Just After Sunset by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

the broomgrass. He could see them huddled together under a billion High Country stars, still waiting for their train.
    “Are you cold?” Willa asked him.
    “No—why?”
    “You shivered.”
    “Maybe a goose walked over my grave,” he said. He closed his eyes, and they danced together on the empty floor. Sometimes they were in the mirror, and when they slipped from view there was only a country song playing in an empty room lit by a neon mountain range.

The Gingerbread Girl

    –1–

    Only fast running would do.

    After the baby died, Emily took up running. At first it was just down to the end of the driveway, where she would stand bent over with her hands clutching her legs just above the knees, then to the end of the block, then all the way to Kozy’s Qwik-Pik at the bottom of the hill. There she would pick up bread or margarine, maybe a Ho Ho or a Ring Ding if she could think of nothing else. At first she only walked back, but later she ran that way, too. Eventually she gave up the snack foods. It was surprisingly hard to do. She hadn’t realized that sugar eased grief. Or maybe the snacks had become a fetish. Either way, in the end the Ho Hos had to go go. And did. Running was enough. Henry called the running a fetish, and she supposed he was right.
    “What does Dr. Steiner say about it?” he asked.
    “Dr. Steiner says run your ass off, get those endorphins going.” She hadn’t mentioned the running to Susan Steiner, hadn’t even seen her since Amy’s funeral. “She says she’ll put it on a prescription pad, if you want.”
    Emily had always been able to bluff Henry. Even after Amy died. We can have another one, she had said, sitting beside him on the bed as he lay there with his ankles crossed and tears streaming down the sides of his face.
    It eased him and that was good, but there was never going to be another baby, with the attendant risk of finding said infant gray and still in its crib. Never again the fruitless CPR, or the screaming 911 call with the operator saying Lower your voice, ma’am, I can’t understand you. But Henry didn’t need to know that, and she was willing to comfort him, at least at the start. She believed that comfort, not bread, was the staff of life. Maybe eventually she would be able to find some for herself. In the meantime, she had produced a defective baby. That was the point. She would not risk another.
    Then she started getting headaches. Real blinders. So she did go to a doctor, but it was Dr. Mendez, their general practitioner, not Susan Steiner. Mendez gave her a prescription for some stuff called Zomig. She took the bus to the family practice where Mendez hung out, then ran to the drugstore to get the scrip filled. After that she jogged home—it was two miles—and by the time she got there, she had what felt like a steel fork planted high up in her side, between the top of her ribs and her armpit. She didn’t let it concern her. That was pain that would go away. Besides, she was exhausted and felt as if she could sleep for a while.
    She did—all afternoon. On the same bed where Amy had been made and Henry had cried. When she woke up, she could see ghostly circles floating in the air, a sure sign that she was getting one of what she liked to call Em’s Famous Headaches. She took one of her new pills, and to her surprise—almost shock—the headache turned tail and slunk away. First to the back of her head, then gone. She thought there ought to be a pill like that for the death of a child.
    She thought she needed to explore the limits of her endurance, and she suspected the exploration would be a long one. There was a JuCo with a cinder track not too far from the house. She began to drive over there in the early mornings just after Henry left for work. Henry didn’t understand the running. Jogging, sure—lots of women jogged. Keep those extra four pounds off the old fanny, keep those extra two inches off the old waistline. But Em didn’t have an extra four