Free A Chill Rain in January by LR Wright Page A

person on his way.
    She told these men that her elderly parents lived in the house by the water.
    Everything had worked out extremely well. Each aspect of her life was precisely as she had planned it.
    She was damned if she was going to let Benjamin destroy it.
    Late that afternoon, the skies cleared. Zoe sat in her office, in an enormous round chair made of bamboo, which had a huge, sumptuous rust-colored cushion. She sat cross-legged, holding a glass of chardonnay. The sun was in the process of setting, preparing to sizzle itself out in the waters of the ocean. Zoe watched it burning in her wine.
    It was time to insist upon some single-minded exertion from her brain.
    Zoe had complete confidence in her brain, and treated it with respect. She tried to understand it and anticipate its needs. She kept her body healthy so as to spare her brain the distraction of worrying about disease or injury to its host. She kept herself as tranquil as possible, thereby providing a close to ideal environment in which her brain could work. It was like maintaining a greenhouse for an exotic plant, or a climate-controlled garage in which to house a fine automobile.
    The sun set; the wineglass warmed in her hand. She closed her eyes and rocked gently back and forth and thought about accidents. Car accidents, boating accidents, industrial accidents, skiing accidents; accidents with farm equipment, accidents with chain saws, accidents with sharp knives, or long-bladed scissors, or drugs; accidents that crushed, or pierced, or punctured, or impaled. She imagined him bleeding, suffocating, choking. She imagined him crumpling to the floor, collapsing into coma, fluttering into death. She saw him crumple…collapse… She saw him fall.
    She thought she knew just how it would feel to place the palms of her hands against his shoulderblades and push, strongly. She thought she knew just what he would look like, plummeting through the air, his scream a wisp, a thin stream of white breath that might even continue to hang in the air for a second or two after his body had struck the rocks, and she would bend over, carefully, to see if any part of him was still moving, down there on the rocks where he had crashed…
    Zoe opened her eyes and smiled.
    She would push him off the cliff right outside his own front door.
    They would meet at the house in West Vancouver. He would give her the scribblers, and she would turn over the stock certificates, ensuring that he put them somewhere other than in his pocket. They would have a drink, and she would make certain that he got thoroughly drunk, if he wasn’t drunk already, which he probably would be. After a while she would get up to leave. When she got to her car she would pretend that it wouldn’t start. She would ask Benjamin to look at it, and when he got out of the elevator in the parking area at the top of the cliff, she would push him over, retrieve the certificates, and head for Horseshoe Bay and the ferry.
    Zoe got out of the big round chair and went to the window. There was still a faint glow in the sky. The days, she thought, must be getting longer. Soon it would be spring again.

Chapter 17
    H ER BROTHER was already on the scene when she arrived, his place in the household comfortably staked out .
    They named her with the very last letter in the alphabet. He’d probably had something to do with that.
    None of the ordinary names had seemed right, they told her. So they’d had to go right to the end of the alphabet. The last name in the world, that was the name they’d given her. Zoe.
    Benjamin was four years older, and sometimes he made her so mad she hit him. Usually he’d just shrug his shoulders and go away then, but sometimes she hit him so hard that it hurt him, and he started to hit her back. Once be made her nose bleed. So she leaned over the sofa and shook her head bard so that the blood would go all over the sofa and he’d get into real trouble, which he did.
    Zoe