Signs and Wonders Read Online Free PDF

he’d do now. He was younger than her by a few years, and I had the feeling she’d always looked out for him. They’d gone to high school with a guy who was now on the police force, and he’d called her when Alan passed out in the square.
    On the short drive back to her place, we didn’t say much. I could hear her talking to him in the backseat, just simple things. “You don’t look good, Alan. We’re going to take you home and get you cleaned up. I’ll make you some grilled cheese. Or whatever you want.” As if she were his mother. Her arm was around his, their blond heads clustered together, and I felt like their chauffeur, some hired hand. When we got there, she guided him into the bathroom. His clothes stank, and his arms and chest were crowded with tattoos and bruises. He looked tough, but he was pliant while we stripped him.
    Together we bathed him, as if he were a dirty overgrown child, and he started to come around a little. He didn’t seem upset that we were manhandling him. He was very polite. “Thanks,” he kept saying, and “I’m sorry.” When he was more or less clean, we helped him out of the bathtub and Stephanie asked me to get him some fresh clothes from a dresser in her bedroom. Apparently they were his own clothes, because they fit just fine.
    “This is Tom,” Stephanie told him, once he was dressed.
    “I’m sorry we met like this,” Alan said. He held out his hand and we shook. His blond hair was lank, and his green eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion. I’d have given him a B12 shot and locked him in rehab for a month, but he wasn’t my brother.
    “No problem,” I said.
    She fed him a grilled cheese sandwich, as promised, and put him in her spare room. Then she and I went to bed.
    “Are you okay?” I said.
    “It’s not the first time,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “His leg kills him.”
    “What’s he on, medication-wise?”
    “He’s been on everything. He always says it doesn’t help.”
    She was undressed for bed, and her back was covered in tiny freckles. I set myself to tracing them with my index finger, making constellations out of them, a triangle, a star. I loosed her hair from its ponytail, and it sprang to life, a million curls clouding her shoulders. She lay down and folded herself against me, pulling my arm across her stomach. I wondered if she was crying. But she turned, and kissed me, then moved down my stomach and took me in her mouth, and I closed my eyes, not thinking about anything else at all.
    After that night, I was deep into Stephanie’s life, and I liked it there. We started spending most weekends together, and I met her parents, who were sweet, tired people, too impressed that I was a doctor for me to be comfortable around them. She showed me around Bethlehem: the shuttered factory they’d turned into a casino, the quaint cobblestoned Main Street, the shambling towpathalong the Delaware canal. Sometimes we went hiking in the Poconos, the mountains’ dazzling green bisected by the truck-heavy rumble of I-80. The whole place seemed hardscrabble to me, gritty and rural, and as much as I liked Stephanie, I had a hard time imagining staying there for long.
    As I got to know her, I realized how closely her life and Alan’s were intertwined. She was constantly bailing him out, helping him get job interviews, putting him up for the night when another in his series of housing arrangements—he’d get a new roommate or a new girlfriend, then argue with them and move out—crumbled.
    I answered the door one night in December to find him standing on the doorstep, swaying a little. Over one shoulder was a blue backpack he always had with him, and sometimes I wondered if it contained all his worldly possessions.
    “Yo,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
    “We have, actually. More than once.”
    “It was a joke, Doctor Tom.”
    “Oh,” I said. He was just as deadpan as his sister. “Come on in. Steph’s cooking.”
    When she saw