Hungry Ghosts Read Online Free PDF

said, putting a hand on her arm.
    â€œDarcy? What are you doing here? I heard you’d left the city for good.”
    â€œI have a gig in the movie they’re doing here, up on Broadway.” I could have said, I’m the abbot’s assistant . I chose not to check Leo’s reaction.
    â€œYou’re still doing stunt work? More power to you.” To the men, shesaid, “Darcy was already a S.A.G. card stunt double when I had a bit part in a film.”
    â€œIn a couple of scenes that you utterly stole!” I laughed. “The star—I forget her name—was so pissed.”
    Tia grinned. “She was. It was like the dog stealing the show. Bet she never worked with a kid or dog again.” Tia hadn’t been a kid then, and both Leo and Eamon Lafferty seemed to understand that. The camera veering to Tia: it went without saying.
    â€œWhat kind of stunt were you doing?”
    I told them about the high fall. Be within the moment, Leo would have said. But I was paying scant attention to my explanation, more to the memory of Tia’s ability to deflect the spotlight while never losing any light. But mostly I found myself struggling not to stare at Eamon Lafferty’s dark brown eyes, his wider-than-Mike’s cheekbones, his laugh that was just a bit slower than the way Mike anticipated punch lines. Or maybe it was that Mike had anticipated my punch lines.
    â€œWhile I was waiting for my Go call this morning, the spotlight crossed the roof here, and I saw you walking across it,” I said to him.
    â€œReally,” he replied, for the first time focusing entirely on me. He hesitated before adding, “And you could still go on with your stunt? I thought stuntmen did a sort of mental dry run right before they started, like athletes.”
    â€œThey are athletes, you clod.” Tia poked Eamon’s arm and laughed in that way that included everyone in our little group. I felt sure that Eamon had been on the verge of asking something: why I was looking at his roof, or what I’d seen. But, as she’d always done, Tia transformed the situation, and the moment when he might have said more than he’d intended had passed.
    Instead, he shifted back to smiling at Tia, as if I didn’t exist. I was stillhalf trying to regain the moment when he was Mike, when I was hugging him, when—
    Leo raised his voice. “So you met on a movie set?”
    â€œMet again. Darcy and I were in high school together. We were the two special admissions girls in our class, and we steered clear of each other.”
    I tried to focus, to take in what she was saying, and heard myself slipping into Tia-speak: “But as a kid on an athletic entry into a very serious academic school, I had so little free time I conjugated Latin in the bathroom stall. I still can’t hear ‘ amo , amas , amat ’ without having the urge to pee.” The rest of the reception guests were talking in groups, but they might as well have been silent, watching Tia; they couldn’t keep their eyes off her.
    She shifted away from me and I gasped, caught myself, bobbled my teacup, and turned away to cover it all. Tia was holding a cane. I couldn’t believe it! It wasn’t right! Not Tia Dru! Why would she need a cane? She was magic, meant to soar. How could she be reliant on a piece of metal?
    I made a production of getting a napkin for the tea on my hand. Maybe it was because I’d already been knocked off-center by Eamon, but I felt even more out of focus now. Tia Dru, what was going on?
    Maybe, I told myself, the cane’s only temporary. But it wasn’t the kind of cane you get and toss away in a week. I focused on Eamon, then on Leo, all the while trying to see past them to Tia, trying not to stare. She gave the appearance of not leaning on the cane, or on anything else. She was thin in a way that was close to malnutrition, and yet there was always an allure in that near-need for