Free Glass House by Patrick Reinken Page B

plane failed to
pull up at the gate.
    They found it at the end of the runway. The
pilot had landed short. The gear caught the runway’s lip, and the
plane pitched forward. It snapped in half.
    Four other people walked away with bruises
and cuts, but Ben died. Megan never learned exactly what caused it.
The coroner met with her to tell her but she wouldn’t let him, and
the copy of the death certificate she was given was still in a
sealed envelope, tucked away in the attic where Ben once had smiled
his soft smile as he handed her that Sears catalog.
    She didn’t cry. Not anymore. For whatever it
was worth, the time in therapy, along with the time away from here,
was enough for her to have gotten past tearing up every time she
saw Ben’s picture. She’d cried herself dry.
    They’d never gotten to the bathroom with a
paintbrush, and the room was still key lime. Heavy porcelain
fixtures and chrome accents. A shining medicine cabinet mounted
above the tiny two-handle tap and sink. And a pedestal tub. A
rubber tube was slipped onto the tub’s spigot in case you wanted to
get water onto your head. Because there wasn’t a shower upstairs.
If you wanted that, you had to go to the basement.
    The light switch was pushbutton. One button
for off, another one above it for on. Between the switches, a
dime-sized orange bulb glowed so she could find the buttons at
night.
    She clicked the bathroom light on and stared
into the mirror, not liking what she saw. When she was in therapy,
the psychiatrist wrote a prescription for Zoloft. The dosage was
calculated out with doctor-like regularity, the refills simply
showing up at the times when Megan was supposed to be out of
pills.
    She never was. She took them for a time that
was long enough for her to realize she handled being borderline
depressed better than she handled dizziness and tremors. So she
stopped. The prescription receipts were collected somewhere in the
house, she wasn’t sure where, and the medicine cabinet still held
three bottles. She checked again, opening the cabinet door and
peering in. There they were, one of them almost expired but
all of them full.
    Back in the kitchen, Megan retrieved a
bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue from a cabinet and cracked its neck
label. She poured two fingers into a plastic cup, drank one of them
away, and filled it again.
    She’d be up for three or four more hours,
and she knew from her own history that she probably wouldn’t finish
the Scotch in that time. Even if she did, there was no one around
to point fingers but herself, and she didn’t think having an
occasional shot of expensive booze was nearly as offensive, or as
weak, as popping a pill that put a cloud in your head.
    Megan opened her briefcase and retrieved a
half-read deposition transcript. She stacked it on the box she’d
brought in and retreated to the front porch.
    Enough light spilled from the living room
windows that she could read out there, and if she needed it,
another bulb hung from the porch ceiling. But she just sat for a
moment, the house windows like glass eyes behind her, looking out
toward the street and the black walnut trees at the edges of the
lawn.
    The traffic was heavy. The cars droned by,
their tires whining on the roadway, their lights blurring red away
from her and white toward her.
    Two blocks down, she could see a police car
at the side of the road in front of the ancient elementary school
across the street. The officer had pulled someone over. She could
see him moving from the stopped car back to his cruiser, his shape
outlined in his own headlights and the spinning red and blue from
his roof.
    Megan watched for a moment, waiting for him
to run the plate, the driver’s license, the insurance. Make sure he
hadn’t happened to pull another Ted Bundy over on West Sixth Street
in Lawrence.
    He appeared again, leaning into the driver’s
window. Pleasantries, hopefully. Three or four seconds, then he
headed back.
    She lost him in the thick silhouettes of