Revolution Number 9 Read Online Free PDF Page B

up and went to the bathroom. He glimpsed his face in the mirror and saw a difference. What? It was the same face, broad and weathered; but there was something positive, even eager, in the eyes.
    Charlie scraped the frost off the window. Snow lay thick on the ground and the sun was shining. A boy walking toward the school bus stop threw a chunk of ice at a tree and hit it smack on. He was wearing a jacket that said “Little League All-Stars—South Shore Champions.”
    Charlie watched the boy till he was out of sight. And he wished he hadn’t done it—hadn’t babbled the fucking power saw, hadn’t taken her to see the monster, hadn’t played Ben Webster. What had he been thinking? Wishing to undo something was a physical sensation—it twisted inside him.
    “Charlie?” she called.
    It was too late.
    Charlie went into the bedroom. Emily was sitting in his bed, quilt drawn up to her chin, smiling at him. “Charlie,” she said. “I like that name.”
    “It’s just a name,” Charlie said.

5
    S ix weeks later Cosset Pond froze over almost to the cut, ending Charlie’s lobster season. On a clear cold day, he and Emily went skating, swooping around the motionless boats like dolphins. Sky and ice were blue, sun gold, blades silver. The whole pond was theirs. Charlie skated faster and faster, could barely keep himself from whooping aloud.
I’m like a goddamned kid
, he thought, and went into a long glide, outpast the last boat, its white hull marked by hockey pucks, and almost to the line where the ice turned black and thin. There he dug his edges into a quick, sure hockey stop and looked back in time to see Emily spin, lose her balance, wave her arms at him comically, fall. He skated back and helped her up. She tucked her face into his shoulder.
    “I’m pregnant,” she said. A vapor cloud rose from her mouth into the blue.
    “But I thought—” Charlie began.
    “No method is perfect, Charlie,” she said, her face still against him: he could feel the vibration of her words in his skin but couldn’t read whatever expression was in her eyes. He waited for her to raise the subject of abortion, but she didn’t, and he didn’t see how he could be the one to do it. Charlie wasn’t a goddamned kid; he was old enough to know what her silence meant. She wanted the baby. Did she want it whether he was in the picture or not? Charlie, watching their breath rise like cartoonist’s balloons empty of dialogue, was afraid to ask the question.
    “That’s great,” he said.
    Then Emily looked up, studying his face in the same probing way she had studied his house. “Do you mean it, Charlie?”
    · · ·
    But she had seen the house on its best day; Charlie didn’t mean it, not at first. He pretended. Then, after a week or two, the baby crossed some frontier in his mind that separated concept from reality. He didn’t know anything about babies, had never even held one, yet suddenly he knew just how a baby’s hair—his baby’s hair—would feel. At that moment he knew he wanted to be in the picture too. This was wrong, but he had lost the will to do anything about it. A long-stuck brake had been released. Charlie, at last, was on the move.
    And picking up speed. First, Emily got a two-year grant from the center to study relationships between water temperature and sand particle movement. Next, she was hired as a consultant by a Wall Street arbitrageur who wanted to save the beach in front of his summer house. After that she began interviewing high school girls who wanted baby-sitting jobs. Shealso sketched some plans on sheets of graph paper, and Charlie soon found himself building an addition to the house—and knowing the mental state of nesting birds in the spring: happy confusion. He was happy, happier than he’d been in twenty-two years, happy as the safest citizen in the land.
    Emily came out one day while he was framing the roof. “Hit your thumb yet?”
    “Not hard,” Charlie said. Looking down at the top of