Read Too Much Happiness for Free Online

the airway. A slight but firm tilt.
    If he still didn’t breathe she would have to breathe into him.
    She pinches the nostrils, takes a deep breath, seals his mouth with her lips, and breathes. Two breaths and check. Two breaths and check.
    Another male voice, not the driver’s. A motorist must have stopped. “You want this blanket under his head?” She shook her head slightly. She had remembered something else, about not moving the victim, so that you do not injure the spinal cord. She enveloped his mouth. She pressed his warm fresh skin. She breathed and waited. She breathed and waited again. And a faint moisture seemed to rise against her face.
    The driver said something but she could not look up. Then she felt it for sure. A breath out of the boy’s mouth. She spread her hand on the skin of his chest and at first she could not tell if it was rising and falling because of her own trembling.
    Yes. Yes.
    It was a true breath. The airway was open. He was breathing on his own. He was breathing.
    “Just lay it over him,” she said to the man with the blanket. “To keep him warm.”
    “Is he alive?” the driver said, bending over her.
    She nodded. Her fingers found the pulse again. The horrible pink stuff had not continued to flow. Maybe it was nothing important. Not from his brain.
    “I can’t hold the bus for you,” the driver said. “We’re behind schedule as it is.”
    The motorist said, “That’s okay. I can take over.”
    Be quiet, be quiet, she wanted to tell them. It seemed to her that silence was necessary, that everything in the world outside the boy’s body had to concentrate, help it not to lose track of its duty to breathe.
    Shy but steady whiffs now, a sweet obedience in the chest. Keep on, keep on.
    “You hear that? This guy says he’ll stay and watch out for him,” the driver said. “Ambulance is coming as fast as they can.”
    “Go on,” Doree said. “I’ll hitch a ride to town with them and catch you on your way back tonight.”
    He had to bend to hear her. She spoke dismissively, without raising her head, as if she were the one whose breath was precious.
    “You sure?” he said.
    Sure.
    “You don’t have to get to London?”
    No.

Fiction

I
    The best thing in winter was driving home, after her day teaching music in the Rough River schools. It would already be dark, and on the upper streets of the town snow might be falling, while rain lashed the car on the coastal highway. Joyce drove beyond the limits of the town into the forest, and though it was a real forest with great Douglas firs and cedar trees, there were people living in it every quarter mile or so. There were some people who had market gardens, a few who had some sheep or riding horses, and there were enterprises like Jon’s-he restored and made furniture. Also the services advertised beside the road, and more particular to this part of the world-tarot readings, herbal massage, conflict resolution. Some people lived in trailers; others had built their own houses, incorporating thatched roofs and log ends, and still others, like Jon and Joyce, were renovating old farmhouses.
    There was the one special thing Joyce loved to see as she was driving home and turning in to their own property. At this time many people, even some of the thatched-roof people, were putting in what were called patio doors-even if like Jon and Joyce they had no patio. These were usually left uncurtained, and the two oblongs of light seemed to be a sign or pledge of comfort, of safety and replenishment. Why this should be so, more than with ordinary windows, Joyce could not say. Perhaps it was that most were meant not just to look out on but to open directly into the forest darkness, and that they displayed the haven of home so artlessly. Full-length people cooking or watching television-scenes which beguiled her, even if she knew things would not be so special inside.
    What she saw when she turned in to her own unpaved puddled driveway was the set of