My Own Miraculous Read Online Free PDF Page A

scrunched into a wad.
    Then my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, and I saw Hilde Fleming was up there with him. Dirt streaked her pale, flat face. Her lips parted as our eyes met, and the tip of her tongue poked thoughtfully out, very pink and pointy. She’d folded herself into the corner opposite, on her knees. She held her white-bandaged hand in close against her chest, like any creature with a wounded paw. In that small, dim space, she was close enough to Natty to be breathing in the air my son had just breathed out.
    In her good hand, she held a pair of sewing scissors. The sunlight came through the fort’s slatted roof in stripes, lighting up the silver blades. They went in a nasty curve like the beak of a small but wicked bird. In the other hand, she held a lock of hair. It was light brown and straight and very fine, as familiar to me as my own. I looked back at Natty and this time clocked the bristle of cropped hairs sticking up like a chicken tail at the very crown of his head. My whole skin blanched cold.
    I came up another step and lurched the top half of my body toward my kid. He reached for me and I grabbed him, pulling him across the floor to me. He clipped his legs around my waist, arms wrapping tight around my neck. I could feel his small body shaking.
    “She cut my hair!” he whispered fiercely, and I realized that he wasn’t shaking because he was scared. He was outraged.
    I stood on the ladder with only the top half of my body poking up through the hatch, holding my kid close, and I bared my teeth at Hilde Fleming. My breath came out in a wordless hiss. It was an animal noise, rising up from the animal feeling that poured through me. I could have bit her open, in that moment, could have torn her face to bleeding ribbons with my hands.
    The violence rising up inside my middle scared me; I had never felt this in myself before. I backed down the ladder, one-handed and very fast.
    As soon as we touched ground, I set Natty on his feet. I knelt down, checking him over. As far as I could see, the only thing she’d cut with her wicked little scissors was the sprig of hair. But this was the girl who put a nail through her own hand. What if I’d been thirty seconds later? An awful picture came into my head: Hilde going after my son’s pretty eye with those curved blades, short and sharp. I shuddered, and I couldn’t get my heart to slow, not a tick. I could maybe keep myself from biting her, but I wasn’t done with Hilde Fleming yet. Not by half.
    “You’re fine, bunny,” I said to Natty, and I made my voice be mild and cheery in spite of all the animal raging inside me. He blinked up at me, believing it.
    “I don’t like that girl, though,” he told me.
    “Me either!” I kept my tone light, as if we were discussing the spoiled kid who tried to boss everybody at his preschool. “I need a sec—run go see Walcott? You can have a turn on the iPad.”
    He grinned and trotted instantly off toward the table. Last week Walcott had downloaded a preschool app called Dinosaurs!, and Natty was obsessed with it. I watched until I saw Walcott had eyes on him, and then I turned back to the ladder.
    My blood galloped through me, red and hot. I’d seen Mimmy like this once, when Nat was barely four months old. She and I had turned to look at a dress displayed in a shop window. When we turned back, an oily-looking man, not a local, was bent over the stroller, hovering so close to the baby. I blinked, only surprised, but Mimmy was already moving, bulling in between them, physically shoving at this fellow who was twice her size. He skipped back, blanching. Her shoulders stayed braced and her neck was so tense that it looked made of cords. He’d apologized and I’d apologized and laughed it off, smoothing things over, but as he walked away, Mimmy stayed bristled up.
    “He’s not right,” she said. “If you see that man again, you take Natty and you go the other way.” Staring holes in his retreating back, she