A Blessed Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

moody, she called it
temperamental.
Elisabet said several times that Erika must not disturb him when he was working, otherwise she risked a flash of his
temperamental
side—and that wasn’t good. Erika would sometimes imagine Isak’s temperamental side as a ton of plutonium inside his head. You wouldn’t even have to disturb him
a lot:
annoying him just a little was enough to make the barrel tip over and the plutonium, pale lilac, run out over the floor.
     
    Day after day Erika and Laura would lie in the high grass in the meadow beyond the house by the sea. It might be two o’clock. They couldn’t hear it, but in the living room next to Isak’s workroom ticked the grandfather clock that chimed every whole and half hour. They couldn’t see him, but they knew Isak would be inside assembling some mysterious invention; it was never really clear what he was up to, but it was his work, and their father’s work was of the utmost importance (Laura would tell Erika) and had something to do with women and birth and swelling tummies and dead fetuses.
     
    It was Laura who saw the boy with the matchstick legs first. He was running. Laura nudged Erika in the side and pointed, but neither of the girls said anything. Erika could see what Laura was pointing at, but the figure was running so fast that at first she couldn’t see that it was a boy her own age in a T-shirt and shorts; it could as easily have been an animal or some supernatural creature. It was as if he came from nowhere—he just materialized in the landscape around Isak’s house—but Erika thought he must have come from the beach, where he probably had slipped and fallen on the rocks. His knees were scraped. The boy didn’t notice Erika and Laura lying quite still in the grass, following him with their eyes. He ran across the meadow, so close that they could hear his sneakers pounding on the ground, his breathing louder than their own. He ran right past them and crossed the boundary between the meadow and the private dirt road that swung down to Isak’s house, past the gate a little way from the house, past the clump of stunted pines, past the wild strawberry patch, now picked bare, past Isak’s green Volvo. Erika looked at Laura and Laura looked at Erika, and both of them looked over at the boy again. He had short brown hair and his T-shirt said I’VE BEEN TO NIAGARA FALLS. And running down the road toward Isak’s house, he suddenly fell over on the gravel. Laura got to her feet, but Erika pulled her down into the grass again. The boy lay flat on his stomach. He lay there for a long time, or at any rate it felt like a long time. In the end he sat up and examined his knees. Erika felt a shooting pain in her own knees. The boy had already bashed his knees on the rocks on the beach and now he had fallen on the gravel and would have to pick all the grit out of the open wounds. It would sting. Perhaps she ought to help him. Perhaps she and Laura should get up from the tall grass and go over to him, but they stayed where they were. It was Erika who had to decide. She was the elder of the two. Erika lay there, pressing one hand on Laura’s back to keep her there, too. It was the boy who got up. He stood there for a bit, not moving, his body tensed, and he looked about him; then he set off at a run again. He ran all the way down to the house, all the way down to Isak’s house, and there he stopped. The boy stopped outside Isak’s door and rang the bell. The boy didn’t know it was outdoors time. He didn’t know outdoors time had been decreed. He didn’t even know what
a temperamental streak
was. He rang several times. Erika could see him ringing the bell again and again—even more than thirty years later she could see him at Isak’s front door—and when nobody opened he started hammering on it; he clenched his fists and launched himself at the door. Erika turned to Laura, who, though she could hear neither the ringing nor the hammering, had put her hands over