Read After Alice for Free Online Page B

heavy soft valise of her breasts resting on her abdomen, even though she must have been young, in her late twenties or early thirties at most. Daphne Erskine, with her smooth, earnest girl’s face, her overbite, her thin, straight, beige hair. She’d be dead now. Or would she? Perhaps not; she had not been that much older than Sidonie. Miss Erskine, Sunday School teacher and Girl Guide leader: the two roles blended into one, somehow, with Jesus asking after the state of their fingernails and teaching Good Sportsmanship, and Lady Baden-Powell inquiring after the state of their souls. Miss Erskine, all fuzzy layers of woolen vests, saying, Girls, there is no mistake you can’t undo . An odd idea for the sister of a Protestant vicar, surely.
    But this error that has cost her too much, in its enacting, to reverse, and that will thus bend and distort the rest of her life, will strew small and large items of regret along her path from now on. She can’t go back; she has retired from her profession, sold her apartment, accepted farewell gifts from her friends and colleagues, and ignored the advice of those closest to her. She has bought a house, moved her furniture and books across the country. There is no going back. It is an irreversible error.
    Clara calls, says, “You sound like you’re waiting for something. Not living your life. What are you waiting for?”
    The bone in her foot to heal, obviously.
    â€œNo, before your accident, even, you’ve had this tone. You’re just marking time.”
    â€œI’m waiting for spring,” Sidonie says.
    Clara makes a disapproving tongue click down four thousand kilometres of optic fibre cable. (Or is it all microwaves, now?) “You’re willing to spend half of the year waiting for the weather to change? Does everyone do that, out there?”
    â€œNo,” Sidonie says. “Some ski.”
    â€œOr maybe you are procrastinating over something,” Clara says.
    Clara, her conscience, who has been keeping tabs on her, keeping her on a leash, these decades; who has hung tight to Sidonie, even after Adam let go his hold.
    Sidonie thinks, not for the first time, that possibly it was to move further out of Clara’s range that she has moved back, after all these years.
    She doesn’t try to explain what she is doing with her days.
    Her other former sister-in-law, Anita, telephones a day later: obviously Clara has put her up to it. “But I approve of you having some downtime,” she says. She believes that Sidonie has fallen intentionally, as a way of leaving the rat race. “It’s all about the mind-body connection. Have you thought of trying yoga?”
    But her body has betrayed her; she does not want to pay it attention. She does not tell her former sisters-in-law how she fills her time; she does not quite know herself. Before her accident, she had filled two hours a day marching around the little lake, her boots bristling with spikes and springs, ski poles probing for hidden ice. She had marched around the lake, a forced march, staving off stagnation. Now she hasn’t even that.
    What she should be doing, in fact, is working. She has work: chores not completed when she left the Institute. Books she has been asked to read and review for journals. An article she is supposed to be writing for JASC, a conference paper with a near deadline. She had made a good start, too, rattling through a couple of unfinished reports in the first few weeks in the fall. She had thought: at this rate, I’ll be at loose ends in about twenty-one months. But since then, she has been unable to submerge in her work. She limps about the house, picking objects up and replacing them, checks her email, follows esoteric and irrelevant internet links. She has not written more than a few hundred words.
    Why should it be difficult? She has read and digested and written all of her adult life. She has produced dozens of articles and conference