The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

uniforms were asking me questions, and their faces were solemn, suspicious. One of them took the box and opened it. He looked inside, although I’d already described what was in there. What did he expect to find? I told them what I could, and left. The box looked strangely naked there, open in the middle of that wide oak desk. I left the police station empty-handed.
    Beenie gave me this same box and left the room without questions. Adrenalin rushed through my body, and I started breathing shallowly, quickly. Whatever I’d been doing before fell from my thoughts. I took Annette’s novel back into my office and spent the rest of the day reading it.
    Roberta was still gone at four when Beenie came in to say goodbye. “Well, I’m done. That garage is smiling again. Hey, Scott, are you all right? You look grey as cement. I think you should put down those papers and go out for a walk.”
    I was two-thirds of the way through. It was still a bad book, worse than I remembered. “Do you know what this is, Beenie? Do you have a minute to listen?”
    She said, Sure, and I invited her in. I went to the desk, and she sat in my fat reading chair by the window. For such a terrible experience, it took only a short time to tell. I’d spent years going over it in my mind, but here I was, telling it again, and it took no more than ten minutes. When I was finished, she looked at her hands.
    “When I was young, my husband and I liked to spend New Year’s Eve in interesting places. Once, it was in a train going across Canada; another time in a firehouse in Moscow, Idaho. Then the children came—” She threw a hand in the air as though she were throwing confetti to the wind. “Kids tame you, don’t they? After Dean was born, we usually stayed home on New Year’s, and maybe brought in a bottle of champagne. Once in a while, there was a party, but we weren’t so crazy about going out and wearing funny hats.”
    I looked at her, confused by her connection between funny hats and my story. We sat there, silently thinking about death and 31 December.
    “I never could figure out what I liked better—New Year’s on the back of a camel, or sitting in the living room with our kids, waving sparklers and jumping around. Both were good.
    “What does that have to do with you? Who knew more, Scott—you before this girl died, or the you after? Scars make our faces ugly, but they also give it character. From my point of view, I’d’ve done the same thing you did back then. That girl didn’t want your opinion; she wanted you to say she was great. Well, she wasn’t, and, sooner or later, that would’ve caught up with her.”
    “Maybe if it had caught up with her later, she would have been better equipped—”
    “Nonsense. She’s dead, Scott. Weak links snap. But as for you, here’s something I believe in really strongly: guilt’s a whore. It goes with anybody, but it’s not good in bed. You’re not dying, but this thing you’ve got with the girl is no different than my situation. We could both use up whole days feeling guilty ’bout what we didn’t do in life, but why spend a day in bed with someone who doesn’t give you any pleasure?”
    “That’s too easy, Beenie.”
    “No, it’s not! It’s the hardest thing in the world. Just dumping your guilt and moving on.
    “Like I gotta be right now. Sorry we don’t see eye-to-eye on this. You know, I do believe in recycling. Save your old papers, Coke cans, glass. But not old guilt. Far as I’m concerned, guilt goes bad after a certain while, and can’t be used after that.”
    We said our goodbyes, and she left. It was so disappointing. I knew Beenie wasn’t Albert Einstein, but it seemed a person who knew they were going to die soon would also know ... more. But what she’d said sounded as though it had come from one of those popular psychology books you find at a drugstore. Sighing, I put my glasses back on and picked up the last pages of Annette Taugwalder.
    New Year’s came