A Song of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page A

of her life. Amanda and her mother had even lived in a house not far from Grandma Isha’s, on land she owned. Amanda missed living there. She missed Grandma Isha. There had been no word from her since they had moved to Boreas. She wanted to ask her mother about it, but her mother was lost in concerns of her own, and whenever Amanda tried to broach the subject, her mother would grow angry, or sad, and Amanda didn’t like to see her mother that way.
    So, when Amanda was not at school – which was often, because she had an illness, and the doctors didn’t seem to know what to do about it – she whiled away the days dozing, or reading, or watching TV until her head and eyes hurt. She had hated it in Boreas at first, hated being separated from her friends in Pirna, and from Grandma Isha. But slowly and surely the sea was beginning to lull her with its rhythms and sounds, for it was the same sea that broke near their old house, even if the view was different. She could not imagine being able to fall asleep without the shushing of waves, or waking without the scent of salt in the air and the tang of it on her skin.
    The man who lived in the only other house on the bay had drawn her attention almost immediately. She had seen him walking on the beach that first day, as she sat on her new bed and stared out at the ocean. He stepped slowly and carefully, as though fearful of falling, even though the sand wouldn’t have hurt him much if he had. He stayed close to the soft areas near the large dunes, and he used a stick. He wasn’t old, though, which surprised her. In her limited experience, only old people like Grandma Isha used sticks, so she deduced that this man must be injured or disabled.
    Because of the relative absence of males in her life, Amanda was curious about men. Not boys – she already understood them well enough to disregard them almost entirely, finding them temporarily amusing at best and irritating for the most part – but grown men: adults, like her mother. She could not quite conceive of the reality of them; their thought processes and actions were alien to her. They seemed like another species from the boys in school, and she could not imagine how someone as dumb and useless in every way as Greg Sykes – who sat behind her in class, and had once spat in her hair – could possibly grow up to become capable of, say, driving a car or holding down a job. Greg Sykes smelled like pee, and would walk around with his hand down his pants when he thought that no one was looking. She could only picture a grown-up Greg Sykes as a larger version of his current self: still spitting, still smelling like pee, and still juggling his junk because he couldn’t tell the difference between ‘private’ and ‘public.’
    So, on that first day, confused about this sudden upheaval in her life, she watched the man walk slowly along the strand, one hand on his stick, his head down, his lips – she thought – moving ever so slightly, so that he appeared to be talking to himself or, perhaps, counting his steps. He had paused for a moment to take in their house, noting the car parked outside, and the boxes and suitcases on the porch. His gaze moved up, and for a moment Amanda was certain that he was looking at her, even though she already knew that the angle made it hard to see her if she was lying on her bed. She’d checked when they first arrived, moving between her bedroom and the sand, gauging the room’s suitability as an observation post. No, he almost certainly couldn’t see her, and yet she felt the force of his gaze, and for a moment he might have been in the room with her, so aware was she of his presence.
    Then he walked on, and she shifted position so that she could continue watching him. She wasn’t the kind of girl who spied on people. Grandma Isha had once caught her rummaging in her closet, Amanda’s infant eyes drawn by the old dresses that her grandmother kept but never wore, the boxes of shoes that