Child of My Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

pulled out a checked sundress, red and blue, with ribbon ties at the shoulder.
    “This is cute, too,” I said. And another of white eyelet. And a pair of pink pedal pushers that would go with her shoes.
    “Maybe some night we’ll sleep up here,” I said.
    “You and I.”
    She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Okay,” looking down at the dress I held against her.
    “Chances are, the only ghost we’ll see is me at your age,” I said.
    “Looking to see who’s wearing my old clothes.”
    Before we went back down, I told her to take off the shoes if the stairs made her nervous.
    She shook her head.
    “I’m okay,” she said.
    I went ahead of her, the clothes on their hangers draped over my arm, turning at each step to make sure she was all right. There was no banister, but she kept both hands flat against the wall and descended so slowly, and with such cautious trepidation, you’d have thought she was edging along some building ledge.
    “Are you afraid of heights, Daisy Mae?” I asked her, halfway down.
    She shook her head. She would not take her eyes from the stairs, or the hem of my old dress, or the pink shoes whose wooden heels and slippery beige soles slapped loudly against each bare step.
    “I’m only afraid of falling,” she said.
    I awoke every morning to the sound of my parents’ voices coming through the wall behind my bed. They slept in twin beds with quilted leather headboards, a nightstand in between, and their voices in those first moments of the day were subdued and conversational. I imagined at one point that they simply told each other their dreams, and in much the same matter-of fact way they might relate the details of an ordinary and unremarkable trip to the market. I don’t pretend to understand it: why they never slept in the same bed but began each morning talking to each other as if they shared the same mind. The wallpaper in my bedroom, and in theirs, was full of yellow roses, fist-sized yellow roses that became, as I stared and listened and tried to make out what they said, the fist-sized yellow faces of wrinkled babies and grinning gargoyles and startled guardian angels, of choir boys in war paint with open, oval mouths.
    My parents got up at five, bathed and had breakfast, and were usually out of the house by six. During the school year I went with them, to be dropped off with the nuns at my private school twenty miles to the west—essentially a boarding school for the daughters of wealthy Asians and South Americans, with only a handful of us day students squeezed in to keep the locals agreeable—but in the summer the house was mine. This had been the case for nearly as long as I can remember, although there was a time, before I started school, I suppose, when old Mrs. Tuohey would be stirred into the mix before my parents left for work, stirred like the hasty half teaspoon of sugar my mother always added to the black tea she made for herself and my father. Even before I was old enough for school, Mrs. Tuohey was a gesture only, mostly a second thought, and quickly diluted by the vast solitude of the tiny house, and my own preference for it. The poor woman, a pale and frail little widow who lived in the village, usually spent the day in the first seat she had taken when my father brought her in, not much more than a ghost herself.
    I loved that house, as I’ve said, and I loved it especially on those summer mornings when the sun lit the kitchen and the bedrooms but kept the living room cool and damp and smelling, because of the old stone fireplace, like a recently inhabited cave. I’d cross it in my bare feet and go into the kitchen, where my parents would be having their bacon and eggs, continuing that same back-and-forth, just-passing-the time-of-day conversation they’d been having since they’d first regained consciousness. When they saw me, my father would pull out the third chair and my mother would stand up to get an extra plate, as if I were an unexpected guest.