Girl in Landscape Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt his hand on her skull and a thrill of animal comfort went through her.
    “Why did you go in?” Clement said softly to David. “You heard something?”
    “Caitlin said something,” said David carefully. “Then I saw her making a face.”
    “It doesn’t mean anything,” said Raymond harshly, even as he leaned against his father’s stomach.
    “Maybe,” said Clement. “Maybe it does.”
    “David probably imagined it,” said Raymond.
    Clement stepped away, his hands slipping across the children’s shoulders, dropping to his sides. He moved awkwardly, like a stranger in his own bedroom. Pella took hold of David’s hand.
    Clement stood not speaking before them for a moment, then picked up the phone and left the room. He stopped outside the door. Pella heard him dial, ask to talk to Dr. Flinch or Finch.
    David sat still on the bed, his hand limp in Pella’s grasp. Raymond sat forward and switched the television back on.
    “She just fell and hit her
head,
” he said, not looking at them. It was like he was angry at the television show.

Three
    Clement left the three of them in Caitlin’s hospital room, and went to find her doctor. Caitlin’s head was wrapped, but only because they’d shaved her for tests. They hadn’t operated, yet.
    The room was sterile and almost completely without character, but what Pella hated most savagely about it were the few details that made it particular. The moon-shaped crack in the ceiling tile, the stain on the wall that looked like urine, the torn calendar. All the things that made it Caitlin’s room instead of someone else’s, some other sick person unknown.
    Caitlin sat up, a book across her legs, her bed cranked up so it was nearly a high-backed chair.
    “Listen to this,” she said. “ ‘The remaining Archbuilders possess an extraordinary linguistic capacity; it is the last manifestation of their former complexity, the richness that has otherwise faded from their culture.’ ” Her hair gone, Caitlin’s face showed its lines. But itglowed, too, despite the flat white hospital light. Her lips were chapped, and she licked them as she spoke. “ ‘They have nearly fifteen thousand independent languages native to their planet, and the average Archbuilder speaks five to eight
percent
of these’—that’s
hundreds
of languages—”
    David clambered up on her bed and put his head on her legs just under the book.
    Caitlin put her hand in David’s hair and went on. “ ‘The fruit of their fascination with English is that it is now one of the seven or eight languages any two Archbuilders, meeting as strangers, are likeliest to have in common.’ ”
    “David isn’t interested in this,” said Raymond hopefully.
    “Why do they like English?” said Pella.
    “Here, wait, it says something good about that.” Caitlin flipped pages back. “Here. ‘Archbuilders describe English as a language of enchanting limitations. The English vocabulary is tens of thousands of words smaller than any language native to their planet. English words seem, to an Archbuilder, garishly overloaded with meaning. One Archbuilder describes speaking English as “stringing poems into sentences,” another compares it to “speaking hieroglyphs.” ’ ”
    Caitlin was unstoppable now. Pella’s family was distorting, wrenching itself into a new shape in two realms: Caitlin’s strange, rebelling body, her illness; and the impending move, the frontier that seemed to be rushing to swallow them like a horizon in motion. The point of relation between these realms, the arrow of causality,was obscured. Was Caitlin hurrying to prepare them for a life without her? She’d begun her cheerleading for the Planet of the Archbuilders before she fell and turned sick, so it couldn’t be that. If anything, the reverse. Moving to the Planet of the Archbuilders was the family project, and the family included Caitlin, didn’t it? So she was going, which meant she would recover and be fine.
    When Pella