Picture Me Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

stressed, but happy to see Gabriel and also—though somewhat less so—us. She asks if I like DVDs and gives me a choice of
Titanic
or
Amélie.
I don’t really care, but choose
Amélie.
I start to watch the movie and it’s fine, but I want to know what Suzanne and Gil are talking about more than I want to watch Amélie save the world.
    Gil says, What else? And Suzanne answers with a sigh.
    Maybe he’s having an affair with one of his students. I don’t know.
    And then I am inside the head of a person with a young child whose husband has gone missing and I am much more upset and panicked than Suzanne. What if he’s
dead
? screams this person with a child. What if I
never see him again
?
    But nothing about Suzanne is screaming. When I say this to Gil, he nods as if he’s noticed the same thing. I suspect there’s more to this marriage than we know, he says. And of course Owen changed everything. Most couples who lose a child don’t stay together.
    I’ve been thinking about the connection between language and thought. Languages that read from left to right picture the passage of time moving left to right. If a French speaker tells the story of a cat catching a mouse, time starts at the left and moves to the right. Hebrew and Arabic speakers start with the cat and the mouse on the right and time passes to the left. So it’s not just a question of words.
    I try to remember this when I talk to Suzanne and imagine how time moves in her brain. Maybe it stopped when Owen died. Or got dammed up like logs in a stream. Or just goes round and round like the clock icon on a computer. She seems like a person made of glass. Tap her and she’ll shatter into a billion pieces.
    It is difficult having a conversation with a glass person but she watches patiently when I hold Gabriel and feed him his boddle, even though I can tell she wants him back. Honey desperately wants to protect the baby. She makes a faint noise in her throat and Suzanne shoos her away. Suzanne is not a horrible person masquerading as a nice one, just an angry one pretending to be normal.
    Perhaps she is the sort of person who says nothing for fear of exploding with words. In my presence, at least, she doesn’t ever mention Matthew. The language that structures her thoughts seems to be one that no one else speaks. And she avoids the only other creature who shares her loss. I think the dog’s unhappiness frightens her.
    Gabriel is too young to notice. I play a game with him where I lower a toy mouse on a string over his face and jerk it up again. He laughs and laughs and then out of nowhere his face collapses and he starts to howl. Suzanne swoops in and picks him up, saying, Mommy’s here. Gil looks at me.
    I walk over to the thousands of books displayed on the walls, run my hand along them and pick one out;
Caravanserai,
it’s called. Camels. Women draped in black. Men squatting, drinking tiny cups of tea. Low square buildings decorated with inscriptions I can’t read. It looks hot and quiet and slow.
    • • •
    Between jet lag and the oddness of being without street noise and other people, the afternoon passes.
    Suzanne is going into town for a few things and asks if I’d like to come. Yes, please, I say, and we take Gabriel along too. Gil stays put. He’ll work.
    On the fifteen-minute drive Suzanne asks me all the usual questions about how I like school and how is my mother, and where is she performing these days, etc. It is polite adult talk and only just lacks the genuine curiosity that connects people.
    Suzanne apologizes for the supermarket being boring but I don’t find it boring at all. To me it’s almost as exotic as Caravanserai. She says to tell her if I see anything I’d like to buy.
    I see lots of things I’d like to buy: macaroni and cheese in a box, Band-Aids with cartoons of superheroes on them, peanut butter and marshmallow swirled round in a huge plastic jar. In the bakery department there are cakes with talking clown heads and