Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders Read Online Free PDF Page A

impatient for them to go. I urged George, mentally, willfully, to get into the car and deposit this woman far away. It hadn’t crossed my mind that he wouldn’t come home—not that day or the next; that he would become a check in the mail, sent monthly.
    And now I am in a hospital bed, next to Opal Harper, and Ruthie is a grown woman out in the world and Tilton never really grew up at all. Years passed at freight-train speed.
    It’s possible that over the last few days someone’s informed Ruthie that I’m in the hospital. A couple of months ago, Ruthie started calling Tilton almost daily—as if she could sense that something was coming—timing her calls for when she knew that I would most likely not be there. Over the years, Ruthie has only sent postcards, and there was a wedding invitation, on two occasions, that I declined. There was a birth announcement once as well. Hailey Ray. How old is that child now? In these calls, Ruthie has confessed to Tilton that she has the desire to know herself—an early midlife crisis? Something about a second marriage going down the drain?
    Tilton reported that Ruthie almost has her PhD in something, that her husband is a professor, that they recently bought matching dogs.
    “Good for her!” I told Tilton. “Good for her! ” But I hoped that the flip side of this statement was apparent enough to Tilton. Good for us! That’s what I meant. Let her go and have her fun, her matching dogs. Who needs her? Then I trained Tilton not to answer the phone when I was out.
    I despise the idea that Ruthie find out about my weak heart.
    I can see Ruthie and George the way they were the night of the crash. She’s clinging to him in that field littered with the dead and the steaming engine on the road behind us. My memories have only gotten sharper as I’ve aged. Distant things are clear; it’s the foreground that’s growing blurry.
    The bedtime story has always ended the same way: “The family was torn apart and it couldn’t be put back together again. The end.”
    But now that Ruthie’s started calling, I can’t help but feel that my ending may be opening, like the seal of an envelope, moistened by steam. What if there’s a force drawing us all back together again? I am sure that this has applied added pressure to my heart.
    An alarm goes off at the nurses’ station and the squeak of the nurses’ shoes comes from the waxy floors in the hall, and when I open my eyes and glance at the door, their white uniforms scuttling by—all bustle and nerve—are like the kite all over again, the kite that was not a kite, like the rippling white shirts of Daisy and Weldon on a tippy canoe in the middle of a broad lake.
    I don’t want to think of my mother’s characters or of these images from her books, but they come unbidden. Those famous lines that Opal Harper was searching for—they ring in my head.
    Daisy said, “Love—it’s how we’re bloomed!”
    And Weldon looked at her and said, “Bloomed?”
    “Did I say ‘bloomed’? I meant ‘doomed’ and ‘blessed.’”

Chapter Three
And the House Tries to Devour the Mother
    Tilton
    M y mother was stuck in the first-floor bay window, which was filled with hot, bright summery sun. The house tried to eat her. In the house’s defense, my mother shoved her way into its mouth. It cannot be blamed.
    If someone asks me, this is what I’ll say, and Ruthie will want to know. She doesn’t like our mother. When she talks about her, it seems like she’s talking about some other mother altogether. Ruthie will know that something is wrong and she will call. She’s supposed to be here with me, as she promised. We made a pact, now broken. It would be cruel to remind her of it. My mother says that I lack the genetic coding for cruelty. When Ruthie knew she was going to break her pact to never leave me, we made a new one. We stood in the attic, put our hands together again, and wound them in string as Wee-ette had taught me, until our hands turned