A World I Never Made Read Online Free PDF

now to her right, cast an elongated shadow of the train. A shadow that, for all its fun-house shape, seemed to gently caress the parched and lonely landscape that it so swiftly passed over.
     
    Lulled by the sound and movement of the train and the sight of its shadow double racing along with it, Megan fell to thinking of her father and of the Christmas-to-New-Year’s week they had just spent together in Rome. Why was it that the holidays, with their insistent sentimentality, distorted and blurred relationships, like the racing shadow she had been watching distorted and blurred the shape of the train? She had dragged him to midnight mass on Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s. It was a wondrous spectacle, but why had she done it? Why change their routine of fortune-teller and Chinese food on all the Christmas holidays they spent together in Europe ? Afterward they had had champagne and exchanged gifts in their hotel’s penthouse restaurant, Rome’s seven hills gleaming below them. That scene came back to her now: the smile on her father’s face as he opened his gift—a richly tooled wallet from Florence—and the awkward silences that followed.
     
    These were and were not the same as the silences, awkward and sad, that she had experienced as a child, both when Pat was away and when he was home, which in the early years seemed only to be at holidays. One Christmas, when she was seven or eight, after Pat had bought them the little house in New Canaan and Megan allowed herself to believe that all was finally well in her world, Pat left abruptly on New Year’s Eve for a job in Iran. She remembered watching him pack, wanting desperately to ask him to call her from this exotic place Iran, as she had heard from school-mates that their fathers did when away on business. But the words did not come, and Pat, in the short and brutal silence that followed, no doubt guilty and with a scotch or two under his belt, was soon dropping her off at Uncle Franks with a hurried kiss and barely a good-bye. She had turned the tables on him since then, but there was no great satisfaction in it after all. She hated New Year’s to this day.
     
    Six days later he was gone, relieved, she was sure, to be on his Alitalia flight to New York, scotch in hand. Something’s different, he had said to her on their last night together, at dinner. You seem quieter. He probably thought she had been jilted by a man, gotten her just desserts at last. Poor Pat, she had left him to work his life out on his own, much as he had left her when she was a child to work out her life on her own. He had years ago stopped asking her when she was coming home, which was too bad, because if he had asked her this year she might have told him she was thinking about a return trip. A trip to Connecticut —the word itself was oddly comforting—might be just the respite she needed. How would he have reacted?
     
    The sensation of the train gradually slowing interrupted this chain of thoughts. Megan first looked at her watch—they weren’t due to arrive in Marrakech for another forty-five minutes—and then out the window. She saw ahead an old and crumbling concrete siding next to a signal stand with one of its paddle arms broken off at the base. As the train came to a stop at the concrete platform, she could hear voices, men’s voices, jabbering in the corridor, and then, a moment later, a handsome, well-dressed Arab man slid open her compartment’s door and told her in perfect English that they were clearing the track for another train to pass and would be delayed a half hour or so. Familiar with the ways of the Maghrib—the so-called western Muslim world—she shrugged and went out to the cracked concrete platform to smoke, sitting on the edge of the equally cracked signal stand with her large, all-purpose carry bag at her feet. These feet, shod in skimpy gold sandals, their toenails painted red, were lovely and, she knew perfectly well, shockingly naked for a Muslim culture.