You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online Page A

sees that he is no longer by the fence she doesn’t think much of it. He is a quiet boy, almost aloof in his elaborate pretend games, and she likes that about him. She respects his sense of privacy.
    Another twenty minutes pass. The grandmother, Judy, finishes the breakfast dishes, dries them, puts them away in a cupboard. She is watching—half watching—an old musical on the small television she keeps on the counter for company.
Carousel,
very sad. “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a woman sings, and she purses her mouth against a welling of sentimental emotion.
    ——
    She is tired today; she didn’t sleep well. Recently she’s been troubled by strange fluctuations of her pulse as she lies down to sleep, and then, once her pulse stops accelerating and she begins to drift off, her heart seems to stop. It is as if the body has suddenly forgotten that it is necessary to keep blood pumping, and she rises with a jolt into consciousness, like a cork from the bottom of a bucket of water. Her whole body tingles for a moment.
    This happens irregularly, but it had frightened her badly last night, and she had paced gingerly through the kitchen with a cup of warm Ovaltine. She wondered if something was wrong with her. The doctors would blame her weight, she thought. Her blood pressure, probably—she had escaped it up until now, but she saw ahead a whole series of adjustments: pills, diets, tests. She would begin the slow and futile ritual of staving off her own mortality. She had seen this happen with her own mother—the way the maintenance of health began to occupy more and more of her mother’s daily life, until most of her waking hours were consumed in a kind of endless tennis match with her own body. Prevent one thing and the ball would come whizzing back over the net: a cold she couldn’t shake, another organ failing, another limb hard to move, or painful. Eventually her mother died from shingles—a ridiculous and almost comical-sounding ailment that had beaten Judy’s mother simply by virtue of her weakened immune system.
    Judy had been thinking of this, pacing through the darkened house, when a noise came from outside—a rattling, the soft echo of a jar rolling over a hard surface. She heard what at first she thought was a high-pitched, raspy voice—a voice not unlike her mother’s in her last years—and she shuddered. Out the window, she saw the raccoon. When she flicked on the porch light, it stood up. It held its front legs against its chest like palsied arms, hunching there, cringing. Its eyes glinted, and when she opened the screen door to holler at it, the creature stared at her like a malevolent and senile old person—like one of those old men who glare from their wheelchairs as you pass them at the nursing home. Abruptly, the raccoon dropped from its standing position and trotted to the corner of the yard. On all fours, the animal looked grotesquely swollen, its wide hindquarters jiggling as it ran. She watched as it smoothly slipped through a gap under the fence, near the lilac bush, and vanished.
    It is this image that comes to her when she opens the back door to call Loomis. An image of that creature loping, waddling, into the bushes, like a heavily drugged person trying to crawl quickly. Its body was too slow and casual to express terror, but she could tell that it was actually quite desperate. “Loomis,” she says, and for a second she thinks she sees a flash of movement, a tail, a swatch of dark pelt disappearing under the lilac foliage.
    This image unnerves her at first. She actually shudders—a shadow passes along the nape of her neck—and then there is the emptiness of the yard. “Loomis?” she says, uncertainly.
    The yard behind Judy’s house is not a place a person could hide in. It is a simple square, a clean patch of grass with some dandelions and clover in it, enclosed by a metal cyclone fence. In the northwest corner is a lilac bush, near the end of its blooming; to the east, along