Why the Sky Is Blue by Susan Meissner Read Free Book Online Page B

responsibilities. He didn’t ask me to tell her about the pregnancy, though, which surprised me, because that very thing was what had motivated me to reclaim—as much as possible—my normal life.
    I called the superintendent of the high school where I had been teaching and told him I had a letter for the school board asking if I might have an extended leave of absence due to medical reasons. He was very understanding. He assured me that surviving a violent attack on my life was more than sufficient cause for a year’s leave. He told me to send him the letter and not to worry a moment over it. So I did.
    I attended a church service for the first time since the attack the following Sunday, wearing a favorite turtleneck so that the pale yellow bruising on my neck wouldn’t startle anyone. People were genuinely glad to see me, several hugged me with tears in their eyes, and I wondered how much Nick had told them. The police had been careful to keep my name out of the papers and news reports, but many of these people were friends, and I’m sure they knew the unnamed woman abducted from a mall parking lot, assaulted, nearly strangled, and left for dead, was me.
    That same Sunday afternoon, my mother called and again offered to come out. This time without Stuart.
    “No, Mom,” I pleaded. “I wouldn’t have you do that to Stu.”
    “He’s okay about it,” she insisted.
    “But I’m not,” I said. “I want you both to come. At Thanksgiving. Like we had planned.”
    “What about your coming out here for a few days? Did you and Dan talk about it?”
    We had. Dan didn’t seem to mind, but I knew he was wondering what Patty would want me to do. Or what Nick would suggest. He was afraid to trust any gut feeling of his own. I imagine he was still blaming himself for not going with me the night I went to the mall. I also wondered if he’d had some sort of feeling before I went that night that I would be better off if he came and had shrugged off the hunch. But of course I couldn’t ask him that. “We’re still trying to decide, Mom,” I said.
    “Matthew really wants to see you,” she added.
    We ended up leaving it that I would let her know by the next Sunday. It was actually Thursday that I called her back and told her I was coming.
    It wasn’t a horrible week, but it was one that left me feeling like a fish out of water. On Monday, after the kids left for school, Dan had left for work, and the security system was properly switched on, I began to feel a compulsion to clean. Part of me was at a loss as to what to do with myself with a Monday morning all to myself with no kids, no students, and no husband to occupy my time. The other part of me was still grappling with the enormity of the situation facing me. It wasn’t the first time in my life I had cleaned instead of pacing the floor in frustration.
    I started with the bathrooms, then moved on to the linen closet. Next, I attacked a hall closet simply known to everyone in the house as my closet. In it I kept dozens of boxes of things that were either precious to me or that I had been unable to throw away. The kids’ first shoes, their baby books, and boxes of their artwork were in there, as was the top from my wedding cake, letters my dad wrote to my mom from Korea, and my set of first-edition Nancy Drew books. But there were also notes from all my college courses, past issues of cooking magazines, and several boxes of old Christmas cards.
    I didn’t know why I had kept the cards, but I had—for the past eight years. Each bundle contained dozens of old cards that I hadn’t looked at since the day I had gathered them up and tied them up with used gift ribbon. Nor did I have a reason for suddenly deciding that keeping them was utter nonsense, but it just struck me what a waste of time and energy it was to hang on to them. I sat down on the floor, pulled out the boxes, and untied the ribbons. I opened each card and checked for a photo. If there was one, I set it