Christmas, Present Read Online Free PDF Page B

penance beyond her own reflections about the promises she’d made before the altar.
    Should she call the boy? She had adored the heat of his muscled belly, the abrupt virility of everything about him, his nutty art-stoked passion, adored him over and over again, many nights in her mind when her sleep was restless. No, he would sometime find out. Elliott would bring photographs to the store, to be made into a tape, or a collage for the girls. He would recognize Laura in the pictures and ask after her. Laura smiled, a little abashed, at the notion of his grief.
    But there was another matter.
    Elliott would find the sketch. She had not been able to bring herself to burn it.

    Well, thought Laura, brushing her hair, he would not find it for a long time, and it was not signed. Would it make Elliott happy or sadden him to know she was still . . . desired? Even in memory? Would he doubt her love for him, which was absolute, or under- stand that the picture represented a momentary lapse? In any case, there was nothing she could do about it now, and she would not know of his reaction, unless she should linger and become a ghost.
    I would love to be a ghost, Laura thought.
    When they were children, in Sunday school or wait- ing for dinner, idly playing what-if games, wishing for super powers, hers had never been for bags of gold or eternal life but always for invisibility—the gift of stealth to invade secret places, overhear adult conver- sations, glide up to the teacher’s desk during the math exam.
    What would she do with it as a permanent condi- tion?
    Eavesdrop, of course. Whenever and however she might. Pull pranks on Elliott as he sat reading Motor Trends on the toilet. Knock the magazine just beyond

    the reach of his hands while his pants were around his ankles. Wake him with a soft whisper as he slept, a breath on his cheek that smelled of her. Perhaps, see him fall in love again. She had read that the famed magician Harry Houdini, a boy from Wisconsin, had promised his wife that after his death, he would send her a sign to prove there was life beyond this life.
    I would do that, Laura thought, send Elliott a mes- sage from me, telling him that I was fine, that I loved him still, and even more, that it was fine with me for him to fall in love again. I would make him trip when he tried to dance at his wedding, she thought, nearly giggling, reckoning Elliott might need no help at that. The notion of such a wedding, of her girls slightly older, in the strappy dresses they would wheedle Elliott into buying, thrust her into no state of jealousy, only a wistful smoothness of mood, as if it really were true what Saint Julian of Norwich said, that all man- ner of things should be well. And what if they finally all were? Would she twirl away then, like a twist of snuffed candle smoke, her earthly purpose fulfilled? Or hang around? Visiting at intervals?

    Yes, Laura thought, not all ghosts would suppose their work in life unfinished, the common theory. Some might simply be . . . curious. Oh, to watch the girls develop, nudge them toward the right sizes at the lingerie counter, to float in the backseat at Annie’s prom, witness that first ecstasy. To cheer, unseen but felt, at Rory’s first triumph in the all-around?
    To hazard a touch, perceived, perhaps, only as an arrow of sunlight, or a puff of wind, on Amelia’s hand at her first day of school.
    She had read—where? Somewhere—that spirit entities often manifested themselves as columns of icy air or scented breezes. Laura would not be a cold spot. She would be a breeze, a warm, perhaps even mischie- vous gust.
    Laura tried to imagine her clingiest girl, her baby, the one who was frightened of everything from skele- ton masks to pictures of snakes on television, standing proud and wide-eyed with her first backpack, after all those years of pretend homework with Laura at the kitchen table. All those lines and curlicues Laura and Amelia gravely pretended were letters and