Read Online Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent - Free Book Online Page A

and shrugs, This is nothing , and now, when the doctor frowns, there is no sympathy in it: Submit to spousal abuse if you will. A blush creeps up Jade’s throat and tints her ears, her shame exacerbated by the doctor’s indifference, for he, assuming she is a highly troubled individual, ably ignores her, bending to his task. Extracted from her heel, brandished under the hooded medical lamp, is a sliver of rusted metal. No, she can’t remember when she had her last tetanus shot. Hatred figures in the look she gives David when the needle goes in.
    â€œWe need to talk.”
    â€œI have to get to the office.”
    â€œWith that foot?”
    Left foot in a steep high heel, the injured right mummified in stretchy bandages and jammed into an old moccasin, she faces him asymmetrically. “Do you know why they do this? Make the bandages this sick beige ? It’s the shade of cadaverous Caucasian flesh. It’s an intimation of mortality. It’s so you wrap your rotting foot in your own future dead skin.” In frustration, she kicks off the high heel and tries a flat. “I did hear what you said, and yes of course we’ll talk, but I seriously have no time, this morning’s the Kelsis thing.”
    â€œKelsis?” he calls. “Kelsis?”
    â€œThe thing,” she calls over her shoulder. “The thing I told you about.”
    The thing she didn’t tell him about.
    He needs to collect his wits, to shave skittishly around the swollen hinge of his jaw, to negotiate rush hour traffic with Zen serenity, to sit down at his desk and chart the decline of the black-footed ferret. He needs the escapism inherent in any ordinarily bad day. After lunch, he opens a fat packet that informs him he’s been hit with a SLAPP suit. Nobody else in EPIC is named in the suit, only him. He is married to a lawyer, and would solicit her ultracompetent advice except that, this morning, she said Kelsis, and Kelsis is a small mining operation near the Arizona border whose radioactive runoff has been turning up in wells in the next county. Even worse, his records for the prospective Kelsis suit, like all the files on his computer, have vanished. He goes through his desk drawers hoping to find penciled notes or a backup disk holding some pertinent trace, but no, there’s nothing, and in trying to reconstruct the basic outlines of the case, he loses track of time, and it’s well after midnight when he turns the key in his front door. As was his habit on certain dire nights in his previous two marriages, he eats a bowl of children’s cerealover the kitchen sink, then swallows a couple of aspirin to mute the ache in his jaw and the pain in his back, which has bothered him more in the last twenty-four hours than it has since he fell. When he glances into their room, Jade is sitting up in bed, a legal pad against her knees, spectacles on her nose, and though she knows he’s there, she doesn’t stop writing. This means either that she’s hot after an idea or that last night’s grievance—the belief that he was responsible for the needle’s piercing her foot—has festered during ten professionally hostile hours at her firm. The rug has disappeared from the floor, he notes, and notes, in himself, the absence of any reaction to the loss, for which Jade will manufacture some credible explanation, but why does she get to preside over what goes, what stays? The rug was his catastrophe, he should say how it ends. The door to the boys’ room is ajar, their nightlight on, Shane’s bed a mess, because Shane is a poor sleeper, rousing and turning at the slightest of sounds—the back of his mother’s hand connecting with his father’s jaw, say. Neither boy is there, of course. There’s no telling when Susannah will entrust them to this household again. The nightlight is a nautilus shell shielding a miniature bulb, and by its glow, David sits in the corner,