On Little Wings Read Online Free PDF

made a strangled cry and finding me helpless, grabbed my hand and put it to my ear. “You have to talk,” she whispered desperately.
    “Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.
    My mouth opened, I swear I pushed the air up my throat, but it stuck stubbornly at my Adam’s apple. I just started to make a sound when she said ‘hello’ again, more doubtfully.
    “Hi.” Is the first thing I managed. I jumped up and started taking senseless steps, the frantic tingling in my body demanding movement. “Hi,” my thoughts were coming. Lagging, but coming. “Is this Sarah Dyer?”
    “Speaking. Who is this?” she asked suspiciously. She didn’t sound like Mother, but her voice encouraged me. It wasn’t jarring or clipped. She sounded smart. And gentle.
    “I am . . .” Quick change of tactics. “Are you Claire Dyer’s sister?” I asked. An almost inaudible intake of breath and then silence. Cleo was still there, glued irrevocably to her spot, her expression horrified and hopeful at the same.
    “Who is this, again?” she asked, fear spilling into her shaking voice.
    “My name is Jennifer. Claire is my mother.” My voice was shaking now. I would begin to cry in earnest any minute. But the funny thing is that the tears replaced the fear. With the hardest words already spoken, crying seemed to be the only way my ravaged body could remove the adrenalin racing through my system.
    “Jennifer,” she breathed. It wasn’t a question at all. I knew as soon as she spoke that she had known about me. “Jennifer?” she said louder, wonder breaking her voice.
    “Hi, Sarah.” I saw Cleo’s eyes glisten when I looked up and she quietly backed from the room, closing the door behind her. I was alone with my aunt.
    “Jennifer…” I sensed her searching for words, trying to find her first question. I knew how she felt. Her voice took on a new intensity, “Is Claire okay?”
    “Yes,” I hurriedly answered, “we’re all fine. I just… I found out about you tonight.”
    “Oh,” she said it so tenderly it was almost musical. “I didn’t think you would know. Did Claire tell you?”
    “No. Not exactly… Not at all,” I amended. Then I went straight into the story of her picture - she made a beautifully happy sound when I told her I looked like her – and she interrupted frequently to ask small questions: How was my father? Was I really sixteen? What grade was I in? When I filled her in all the way to the current phone call I felt an overwhelming sense of power. Like the story had been told by other people up until that point and now I was stepping in and taking over, picking the words and the scenes. It was the first time the story of Sarah and Claire Dyer, as incomplete as it was to me, belonged to my life.
    “Jennifer, I am so glad you called,” she said earnestly when I stopped talking. “That was so brave and I am so grateful. I… I just don’t know what to say first. I could talk to you all night.”
    I glowed. The relief radiated off my skin. “I’m glad, too.” The dark mystery pushed far to the corner of my conscious and all I wanted to know were the happy things. What she was like. What she liked doing. When I could see her. I asked her if she was married, if I had any cousins and her painful hesitation made me regret my question. She told me no, never married, but she had a family of friends in Smithport she would love to introduce me to.
    “You would really love them. They’re characters, some of them. Do you like reading… literature?” she asked.
    “Oh, of course. When Mrs. Hanshaw isn’t teaching I absolutely love it.”
    “Good, good,” she said absently. “I was hoping you would.” She waited, a question hanging in the quiet air between us. “I’ll be done with work in a few more weeks. If you ever wanted to… if your mother would let you…” She said timidly, trying to invite me to Smithport. Every cell in my body responded to her summons like a magnet.
    “What do you do?” I