Child of My Heart Read Online Free PDF

the time before you were born?”
    She thought for a moment and said no, she didn’t think she did.
    “You don’t remember God?” I said.
    “Or heaven? Or the angels? Or the other children waiting to be born?”
    She frowned.
    “I don’t think so,” she said.
    “You don’t remember meeting Kevin” (one of her younger brothers) “or Brian or Patrick,” (the others) “before you were all born?”
    She shook her head.
    “You should try to remember,” I told her.
    “You’re only eight. I remembered a lot of it up until just a few years ago.
    You should think about it more and see what you come up with.”
    I told her I could remember the name Robert Emmet. I said I had once asked my mother, probably when I was about your age, who Robert Emmet was, and she, after a long pause, had said he was an Irish patriot her father had been particularly fond of. I said no, he was a little baby boy, the one I was talking about. A little baby boy still in a blanket. That’s the Robert Emmet I was talking about.
    Later on I found out that before me, my mother had had another baby who’d died just as he was being born and who was baptized Robert Emmet by the delivery room nurse because that was the name my grandfather offered when my father was asked and had no response to give.
    Clearly, I said, my brother and I had met, and exchanged names, sometime between his birth and mine. I’d had a glimpse of my grandfather, too, I was certain, but the memory was not as clear.
    I walked over to the old dresser and pulled open its bottom drawer. There were a number of shoeboxes lined up inside, and in one of them my mother had her father’s old shaving things: a cup wrapped in tissue paper, a brush, a long thin razor.
    A brown bottle of bay rum with a cork stopper and, on its label, a stained and yellowed drawing of a palm tree and a beach. I took out the bottle and showed it to Daisy. I pulled out the cork. The bottle was empty, but there was a faint whiff of the stuff still inside. Again, I told her to take a sniff.
    She leaned forward and breathed deeply.
    I remembered smelling this same smell, I told her, sometime before I was born. I think my grandfather and I must have passed each other, he on his way in, me on my way out-he died in March, I was born in April. I think I must have smelled it when he leaned over to pat my head as he walked past.
    I put the stopper back in and returned the bottle to its box.
    “That is,” I said, “I think I remember.”
    I looked at Daisy. She was nodding, her eyebrows raised, her mouth turned down, as if she were considering all this and finding it very reasonable, very likely. I loved the way she looked, in my old dress, in her pink shoes and socks, so I picked her up and turned her around a couple of times and then put her down again. Going back to the clothes rack, I told her how my Uncle Tommy slept up here whenever he visited, and how he always said, before he climbed the stairs, “If I see the ghost, I’ll give him your regards.”
    I told her how sometimes he said the old fisherman who built this house appeared during the night, just standing over there by the window, looking out, smoking his pipe. The first time Uncle Tommy said, “Can I help you, sir?” And the man just turned around a little bit and waved his hand behind his back and said, “No, no. No, thank you,” in a voice so choked with emotion that Uncle Tommy didn’t ask anything else, just watched the man staring out the window and smoking until he fell back asleep again.
    Once he asked him, “Can I get you a chair, sir?” And the man again waved him away, saying, “No, no.” But the next morning, Uncle Tommy moved the chair over to the window anyway and was very happy to wake up during the next night to see that the man was sitting in it, his legs crossed comfortably.
    And oddly enough, Uncle Tommy said, there was a little boy asleep on his lap.
    “Who was he?” Daisy asked.
    I shrugged.
    “Who knows?”
    I