Frog Music by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online

it’s barely audible.
    His sky-blue eyes have the sheen of oily puddles. How’s the boy ever to forget this night? His head turns toward the front room, the speckled shadow of blood.
    “Don’t look,” says Blanche, grabbing him.
    He hisses, his hand flying up to his injured arm.
    “Sorry.”
    Ellen McNamara is suddenly on her feet. She crosses the floor and pulls her son away, making him yip with pain. “Down on your knees, you should be, Miss Blanche, thanking the merciful that you were spared.”
    Spared , repeats Blanche in her head. She’s been learning English since she was fifteen but still sometimes a word turns strange to her, as impenetrable as a pebble.
    “Leave her be, would you,” says McNamara, without lifting his head off the bar.
    “Well, tell me this,” Ellen demands, “how did every godforsaken bullet happen to miss Her Nibs here, but Jenny’s lying in there in flithers?”
    Nobody answers. Blanche can taste the hatred, like vinegar on the air. The funny thing is, these people don’t know that she’s the source of the bloodshed, the cause. But even so, she can tell they all wish it were the other way around, with their old friend Jenny sharing a late-night jar with them, and the other visitor’s body askew in the next room.
    She struggles up until she’s sitting against the barrel, the room spinning around her. It’s a fair question: How did every godforsaken bullet miss Blanche? She bent down, that’s all she can think of to explain it. She leaned down to undo the knot of her gaiter. Mary Jane’s gaiter; Blanche asked for a pair only yesterday to keep the skeeters off. Yesterday? Thursday morning. This morning, because this is Thursday night. Blanche stares at her single small boot with the gaiter taut over it. It feels as if her right foot’s been tied into its borrowed skin for a lifetime. Must ask for a knife, a knife to cut the laces. What a fluke. To owe her life to a borrowed gaiter. Because when Blanche doubled over to pick at the knotted lace, that happened to be the very moment—
    Now her heart hammers with belated panic. What if she’d stayed sitting up straight, singing one more verse—if she’d gotten her laces undone without a struggle—would there be two bodies in the next room right now, a tangle of stiffening limbs in a lake of blood? Was the gun aimed at both of them?
    No. Just at Blanche.
    It’s all a mistake.
    How stupid she’s been this evening, how she’s misunderstood from the moment the shots tore the air. Blanche’s creamy body cut down, that’s what he wanted. That makes a horrible kind of sense. Isn’t it Blanche, not Jenny, he has most reason to resent? Blanche who could be said to owe him something, everything, according to the twisted logic of men? What did Jenny ever do to him except make the error of befriending Blanche?
    A thought occurs to her, like a hand around her throat. Did he stay to look through the shattered window afterward? Does he know what he’s done, and what he’s left undone? Christ! Blanche wants to run straight out the door of the Eight Mile House—except that he might be waiting out there for her, half a mile up the County Road, to finish the botched job. She could let her dancer’s legs carry her far away, if she had any idea where in the world she’d be safe from him. Her pulse sounds so loud, the room seems to shake with it.

II
I HAVE GOT THE BLUES
    That Saturday night in the middle of August, Blanche wakes in her armchair. Her leg throbs painfully, reminding her of the collision with the high-wheeler, the thug at Durand’s brasserie, and her new acquaintance Jenny Bonnet, who’s stretched out on the couch, snoozing like some cat.
    What’s roused Blanche is the men coming in. “There’s some ridiculous con on the sofa with meat on his face,” Ernest is remarking to Arthur in the whimsical tone that means he’s soused.
    “Mister, the evening is over,” Arthur murmurs, leaning over the back of the couch in the