Critical Injuries by Joan Barfoot Read Free Book Online Page B

watching the headlights sweep by beneath. She would think — what?
    That all those headlights meant people with places they needed and wanted to go, with or towards people they needed and wanted to see, maybe that’s what she’d think. While she was up there in the dark on the bridge all alone.
    Maybe she missed her son. He imagined that, too, although also considered that maybe her son was the farthest thing from her mind; that maybe she’d forgotten her son. Her heart, anyway, was heavy as lead. Maybe it was so heavy she could hardly climb up the iron bridge fretwork. Maybe it was so heavy she thought it would smash easily when she hit bottom. Maybe to her that sounded best.
    He saw her falling, like a dummy, like a mannequin, like a person who does stunts for a living. But he couldn’t imagine her heart. He wondered what her last thought would have been, flying downwards. Maybe, “Oh no.” Maybe, “Finally.”
    Now, lying on his back in the tall grain, staring up into the starred, darkening sky, and into the remote, watchful faces of two German shepherds who show no signs now of malevolence, listening to pounding boots coming closer through disturbed, rustling grass and words being called out between male voices in cautious tones, Roddy thinks, “Oh no.”
    He has done everything he could. Even if nothing worked and this moment arrived anyway, he did everything he could think of. “All a person can do is their best,” his grandmother likes to say, although she would not have meant anything like this.
    So in that way he also thinks, “Finally.”
    It’s a funny thing, though. Roddy supposes this moment of lying here watched by two dogs and a thousand stars, and with probably a million insects and other small things unseen and unfelt underneath, is real. He guesses it’s a very particular, suspended moment between one thing and another entirely different thing. The funny, surprising thing, though, is that suddenly it feels good now, being suspended between one thing and another like this. Kind of weightless and free, like being in space.
    He’s not cold any more, either.
    It’s amazing, how totally contented he is with this moment. Perfectly satisfied. This is so new, and so fine, he wouldn’t mind at all if it just went on and on, forever. He sighs, he smiles upwards, he would say he is nearly, right this second, happy.

All the Time in the World
    As Lyle starts so reluctantly recounting the missing event, Isla finally sees it unfolding. Although not in his words, or his way. “Hop in,” Lyle says, and in she hops. He does a little number on her thighs: “tickling the ivory,” he calls this. It still, after several years of doing so, delights her to climb into his old dented green pick-up, so large and high, sturdy and workmanlike. The ruts and potholes of the laneway are easier on the truck’s tough suspension than on their cars, although inside it, humans tend to bounce around. Isla feels like quite a tiny person in the truck, with its wide seats and distant floor, as if she’s a kid briefly reliving childhood; although not her own childhood.
    The laneway ends at a busy county highway, and sometimes it takes a while to pull onto it. It’s always a wonder that there’s this rush of life so close to the house and yet also so distant. People come to visit, and even if it’s not their first time they’re likely to remark at some point, with flattering astonishment, “You’d never know this was here! It feels like a whole different world.”
    So it does. But still an easy drive to town, and then a long, slow expressway drive into the city, and work, and a different kind of whole different world.
    They turn left at the foot of the lane for the eight-minute trip into the town whose outskirts, which have been creeping in their direction, include a couple of car dealerships and strip plazas followed by a