Red Equinox Read Online Free PDF

the scarab, help her understand what it meant to people, to her grandmother, was slipping away.
    “Let him go,” Rafael said. She’d forgotten he was there.
    When she turned back from a glance at Raf, John Proctor had fled through a gap in the collapsed bricks and beams, leaving only a rustle in the teeming weeds to testify that he had been there at all.
    Becca went to the birdbath and stared at the slimy leaves through the rainwater.
    “What was that about?” Rafael broke the silence. “Your grandfather was a patient here? How come you never told me?”
    Becca didn’t reply. She tucked the scarab back under her shirt, and the sun tucked itself behind a cloud.
    She approached one of the other doorless entrances to the hospital as if in a trance. It gave onto a common room, the bookshelves sagging and moldy, the other furnishings long since removed. Her boots, painted with Rafael’s silly characters, crunched on dislodged segments of tile grout, bringing small bones to mind. She could sense Rafael behind her, wanting to say something but knowing better.
    For a moment she saw the room as it had been when she was eight years old. She had forgotten visiting her grandfather here, but now, looking at the courtyard from this angle, through the empty window frame, she could almost see him, scrawny and gaunt in his gown, barely aware of his granddaughter or wife; him staring at the bright light wavering on the water in the birdbath and shielding his eyes from the glare with a hand against his brow. It had looked like a salute offered to someone she couldn’t see, his hand not quite casual enough to merely be serving as a visor, his thumb pressing against the skin above and between his eyes, massaging the area where a crescent scab marked him. She remembered being afraid for him and thinking that he must have dug his thumbnail into that spot from repetition of the gesture.
    It was all rushing back now, the ice cream Gran had bought her on the way home to cheer her up (black raspberry—a flavor she had unconsciously avoided since), and the vacant smile Grandpa had flashed her that made her wonder if he still knew her name. He had been semi-catatonic throughout the visit. No, that wasn’t entirely true. He had said one thing to Catherine as, with her hand on Becca’s shoulder, she turned to leave. The words had croaked out of him in a voice atrophied from infrequent use, through chapped lips stretched in an ironic and horrid grin.
    “What I came here pretending to be…I am becoming.”
    Catherine had almost pushed Becca to the car after that, and Becca had been relieved to go. Whoever that man had been, he wasn’t her grandfather anymore.
    A scratching roused her from her reverie, and she turned to find Rafael down on one knee at the other side of the expansive room. He held a slim putty knife in one hand and was scraping dots of bright blue paint from the floor, as if it were still 2006 and he’d been hired for maintenance.
    The wall behind him revealed his latest work, and her breath hitched in her chest as she took it in: a series of torrential waterfalls appeared to pour from ragged holes in the sheetrock while kaleidoscopes of blue and yellow butterflies streamed toward the ceiling from gashes in the sagging wallpaper.
    “When?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “While you were at the funeral. You like it?”
     
     

 
Chapter 3
     
    In his dusty black frock, Reverend John Proctor climbed aboard an aboveground trolley and rode the Green Line into the city amid college students and commuters, swaying with the rock and pitch of the car, and staring out the filmy window at the darkening skyline until the train plunged underground at Kenmore, leaving his tattooed reflection staring back at him.
    There were two kinds of people on the subway: those who stared at him, and those who stared away from him. His people had lived in Boston for generations. Longer than the Muslims with their burkas or the Chasidics with their braids,