I see you everywhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

sister was born, shoulders straight from the Super Bowl, neck closed with this old-fashioned cameo she wears all the time: some dainty damsel sniffing a flower. But right then, for the first time, I see my great-great-aunt as more than a charming fossil. Her face is so wrinkled, it’s a geology unto itself, and her hands are knobby and speckled as driftwood. I’d bet she’s lost five inches in height—never too tall to begin with. But she stands upright and slim, wears her hair in a neat silver twist, and smiles sometimes like she’s sixteen, so I think, Why the hell not? I lead her to a back corner, a rack of dresses on sale because they’re Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 20 20
    Julia Glass
    outdated, last spring’s longer style. I pick a dark purple one with red flowers, crinkly rayon with a loose waist and sleeves. Lucy jiggles the tiny bells that hang from ties at the neck. She looks cautiously approving.
    “So?” I say. “Try it on.”
    She tells me emphatically that she’s past the days of undressing outside her own room. But I can guess her size—like, teensy —and nine dollars is worth the adventure. When I point out it’s a two-for-one sale, she says, “Very well, then this one, too.” The second dress is equally modest, but it’s an electric maharani green shot through with turquoise, like the sea off Martinique at noon. It comes with a long gold sash. As she strokes the sash, laughing quietly at herself, it makes me think of all the years she’s lived and all the people who’ve passed through her life—just countless—because I’m pretty sure that none of them ever saw the Lucy I’m seeing tonight.
    ∞
    i slept till eleven, infuriating myself. Clem was gone, but she’d left out that eccentric bread, cream cheese, maple butter, and coffee in a brand-new Swedish coffeemaker. I poured a cup and took her note onto the front porch. The house wasn’t far from the street, but thanks to Aunt Lucy’s hands-off approach to the landscape, it was hidden by holly trees that had knit their branches into a daunting fortress. Clem had made plans with two guys named Hector and Ralph, and did I mind? My first reaction was, So what if I do? The second was, Which guy is she involved with? Clem is never without a boyfriend or two. She’s not beautiful, exactly, but she’s tall and strong and has the kind of hair—
    dark and dense—that lends itself to tossing. She’s physically daring, if rarely graceful, runs and throws like the boys (fast and far, which they so predictably mention, tripping over themselves with adulation). I’m not so tall, not so strong, and my hair, ruly and just barely blond, doesn’t toss. I decided that whichever guy was hers, I would do my best to steal him, just for a night. I was determined if not optimistic. After toast and more coffee, I toured the house. Clem was staying in Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 21 I See You Everywhere
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    the bedroom next to mine. It looked like a college lair: whirlpool of sheets, sneakers, and books. Clem’s books are detective novels and nature guides: everything you ever wanted to know (or not) about dolphins, comets, birdsong, and the endangered flora of northern New England. The dresser was strewn with earrings—wooden tigers, silver parrots, soapstone Eskimo fish—and the floor with bikini underpants, glossy and black like her hair.
    But Aunt Lucy’s room was where I wanted to snoop. Partly because I wanted to see what treasures, if any, were left behind, but mostly because she’d always been such an enigma. After her sister’s death—sometime back around World War Two—Lucy started sleeping in the den, off the parlor. The furniture was heavy and dark, the linens starched and wedding white. The quilt on the bed was white on white, a grapevine, one of Aunt Vetty’s. The wallpaper, a mesh of spidery ferns, gave the room its only color.
    In the past, the dresser had held only