Read Online The Bubble Reputation by Cathie Pelletier - Free Book Online

roared into your yard a year ago. I’m all over the teary-pillow stage. I just need to think about what I should do. The truth is, I’ve missed you. And I know how you must miss William.”
    Rosemary smoothed her hair back, twirled the ponytail around her finger. William . How just the mention of his name could elicit such a quiet panic in her, could start a trembling, an emotional earthquake with sharp tremors.
    â€œDo you want to talk about him?” asked the telepathic Lizzie. Rosemary shook her head.
    â€œNot yet,” she said.
    The orange sun was dipping down behind the apple trees, about to disappear in clouds and horizon. A red-winged blackbird, its epaulets flashing a blood red, flew away from the cattails growing across the road. Orange. Red. The green leaves of the apple trees. Even colors pained her now, knowing how William understood them, broke them down into components, admired them. Above the sinking sun was the lonely trace where a jet had been and gone, a ghostlike trail, a mere memory, as William’s life was now becoming. And even her memory of William was shaken. It had occurred to her during her three-month hiatus in the old house that perhaps she didn’t know him well at all. Why hadn’t he confided in her if his pain had grown to proportions large enough for him to commit suicide? This was the terrible knowledge nagging at her, trailing her about. After eight years, she did not know him well at all. She had had no inkling of the catastrophe ahead, she who was closest to him. And so his wrists had opened up in a flowering red, his veins cut like telephone lines. “No communication anymore with the people around him,” Michael had said, when he phoned with the news, and Rosemary had shouted, “Why?” over the phone, via the busy satellite, slow enough to miss a word or two in his answer, which was no answer at all. No communication. All the lines cut. Severed. “The vena amoris,” William had said to her once, “leads directly to the heart. The Greeks believed that, anyway. That’s why we put a ring on the fourth digit of the left hand when we marry.” But William had done away with the vena amoris.
    Rosemary looked at the mailbox, fading into the shadows by the edge of the road, and tried to think of other things than William and paints and suicide. She was afraid she might cry.
    â€œSpeaking of destroying someone’s illusions,” she said, “does your mother know about you and Charles?”
    â€œAre you absolutely unwound in the brain?” Lizzie asked, astonished. “I might be an adulteress, but I’m not stupid.”
    â€œI guessed she’d be the last person to know.”
    â€œDid I ever tell you how she studied my freckles when I was a child?”
    â€œA thousand times, Lizzie, you’ve told me.”
    â€œShe called them pigmentary disturbances ,” Lizzie said.
    â€œAnd she made you brush your teeth in the shower to save water,” Rosemary added.
    â€œOh, well, that’s just common sense,” Lizzie said. “My kids do that, too.”
    Night was emerging now, out of the trees, out of the meadows, casting dark shapes upon the road.
    â€œDo you remember the nightmare last night?” Lizzie asked. Rosemary wished Lizzie had forgotten it herself. It wasn’t a nightmare, really, but just another of the William dreams she’d been having since his death. She’d gone down to clean the basement, a task she’d dreaded and delayed for months, and there, among the forgotten junk and bottled cranberries, she’d found William dead in a puddle of scarlet blood. And then the bottles of cranberries dropped one by one from the shelf and crashed to the cement below, each one hitting with a deadening splat! They were as loud as guns going off. Splat! Splat! Each bottle spilled its contents out across the floor in bloody spurts, the last of the wild cranberries she and