8

       Exercise. Exorcise.

      Stomping furiously on the treadmill, sweat dripping down—pouring down—as if her entire face were crying. Her wet palms were barely able to hold on to the handgrips. In a minute, they’d slip off and she’d go flying into space. Off the belt and into a wall like some Hollywood slapstick stunt. So as long as she could, she pumped her legs, running aslant on the instrument’s full tilt. She felt it in every vertebra of her backbone.

      To keep her mind off the pain, Alison thought of her research. The green book. All the answers were there if she’d just take the time to look in it. If she could only get off this blasted treadmill and concentrate on her research.

      It drove her crazy. To have to run. But she did it because she was too afraid not to do it. If she stopped, terrible things might happen. The nasty voices could come back. The horrid visions might return—flashing images of blood and guts and sticky stuff. They never came when she was busy. Why leave anything to chance?

      Running.

      Running to nowhere.

      An adequate assessment of her life.

      To run, run, run without any fun, fun, fun.

      But she stopped short of bludgeoning herself. She had come so far. It used to be that the fear kept her in bed almost twenty-four hours a day. Steve had to carpool, Steve had to cook meals, Steve had to shop and go to parents’ conferences and do everything.

      Now she could function. She could shop and pick up the kids from school … smile at the teachers and say hello. Often they’d smile back and say hello, too. And when she left the house, she made sure she was well groomed and presentable.

      At times, she was oh so normal. A normal woman doing normal things. But then there were the other times …

      So that’s why she ran.

      If Mama had run, she might still be around today. But Mama hadn’t run and that had been the problem.

      The steady whir of the machine’s motor buzzed through Alison’s head. Her leg muscles contracting and expanding, the exertion building up her lungs and heart and stamina. The exercise was making her strong.

      If only Mama had run.

      But of course, in her own way, Mama had run. But not in a healthy way. Her strange forays during the night. Two, three o’clock in the morning, she’d be gone. Her disappearances had terrified Alison as a child. Papa had been no help at all, as he had been frantic with worry. Sometimes Mama had stayed away for days in a row. And when she returned … the way she had looked. There had been times when Alison had wished that Mama hadn’t come back—this stranger so silent and sullen, her eyes feral and always bloodshot.

      Drinking maybe.

      Because her breath had turned fetid. As if she had lived on carrion.

      The ensuing arguments. Papa asking her where she had been. Mama saying she didn’t remember. Papa accusing her of lying. Mama going hysterical. Papa begging her to see a psychiatrist. Mama stalking out of the house.

      The scene repeated over and over until finally it became moot.

      Mama’s nighttime escapades. When she was ten, Alison had asked one of her own psychiatrists about them. Dr. Jones had called them fugue states. Alison looked up the word fugue in her junior dictionary.

       A musical form or composition in which a theme is taken up and developed by the various instruments or voices in succession according to the strict laws of counterpoint.

      Had Mama been playing music all this time?

      The idea puzzled Alison for years. Until she was older and looked the word up in an unabridged dictionary. There were two meanings, the second one stating:

       A state of psychological amnesia during which a patient seems to behave in a conscious and rational way, although upon returning to a normal consciousness, the patient cannot remember the period of time nor what was done during it. A temporary flight from reality.

      A temporary flight from reality.

      Not so temporary in Mama’s case.

      When Alison didn’t answer the doorbell, Poe took out his picks. A minute later, he was inside the house. She was exercising on the treadmill, her face as red and wet as a rain-washed plum. Her long legs were cutting long strides to keep up with an unnaturally fast pace. Her fingers were so tightly wound around the handlebars that the knuckles had turned bloodless. Her breathing was fast and furious and much too shallow.

      Poe went inside her hallway closet, pulled out an octagonal red stop sign mounted on a dowel handle. He took the sign, placed it in front of her face.

      As if she were looking at air.

      Even before Poe did it he’d known that this time, it wasn’t going to work. She was running too fast … out of control. Time to take action. Slowly, he reduced the machine’s rate until she was barely walking. He let her go for five minutes, then turned off the treadmill.

      She stood in place, not uttering a sound.

      “Look at me,” Poe whispered.

      Alison met his eyes. Then she dashed into her bedroom. He heard a sudden blast of water rushing through the pipes. He’d give her ten, maybe fifteen minutes tops.

      While waiting he realized he was hungry. It was half past six and Poe had eaten his last meal, at Myra’s, well over eight hours ago. He returned Alison’s stop sign to its place in the closet, then went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, happy to see it well stocked. He made himself a meatball sandwich with dark mustard on thick sourdough, poured himself a glass of orange juice. He ate slowly, hoped that the water would stop. Of course, it didn’t.

      With reluctance, he got up from the table, went into the bedroom.

      Their bedroom.

      Into the bathroom.

      He opened the shower door, reached inside. The water had turned cold and Alison was shivering. He turned off the taps, placed a bath towel around her