Nell by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page B

protecting them; boxes packed; change everywhere. Maybe they would have to sell the house. Where would she live? She could live anywhere now, in any city, state, country. She was free to go. But she found this sudden freedom confusing. Even if she had not been happy with Marlow, still he had brought order to her life, anchoring her firmly to the ground, giving her something to center her life on. Now she was going to drift free, and she was scared. She hadn’t yet figured out what it meant that they had married, and now she would have to figure out what it meant that they were divorcing.
    Five years later, here she was wandering around her house at night and she still hadn’t figured it all out. She still hadn’t decided a thing.
    But she had survived. She had managed. She had kept her children safe, healthy, and happy. She had found a job and kept it. She had gotten them this far.
    Nell drifted down the stairs of the dark house and carefully opened the front door so that the Indian wedding bells hanging from the nail below the knocker wouldn’t chime and wake the children. She slid outside into the night, and as her bare feet touched the cold wood of the porch, she felt a shiver ascend inside her. She walked to the edge of the porch and sat down on the steps. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light and she could make out the figures of trees and bushes, street and streetlights. The April air was chill and the porch wood was damp; her gown clung, moist and cool, to her bottom and legs. She would probably catch a cold. But she liked these cold, definite, unambiguous physical sensations. She needed them.
    Once, when she was a senior in high school, Nell had driven from Des Moines to Chicago to spend a weekend seeing theater. Laura Morrison, her best friend, another aspiring actress, had gone with her. They had sped along the highway in Nell’s red Thunderbird, with the white top down and the wind blowing their hair. They had felt young and lovely and glamorous and adventurous, singing with the radio, passing acigarette or Coke back and forth between them, waving at other cars. There had not been such severe speed limits in those days, and Nell had driven very fast, proud of her driving. As they approached Chicago, Laura had unfolded a gigantic map.
    “Do we want 94 or 294?” she yelled.
    “What’s the difference?” Nell yelled back.
    “I don’t know,” Laura said, her words carried away on the wind.
    The map rattled and whipped in her hands. It was big and awkward and flapped like a great colored sail, seemed to fight like a live bird.
    “Hell!” Laura said, and began ripping away at the map. She tossed complete sections of the map over her shoulder so that the paper flipped away behind their car. “We don’t need this part, or this,” she said. “We’ve already been there.” Finally, she had nothing in her hands but a small square of paper covered in a complicated checkerboard of the vicinity immediately around Chicago. “Now,” she said, “I’ll be able to make sense of this.”
    But she had thrown so much of the map away that they couldn’t figure out where they were, not even when Nell finally pulled the car to the side of the road and studied the jagged remnant seriously. They didn’t know anything, couldn’t tell anything. They didn’t know if 294 was different from 94 or the same road. They stared at the flat corn land around them and realized they didn’t even know which towns they had just passed. In the end they had had to get off the highway eight times in order to find service stations and ask directions, and that had added two hours to their trip.
    Still, Nell liked that memory. She and Laura had found the whole trip hilariously funny. And even now Nell liked knowing that once she had been brave and carefree enough to speed down a highway while her friend threw pieces of map to the wind.
    Then, getting lost had been an adventure.
    Now Nell worried that she’d never get on a good