Hush by Anne Frasier Read Free Book Online Page A

getting back in the carrier—a vessel he normally avoided to
the extent of hissing and yowling.
    Ivy hung the little red collar with its tiny
bell and silver rabies tag over the doorknob, then sat back down at
the table and took a deep breath.
    The smells of the inner city ... Stale sweat,
cooking grease, moldy wallpaper glued to rotten wood. Plastic
garbage containers overflowing with soiled diapers. Sour, spit-up
milk caked to stained towels.
    The sounds of the city. Sirens. The squealing
of tires on hot, sun-softened asphalt. A baby crying. The
repetitive bass of rap music coming from a chopped blue Chevy that
cruised slowly up and down the narrow street, its modified engine
producing a deep testosterone rumble.
    The apartment with its air of slight decay .
. .
    It all took Ivy back to a day she'd hoped to
examine from a great distance. But past and present meshed, and she
realized with dismay that her life had not moved forward in a
linear fashion, but was spiraling backward upon itself until she
was one inhalation away from yesterday . . .
    They say bad things come in threes. That was
certainly true for Claudia Reynolds, the person Ivy had once been.
Within a short span of time, she had lost everyone she cared about:
her father, her mother, her boyfriend.
    Under her photo in her suburban Des Moines
high school yearbook was the caption "Girl Most Likely." That could
have been taken any number of ways, but in Claudia's case it had
meant girl most likely to succeed. She'd graduated with so many
offers of full scholarships that she had been able to pretty much
take her pick of schools, and finally she had decided upon the
University of Chicago. At the time, Chicago was known as the murder
capital of the world, but that didn't stop her from settling on the
school where her boyfriend was going. She'd planned to pursue a
degree in fashion design. It seemed so frivolous now, so
shallow—and yet she was still drawn to fabrics of rich hues and
textures. And really, college hadn't been about a degree, it had
been about being near Daniel. She'd imagined their relationship
quickly blossoming to the point where they would share an
apartment. Share dreams. Share the future.
    She became pregnant.
    Up until the pregnancy her life had been
perfect to the point of embarrassment. Bad things didn't happen to
Claudia Reynolds. When she was little, her charm was so great that
people would rub her head for luck. On her sixteenth birthday, she
bought a lottery ticket and won half a million dollars. But later
the money was taken away because she hadn't been old enough to buy
a ticket in the first place.
    Strange luck.
    Once during a school hockey game, the
goaltender had her kiss his smelly gloves—and his team won. After
that, he would always look for her before he took to the ice. One
time, when she wasn't there to kiss his gloves, he broke his arm
and had to sit out the rest of the season. The next year he
couldn't get the magic back and after a month of bench-warming he
quit, taking his wounded pride with him.
    It wasn't a good thing to be someone's luck.
There was so much pressure, and so many things could go wrong.
    Her accidental pregnancy threw something out
of balance and suddenly her life went from charmed to cursed. And
once the bad stuff started, it didn't stop.
    She'd always had weird periods so by the time
Claudia realized she was pregnant it was too late to have an
abortion—and she wasn't sure she could have gone through with it
anyway. Before she could share the news, her boyfriend tearfully
told her he'd met someone else.
    A week later, her father, a grade-school
teacher, had a heart attack and died. After that, Claudia's mother,
who'd depended on her husband for everything, seemed to lose the
will to live. She mentally drifted away. Her doctor put her on
antidepressants and tranquilizers. In that numb state, she stepped
off a curb in front of oncoming traffic and was instantly killed.
But Claudia knew what had really killed