Leaving Atlanta Read Online Free PDF

if the boyfriend hadn’t shown up, and Tasha couldn’t imagine.
    But this was way worse than a swamp-monster with vague motives. If a child murderer came in the doorway, he would have to
     kill Mama, then DeShaun, and then Tasha. But if he came in the window, Tasha would be first. And it could happen. Didn’t Monica
     Kaufman say that one girl was taken through her window? And Tasha knew what had happened to her. She got asphyxiated.
What’s that?
Tasha had asked. Mama shut her eyes.
Smothered,
she breathed.
    Tasha pressed her face into her pillow to see what it was like to be smothered, to be deprived of something as necessary as
     air. After a few seconds, her heart moved harder and she felt a desperation in her chest. She held her face there as long
     as she could and then she lifted her head. Her body acted without her, drawing a long, deep breath as if it were making up
     for lost time.

    The power of DeShaun’s tears had long been, for Tasha, a source of mystery and envy. As soon as Shaun’s lower lip started
     trembling and her eyelashes went to blinking, their parents sprang into motion. Tasha’s tears, it seemed, only brought admonitions
     to be a big girl. But it was DeShaun’s enchanting weeping on the night they found out about the child murders that brought
     Daddy back home.
    It took a few weeks for DeShaun’s magic to kick in. Tasha was fumbling with the lock on the front door—trying to remember
     if pushing or pulling would keep the bolt from sticking—when the door opened from the inside. Tasha dropped her lunch box
     and used her free hand to grab her little sister’s wrist. The plastic container opened when it hit the porch and an apple
     rolled out, badly bruised.
    “Who’s that fooling with my door?” Daddy said, smiling broadly, stretching his arms wide enough for a double embrace.
    DeShaun ran into the hug, shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” like TV kids, but Tasha stood back. He folded one arm over DeShaun’s back
     but left the other free, inviting.
    “Ladybug, you’re not glad to see your father?” He stopped smiling.
    “You came back for your fishing rod, screwdrivers, and stuff?”
    “No,” he said. “I came back for you two.”
    “You’re taking us with you?” Tasha said, alarmed.
    DeShaun fell limp in her half hug.
    “No,” he said, laughing. “I mean I’m back home. For good.”
    Tasha consented to the hug then, but she didn’t believe him until she had snuck into her parents’ room and seen his underwear
     stacked in the top dresser drawer, their striped waistbands facing outward.
    They sat at the table that night in their usual positions; the only evidence of the weeks that had passed without him was
     the little TV, which displayed the pictures of the lost children. Tasha was aware of the words
hot line
and
task force
as she shoveled bright yellow corn into her mouth. She looked up at the little screen and took in a photo of the little girl.
     Her hair was fastened into an unruly ponytail just above her right temple.
    “Daddy,” Tasha said, “at school somebody said that they took that one girl out of her house when she was asleep.”
    “For real?” DeShaun said.
    “That’s what Monica said.”
    “That girl that was taken out of her house was different,” Daddy said. “I believe that was her stepdaddy.”
    “Like Rex,” Tasha said, interested.
    Mama interrupted. “Tasha, don’t even say that. Next thing you know, you’ll be going around telling folks that Rex is going
     to kill Ayana.”
    “I wasn’t going to say that,” Tasha said, wondering how her mother could look right into her head and see what she was thinking.
    “But somebody took her out of her bed?” DeShaun asked again.
    “Carried her out of the window,” Tasha added. “And nobody ever saw her again. They still don’t know where she is.”
    “Tasha, stop,” Mama said.
    Daddy sat DeShaun on his lap and put his hands on either side of her toast-colored face, smoothing back the hair