Shadow Man: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Sorrento.”
    Kurt and I looked at each other.
    “That’s in Italy, boys, below Naples. The cliffs are high and the lemons are big as a grapefruit. You could fill a whole glass with one lemon. I swam in the blue sea and dreamed of sirens tempting sailors. Imagine voices so pretty that they lead you to ruin. Haunting. There’s another word for you, Jim. Haunting. A voice out there in the mist, calling.”
    Kurt and I had seen
Jason and the Argonauts
on TV, but neither of us said anything and Vera went on slicing and squeezing lemons, the juice dripping down her forearms and elbows and into the sand. She could do that. Begin a story, frame it out pretty so as to invite you in, and then let it trail off the way a breeze lifts out of nowhere and vanishes.
    Kurt tossed his coffee cup and we were off again. Marvin Gaye was on the radio, but we lost him when Kurt accelerated and the car filled with crackle and wind and Vera’s flying hair. The road beyond the windshield was wide and not too curvy. Kurt was sweating and daydreaming, his hand loose on the wheel. What was going on? It wasn’t like Kurt to take a vacation so suddenly. He hadn’t been off work since Mom died, but the summer days and Vera enticed him. We still didn’t know her real story, or at least I didn’t. Kurt may have because he and Vera had been staying up long nights talking. They weren’t sleeping together. When I’d come down in the mornings, Kurt was back-flat on the floor and Vera was curled on the couch. They’d ease into the day like two cats; Kurt making coffee and pouring juice; Vera snatching the
Inky
from the porch, thumbing through pages and glancing at ads and pictures with the occasional, “Hey, Kurt look at this.” Her clothes tangled with his, hanging off the banister and on the towel racks in the bathroom scented with her balms of lilac and musk. She’d sit on the back stoop and murmur Buddhist chants and sometimes it seemed she went into a trance. Neighbors peeked from behind window shades and Kurt told the Kowalskys and McMurphys that Vera was a “distant relative who had spent her life in exotic places.” Vera played along, calling Kurt “Cuz” and inventing family histories.
    She’d come into my room and lie beside me while I studied the dictionary, asking me to read her the second and third meanings of words. I’d read slow and I could feel my voice calm her or maybe it was the glow of the lamp and the sounds of distant cars in the alleys. She’d close her eyes and tell me that words were masks and disguises. “Did you know, Jim, that God has ninety-nine names in Arabic? The Avenger. The Truth. The Shaper of Beauty. They’re written in holy books and on fortress walls deep in the desert. Go see these places one day, Jim. Promise me you’ll go and trace God’s name on a desert wall.” A few times at night, while Kurt was sleeping,I’d sneak and sit on the stairs and see Vera in her underpants and T-shirt kneeling beside the radiator, twirling her hair and staring at the front door as if waiting for someone to turn the knob. Once, I thought I heard her crying and talking to herself in the basement, and when she came up, wiping a startled look off her face, she told me she had been singing a rhyme from childhood and was sad that childhood would never come again. She put a picture of a yogi, a guy with a long beard who looked like he had diapers on and hadn’t eaten in a while, on the coffee table. She bought beads and hung them between the kitchen and the dining room and then tried to teach Kurt to meditate by closing his eyes and sitting pretzel-legged, but Kurt cracked up and shook his head when she lit incense around him.
    “Vera, this isn’t me.”
    “You need to get in touch with your inner self.”
    “My inner self is doing just fine without me going to look for it.”
    Sprawling as she was in moods and scented possessions, though, Vera could not make the house her own, not even by carving her initials above