Illyria Read Online Free PDF Page B

long-legged, with light-brown hair barely thinning from their foreheads.
    But, as the older twin, my uncle seemed to have absorbed the greater psychic mass. He was a bit grayer than my father, more worn about the face--like Aunt Pat, he was a heavy smoker--and more choleric. Seeing both twins in a crowded room, you might be hard put at first to tell them apart.
    But inevitably, your gaze would be drawn to my uncle. Even in
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    daylight he appeared to stand half-shadowed, and no matter how animated he was, you were always conscious of something waiting, a coiled anticipation. It was only as I grew older that I realized this sense of expectation didn't come from my uncle himself. It emanated from his children. Being in a room with his sons was like standing in a pen crammed with nervous horses. Their fear was palpable, and their mute hatred; their love.
    The older boys all resembled him. Only Rogan was different, with his flaming hair and uncanny sea-foam eyes. He looked like me, and like my father; as though the strange displacement that gave my uncle his somber weight cast a bright aura around his youngest child. In a crowded room with Rogan and me, you would always look at Rogan first.
    "How was your day?" asked Aunt Pat.
    "It was fine." My uncle bent to kiss the top of her head, then set a big hand on my shoulder. "Hi, Maddy. You setting a good example for these reprobates?"
    "Trying to." I smiled weakly.
    "Michael, you take care of those gutters like I asked you?"
    Michael nodded, staring at his plate. "Yup."
    "Good." My uncle's gaze barely touched the other boys as he turned to go upstairs to change. "I'll be down in a minute. Make me a drink, will you, Pat?" When he could be heard in the hall above us, everyone began to eat again.
    I left soon after, not waiting for Uncle Richard to return, or for dessert. When I looked at Rogan across the table, I felt as though I must give off sparks.
    And as I stood to go, I saw Michael staring at me.
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    "Make sure she rubs off on you," he called as Rogan walked me to the porch.
    "Fuck you," said Rogan under his breath. Once we were outside, he bumped his forehead against mine. "Hey, I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
    "Okay," I said. "That was amazing. Up there ..." I tilted my head toward the upper stories.
    Rogan grinned. "It was incredible." He looked the way he did on Christmas morning.
    He went back inside, and I headed up the winding driveway. I'd gone about halfway when someone called out.
    "Maddy!"
    I turned. At the bottom of the hill, where the drive wound down to the carriage house, Aunt Kate stood and beckoned to me. "Come here!"
    I lifted my hand in a wave and walked down to meet her, my shoulders hunched against the chill night wind. Aunt Kate looked beautiful and exotic as always, in green lizard-skin boots and a russet swing coat, her cheeks pink with cold and a paisley scarf loosely knotted around her neck. Someone was with her, a tall figure I didn't recognize; a man.
    No surprise there. Aunt Kate had never married, but she had a lot of male friends. This caused great consternation among her family, especially the women, who took it as a personal affront that Kate had a (presumably) active sex life, as well as an intellectual one. None of her friends were stockbrokers or lawyers or doctors, which might have made their presence slightly more palatable, or at least
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    comprehensible; and most of them appeared to fall under some vaguely defined rubric that identified them as artists of one sort or another: men who had too much hair or none at all, men who gave a blank look when someone brought up the Mets, but who had visited slightly louche destinations, Tangiers or Nepal or London or San Francisco. They had often read the same books as Rogan and me and, despite the disparity in our ages, sometimes listened to the same music.
    This man, though, didn't look like the others. He was tall and thin, with a long, angular, ascetic face, and black hair cut very short. He wore a