?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAbout Gigi being covered in Aunt Sally’s blood?”
    Tyler wipes his mouth and then tosses the crumpled paper napkin into the center of his egg-streaked plate. “No, I didn’t.”
    â€œHow long do you think she was sitting there before they found her?”
    â€œListen, Bry, I wouldn’t give it too much thought, OK?” The unexpected kindness in his voice causes a slithering feeling in Bryony’s stomach.
    â€œOK.”
    â€œShe’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. Just put your head down and wait for the crap to pass.” Tyler gets up from the table and ruffles the top of his sister’s head as he walks behind her chair.
    â€œHey! You’re messing it up,” she says, and removes the hair clips she put in earlier that morning; they are silver with yellow pineapples on them, a color that Adele is always telling her she can’t pull off. Bryony stares at the miniature plastic fruit for a moment, then jams the hair clips into the pocket of her shorts. Stupid , she thinks. Everything’s just stupid.
----
    I leave Bryony sitting alone at the kitchen table.
    Suspended within the center of the story roar, I feel around for another thread to follow instead; the house is full of them, woven tight in some places and unraveling in others. I hunt for Gigi’s, but again, the pills she’s taken make it impossible to find.
    I pick up a navy-blue thread in amongst the tangle. This one feels familiar and solid and carries with it the faint smell of mown grass and aftershave. I follow it up the stairs and into Bryony’s room, where Liam is kneeling on the floor beside Gigi’s bed.
    â€œGigi?” he whispers, but she sleeps on, lost in her chemical void. Liam smooths the grimy hair back from her forehead, revealing a pale constellation of freckles. Are you in there, Gi? He finds the pill bottle on the floor by his knees and takes a moment to read the label. “You’re still OK, Gi, aren’t you?” It’s not a question; it’s a plea.
    You were always such a sweet kid, just like your mom. She was the sweet one and now . . .
    The force of his feeling sideswipes me and pulls me under, a powerful wave that tumbles me till I rip my skin on grainy sea sand and there’s a searing, salty pain in my mouth, my nose, and my lungs—I am drowning. Such grief.
    Oh, Liam.
    I drop the navy-blue thread. I flee the Wilding home as fast as I can.
    The story sound hisses at me like an enraged, trapped animal. I clutch at shadows, blind and screaming, to try to block the noise as I race down streets, through shopping mall parking lots, around corners, and across school hockey pitches, until, finally, I stop.
    I know this place.
    The houses along the tree-lined street are old, nothing like the ones in Cortona Villas, but they have been brought up-to-date with expensive sandstone cladding, sleek brushed-steel house numbers, and electrified fencing. The house where Adele and I grew up is still surrounded by a large white wall, but the black iron gates that used to rattle when we swung on them as we waited for Daddy to come home from the office have been upgraded to electronic ones.
    I remember how cold the metal felt that one long afternoon in my second to last year of high school when our parents told me and Adele that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer. I remember feeling weirdly disconnected from my body as I walked out of the house with this new, icy news inside me. I crossed the brown, crunchy winter lawn, strode past Mom’s roses, which had been pruned back to nothing but thorny sticks poking out of the flower beds, and stopped when I saw fourteen-year-old Adele clutching on to the gate and looking out at the street, just as she used to do when we were little.
    She’d come outside in her slippers, and I could see the outline of her newly curvy torso through her thin jersey. She