I see you everywhere Read Online Free PDF

practical things. Lucy did not like displaying photographs, least of all any including herself. So, no effigies of family on the dresser, but tucked in the frame of the mirror was a picture of Jimmy Carter, a recent cover from Time magazine. On the lace runner below, among soft-bristled brushes and silver-capped jars, a cassette player loomed like an urban intruder, one of those new macho machines resembling a suitcase. Some of the tapes stacked beside it were classical—Chopin, Mozart, Puccini—but the ones on top included Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead. When I pushed play, Van Morrison filled the room, a song that went off in my memory like a flashbulb: back in college, a picnic in Boston Garden, roast beef subs, screw-top chablis. The swan boats gliding in a blur behind willows.
    “These Dreams of You.”
    Over the bed hung a kite, a dragon with a twisting tail, suspended from the ceiling with hooks and fishing line. On the side table, a wind-up alarm clock had stopped at 9:21.
    The dresser drawers were empty, except for the brittle paper liners patterned with tiny violets.
    “The jewelry,” said Clem, “is in the bank.” She stood in the doorway. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 22 22
    Julia Glass
    I closed the top drawer. “That’s not what I was doing.”
    “I know.” Oddly (mercifully?), she didn’t sound sarcastic. “I’m trying to hang on to her, too. All the little details. The quirks. Really, though, she didn’t leave much of herself—her self —behind.” Clem walked back into the parlor and looked around. “She used to make me lunch. I suppose we’ll have to go out. We have a lifetime supply of bread, but nothing to go between it.”
    “I think I saw soup in a cupboard,” I said. “When I was looking for sugar.”
    Clem laughed. “That’s right. You take sugar. ”
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Oh, just everything.”
    “Death is funny?”
    “Sometimes, Louisa, yes. As a matter of fact. But that’s not what I meant.”
    ∞
    “avian aerobics,” I explained to Louisa. “Physical therapy.”
    Ralph held a peregrine falcon while I exercised the newly healed wing, flexing it away from the body and back, away and back. Lance (Ralph gave all the birds Round Table nicknames) knew the routine by now, but still you had to be careful. Back in June, a barn owl had nailed me. I thought he was small enough for me to handle alone; next thing I knew, he snatched a leg free and sank his claws a good inch into my arm. I managed not to scream; a struggle would have ripped me to shreds. Hector, precise and silent as a surgeon, pulled the foot free one sickle-shaped talon at a time.
    Louisa was finally out from under her portable storm cloud. She seemed thrilled by everything we showed her. But she was weirdly overdressed—in this practically see-through white dress, long gold earrings that Lance would gladly have swiped in a flash; I could see his cold laser glance captivated by the glint as she laughed. She stood back when I Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 23 I See You Everywhere
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    brought him out and turned down my offer to help feed our orphaned cygnets.
    Ralph explained how Lance had been caught in a ground snare set for wolves, how he’d fought and broken his wing in two places. Lance is one of Ralph’s miracles. Unlike most of our birds, which end up in preserves and zoos, he’d get released back into the wild.
    “He’s magnificent,” Louisa said to Ralph.
    “They drove this guy down from Canada; they know we don’t fool around,” said Ralph. He put Lance back in his cage.
    “Tell her about the redtails,” I said.
    This was our favorite success story, but really it was Ralph’s. The previous fall, before I arrived, he had rescued a female red-tailed hawk with a torn foot. She’d been a star inmate at the sanctuary when I came. Ralph adored her, but he was careful not to tame her. Two weeks after I got there, she