Read Blame: A Novel for Free Online Page A

case, whatever its remaining mysteries, be at least officially closed.
Yes
, spoken aloud, seemed the least and only thing she could do for the enraged women and shipwrecked man sitting on the other side of the room. She said yes, and cleared her throat and realized from the court recorder’s expectant pause and the continuing gaze of the judge that she might not have spoken at all. Yes, she said, this time loud enough, she hoped, that the man and women felt a loosening, some small uplift, an easing.
    The judge set the sentencing twenty days hence and her bond at three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, same as that gangbanger’s.
    Benny and Burt, who had reappeared, shouldered her out of the courtroom, her mother right behind. At the women’s row, she twisted toward them. I would like . . . , she said to Benny, who grasped her arm above her elbow. Burt, I want to . . . But neither man paused, and Burt wrapped an arm around her waist as if she were stumbling. Even so, as she passed the man, Patsy looked directly at him. Darkness met darkness, though in his gaze she also saw bright, glinting splinters of grief.

3
    Twenty days, neither in prison nor free. What do I do? she asked Benny.
    You take care of business, he said. And behave. You keep out of trouble. For god’s sake.
    With her mother’s help, Patsy cleared out her office at school. Another day they visited the bank, changed the names on her home deed lest a civil suit be filed, and found an agency to manage the leasing of her house, the mortgage payments, and taxes in her absence. (She’d said, Oh, give them the house, give them everything, but her father had made the down payment, so Pomelo Street was really not hers to relinquish.) She rented a storage unit. She packed her woolens with blocks of cedar, rolled her yard-sale china and glassware in newspapers whose words would be at least two years old when next read. Her home grew ever more sparse.
    One night, as her mother snored, Patsy walked down the hill six blocks to the Sav-On directly across the street from the Altadena sheriff’s station. The man in the liquor section did not know her, and he wordlessly sold her two liters of Jim Beam, lightweight plastic bottles with handles and, because she still had money, a same size bottle of vodka. The bag was heavier than she had anticipated, so she carried it like a real sack of groceries, in that usual practical hug, six uphill blocks to Pomelo Street. A sheriff’s black-and-white passed her going the opposite way; she expected it to turn around and slide up beside her, but this did not happen. Her hair, she realized. She did not look like herself.
    She stashed two bottles under the camellia bush against the shed, took the other to her bedroom. She rinsed out her mother’s teacup and filled it to the brim. Bourbon, she noted, was remarkably tea-colored. The first mouthful, as big and sweet and hot as gasoline, caused tears to spring from her eyes.
    •
    Of course she was found out, sooner than she thought possible, the first thing the next morning, with less than a quarter of one bottle gone, a waste, and of course all hell broke loose, a lecture from everybody, and Benny so angry he grabbed her shoulders and shook until she looked him in the eyes. Listen to me, you ungrateful monster. I busted my fuckin’ balls for that plea, but it’s not written in stone. Screw up now, you’ll get ten to fifteen, easy. Or all twenty-five. And fuck all, you’d deserve it. But what do I care? I’m outta here. I’m through.
    But he wasn’t really. Somebody talked him back. Patsy thought, not for the first time, that he was probably a little in love with her.
    She had round-the-clock sitters after that: mother, father, her friend Sarah, a burly Russian housekeeper allegedly hired to clean the place for prospective tenants, though that wouldn’t normally involve spending the night, would it?
    Only once more, again on her mother’s watch, did she slip out late one