Shadows Gray Read Online Free PDF

the couch with the reading lamp still on.  He sleeps there more often than he does in his bed, so I pull an afghan over his legs and switch off the lamp. Matthias and Harry tell me I sang beautifully and they retire for the night to the room they share, whistling I’ll Be Seeing You.  Israel is eating soup from a blue pottery bowl in the kitchen and I join him.
    “What’s wrong?”  He asks.  Israel sometimes seems as though he knows me the best.  His brown eyes look concerned.
    “Do I look that bad?”  I joke lightly.
    “You look like something bad happened,” he responds, leaning back against the counter.
    I look like I’ve seen a ghost, I think. Because I did.  Instead I choose my words carefully and speak softly so that my dad, curled up on the couch, can’t overhear.
    “I saw Rose today.  I know it was her. I know I’m not mistaken. Do you think I’m crazy?  Or imagining things?  Is it possible that she didn’t stay in that century, that she can travel too?  That she’s Lost?”
    Israel is silent so long I fear what he will say when he finally does speak.
    “I’ve seen my family in the strangest places.  Sometimes I’ll turn a corner and I’ll see someone and I’m sure it’s my mother.  Other times I stare so long and so hard at someone that their features will start to resemble more and more my father.  I see my brothers in every little boy their ages. I always hope that we’ll meet up again one day.  It’s good to hope, Sonnet.  Hope doesn’t make you crazy. The absence of hope does.”
    “You don’t believe me then?”  I feel like crying, but I also feel angry.
    “Will that make it better? Do you want me to believe?” ( In your delusions? is the unspoken ending to his question.)
    “Do what you want,” I shoot back.  I turn my back on him and rummage through the cupboard until I find what I’m looking for: Nightfall pills.  Sleep being so important and vital to coordinate with your group, a Lost man long ago developed Nightfall pills.  Although I am exhausted and weary to the bone, I know I will need their assistance in turning my brain off and falling asleep tonight.  I swallow two of the lavender pills and go to bed, leaving Israel in the kitchen in silence.
    Despite the pills, which usually knock me into a dreamless, comatose kind of slumber, I am fitful and restless all night.  I feel stuck in that not quite asleep, not quite awake state like you feel at the very ending of a nightmare.  Too groggy and disoriented to wake up fully, but never reaching that refreshing, rejuvenating energy you get after a good night’s sleep.  I feel as though my insides are shutting down, everything is heavy and I am being pulled under by a suffocating fog and strange dreams.  My room is so dark and my dreams are dark too.  At first, I am young again, eating bread in our stone home in the seventeen hundreds.  I can see my mother sewing something by the fire.  I am lying on a pallet next to her; I can see her bare feet.  The fire burns hot, I can feel it on my face and on my legs and arms.  I hear my dad humming but I can’t see him.  I hear a little scuttling sound and then Rose, little three-year- old Rose, lies down beside me.  I can see her light blue eyes, mirror images of my own.  She wears a white gown and holds a small wooden toy in the shape of a bear.  As I watch her, she begins to grow.  Her features grow up, her baby fat melts away.  I look down at my own legs and they are growing too.  Rose reaches out and strokes my cheek, then my hair.  I still feel the fire burning brightly beside us.  I still hear my dad’s hums, see my mother’s feet.  Rose stops touching my face and her hand reaches down to hold mine.  She holds it softly for a moment, then tighter, then tighter still until I want to say stop, that hurts!   Her hand squeezes and it feels larger now, not like that of a small three year-old.  It squeezes violently then and pulls out of my