Letters from Skye Read Online Free PDF Page A

skip as a child?
    I saw it fall.… It spun straight onto the pavement, right outon the street. I ducked behind the dormer just in time. Rock and dirt kicked up everywhere. The cobbles were there one moment and the next were a smoking crater. I have no idea how I kept my balance, how I didn’t fall off the roof with the blast. There wasn’t even a siren.
    I remembered Mother. The bedroom window had shattered, everything silent inside. I called her. I didn’t know how to get into the room, with all the jagged glass around the window. Inside, all was shambles. The bed had skidded right up against the far wall, the night table on its side. A paving stone, flung through the window with perfect trajectory, had torn through a section of wainscoting. Papers fluttered white in the sunset-drenched room.
    I called again and then I saw her shadow in the doorway. She stepped in slowly, her blue satin slippers toeing away the papers. But she didn’t come all the way to the window. She just stood, staring at the splintered wainscoting and the snowfall of paper.
    I reached through and yanked down one of the blackout curtains. I wrapped my hand and knocked out the glass around the windowsill so I could climb in.
    Mother still didn’t say a word. She dropped to the floor and pulled armfuls of paper onto her lap. I bent and picked one up. A letter, yellowed and creased, addressed to someone named Sue. And, because it sounds so much like you, Paul, I copy it here.
    Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
    October 31, 1915
    Dear Sue,
    I know you’re angry; please don’t be. Talk of “duty” and “patriotism” aside, how could you really expect me to pass up on this, the ultimate adventure?
    My mother’s been floating around the house, red-eyed and sniffling. My father still isn’t speaking to me. And yet I feel as if I’m doing something right. I messed up in college. I messed up at work. Hell, I even messed up with Lara. I was beginning to think there was no place in the world for a guy whose highest achievement included a sack full of squirrels. Nobody seemed to want my bravado and impulsivity before. You know this is right for me, Sue. You of all people, who seem to know things about me before I myself do. You know this is right.
    I’m leaving tomorrow for New York and have to trust my mother to mail this letter. When you read it, I’ll be on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic. Even though we get a reduction on our fares if we sail the French Line, Harry and I are bound for England. He has Minna over there waiting for him. And I … I have you. Like knights of old, neither of us can head off to fight without a token from our love to tuck into our sleeve.
    I’ll be landing in Southampton sometime in the middle of November and will be going up to London. Sue, say that you’ll meet me this time. I know it’s easy for me to ask, far easier than it is for you to leave your sanctuary upon Skye. Don’t let me go off to the front without having touched you for the first time, without having heard your voice say my name. Don’t let me go off to the front without a memory of you in my heart.
       Yours … always and forever,
       Davey
    “These are mine.” Mother grabbed at other letters fluttering around. “You have no right to read them.”
    I asked what they were, who Sue was, but she didn’t answer. She sat there with wet eyes, fumbling hands piling up the yellowing paper. Outside the windows, the air-raid sirens finally started.
    “Go,” she said finally, holding the envelopes tight. “Just go.”
    With the sounds of the sirens and the ack-ack guns, I stumbled from the house towards the air-raid shelter. I knew I had to finish the letter to you, that there was no one else I could tell about this evening. About how none of it seemed real.
    I’ve never kept secrets from my mother. You know that, Paul. But as I hunkered down in that shelter, with my notebook still tucked in my blouse and the letter in my hand, I wondered what