Read Online Sorrow Road by Julia Keller - Free Book Online

her crazy spinning thoughts back into a normal rhythm. Something wild and shocking and hard.
    Something that would serve as a sort of emotional defibrillator. That was how she rationalized it. She needed something to stun her back toward normalcy.
    She lost weight, because she could not eat, because the thought of food revolted her, and instead of expressing concern, most of her friends asked her what her secret was: Atkins, South Beach? Vegetarian? Vegan?
    Many times, out of the blue, she could not catch her breath. She would be at work or hanging out with her housemates and she would start sweating. She could not focus. She thought she was going to pass out. She was barely twenty-one, but the first time it happened, she was pretty sure she was having a heart attack. The second time, too. And the third and fourth. The moment eventually passed, but that did not matter.
    The fact that it wasn’t a heart attack the last time it happened did not mean that it wasn’t a heart attack this time. Or maybe a stroke. Or something.
    Saturday afternoon, she had crawled under the thick down comforter on the bed in her tiny room. She closed her eyes. She waited to die.
    She did not die.
    A few hours later, she got out of bed and fired off an e-mail. About a job she’d seen advertised. A job in Acker’s Gap. And then she called her mother and told her she was coming home.
    *   *   *
    Sunlight smacked the peaks of piled-up snow lining the road, bouncing back into her eyes and momentarily blinding her. Carla adjusted the visor. She hadn’t brought her sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a lot of things. In fact, she had left a ton of junk behind. More than just sunglasses. She’d only taken her laptop and a makeup kit and a couple of books and some bras and panties and an extra pair of jeans and a few sweaters. She’d just stuffed everything into her backpack and thrown it onto the passenger seat and taken off. She’d text Skylar later. Skylar had the room next to hers. Skylar would dump the rest of her stuff in a box and ship it to her in Acker’s Gap. No rush, she had told Skylar. Whenever.
    This was a rare straight stretch of road. Carla was able to see a long way down it. She had left the store an hour ago. She’d finally finished crying, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her coat. Gross, she had thought, even while she was doing it. The clerk watched her. Then the old woman forced her to take a can of Diet Coke, even though Carla didn’t want it. Here, honey, c’mon—it’s free, okay? You don’t look so good and you need sumpin’. Here. She had pushed the cold wet can into Carla’s flaccid hand. Sorry we don’t have no Dr Pepper but this’ll do ya right ’til you can get summa that.
    And then Carla was back out on the old country road, which for the most part wound around and around in tight corkscrews, wriggling and twisting around frozen-over creeks and snow-matted fields and abandoned barns that looked seconds away from total collapse. That’s why this sudden stretch of straightness felt like a gift. For once, she could actually see where she was headed.
    The bumpy walls of snow on both sides of the road created a kind of tunnel effect. Instead of feeling closed in or trapped, though, instead of feeling suffocated, Carla found the narrowing to be … comfortable . Peaceful. It cushioned her. Protected her.
    She was going home.
    Kurt and Skylar, two of her roommates she liked the best and was closest to, had tried to argue her out of it, telling her that she was going back into what Skylar called “the belly of the beast”—returning to the very place where all the bad things had happened, and where things never changed. Skylar was an African-American woman from Brooklyn, New York. She had family members, she told Carla, who lived in places where a black face was an anomaly—and not a welcome one. On her visits to