The Silver Linings Playbook - By Matthew Quick Page 0,97

long time. I want his reaction because he is the only person I know who doesn't already have a strong opinion about Tiffany. Everyone else is obviously biased - even Cliff.

"So," I finally say from my bed. I'm sitting with my back against the headboard and my cast propped up on a few pillows. "What do you think I should do?"

Danny sits down, opens up the Parcheesi box, and takes out the hand-painted wooden board and pieces my mother gave me for my birthday. "I feel like being red today," he says. "What color you want?"

After I pick blue, we set up the board on the little table my mother put in the room for us when I first came home with a broken leg. We play Parcheesi like we always do when Danny visits, and it becomes obvious that he isn't going to weigh in with an opinion regarding Tiffany, probably because he knows that only I can make this decision - but maybe because he just wants to play the game. He loves Parcheesi more than any man I have ever met, and when he lands on one of my spots and sends one of my pieces back to the start circle, Danny always points at my face and yells, "Booyah!" which makes me laugh because he is so goddamn serious about Parcheesi.

Even though I don't really enjoy playing Parcheesi as much as Danny does - and he won't answer any of my questions about Tiffany - it's nice to have him back in my life again.

We play Parcheesi for so many hours - days pass, and my record against Danny grows to 32 wins and 203 losses. Danny is a supreme Parcheesi player, and the best dice roller I have ever met. When he says, "Papa needs a doublet," he almost always rolls two sixes. Whatever Papa needs, Danny rolls.
Chapter 45
Break Free of a Nimbostratus

A week after my cast has been removed, I stand alone on the footbridge in Knight's Park, leaning my weight on the railing, gazing down at a pond I could walk around in less than five minutes. The water underneath me has a thin layer of ice on top, and I think about dropping rocks through it, but I do not know why, especially since I have no rocks. Even still, I want to drop rocks through the ice so badly, to puncture it, proving that it is weak and temporary, to see the black water below rise up and out of the hole I alone will have created.

I think about the hidden fish - mostly those big goldfish people stock the pond with so old men will have something to feed in spring and little boys will have something to catch in the summer - fish now burrowed in the mud at the bottom of the pond. Or are these fish burrowing just yet? Will they wait until the pond freezes completely?

Here's a thought: I'm like Holden Caulfield thinking about ducks, only I'm thirty-five years old and Holden was a teenager. Maybe the accident knocked my brain back into teenager mode?

Part of me wants to climb up onto the railing and jump off the bridge, which is only ten yards long, only three feet above the pond; part of me wants to break through the ice with my feet, to plunge down, down, down into the mud, where I can sleep for months and forget about all I now remember and know. Part of me wishes I never regained my memory, that I still had that false hope to cling to - that I still had at least the idea of Nikki to keep me moving forward.

When I finally look up from the ice and toward the soccer fields, I see that Tiffany has accepted my invitation to meet, just like Cliff said she would. She is only two inches tall in the distance, wearing a yellow ski cap and a white coat that covers most of her thighs, making her look like a wingless angel growing and growing - and I watch her pass the swing sets and the large pavilion with picnic tables inside. I watch her walk along the water's edge until she finally reaches her usual height, which is five feet and a few inches tall.

When she steps onto the footbridge, I immediately look down at the thin layer of ice again.

Tiffany walks over to me and stands so her arm is almost touching mine, but not quite.