Some Things About Flying Read Online Free PDF

Shakespeare? She wondered what would have happened to Romeo and Juliet if they had lived. The bitter secrets of A Girl of the Limberlost felt more familiar, and for a while, she was quite at home in the fraught dramas of the Brontës.
    She read as if her family were more than the humans involved, but were also a set of stories she wasn’t advanced enough to grasp.
    Don had his own ways. He stayed out a lot and denied an interest in thick air. Perhaps associating Lila, too, with gloom, he avoided her as well. None of this is a subject he will discuss; or maybe, it occurs to her, it’s not one he can bear. He and Lila still don’t have much in common except the colour of their eyes, affection for his children, and one terrible event.
    He’s on his second marriage, though. He must at least have learned not to stick around once something irretrievable has occurred.
    It is now Lila’s view that her parents went wrong for reasons that do not concern her; that had only to do with adults, not their children. This can happen. There is nothing about marriage, or well-intentioned promises, that prevents it from happening.
    It is necessary to be able to get free when it happens.
    â€œYou okay?” Tom asks, and Lila realizes she has put a hand to her throat, as if she feels sick, which she doesn’t.
    She nods. “You?”
    â€œYeah, but I think I’ll hit the john. Or at least the line-up for it.”
    â€œQueasy?”
    â€œNo, the Scotch. And the excitement. Anticipation. Shit, Lila, you don’t know how much I’ve looked forward to this.”
    He is such a goddamn sweet man, she could squeeze the life out of him.
    How is the atmosphere in his household? Thick with secrets, of which Lila is surely the thickest? Or is it mainly an efficient, time-tabled flurry of two busy, preoccupied people?
    Tom keeps secrets in all directions. He has more than the usual quota of privacies.
    â€œYou have no faith,” he has several times complained. In him, he means. “Trust me,” he says, and she does, as best she can.
    He will talk freely about his daughters, if not his wife. He speaks of them proudly, and as if they are holy, and as if, even now, he can make them, good or ill, what they will be.
    â€œBut,” Lila has argued, from the disadvantaged viewpoint of the childless, “you can’t ever tell what’s going to go ping in a mind. You have no idea what’ll be remembered, or how, or why, for that matter.”
    â€œI know,” he agreed, “you’re right,” but his heart wasn’t in it.
    What Lila meant, though, is that, for instance, no one would have imagined Aunt June would have stuck, somewhat larger than warranted, in Lila’s own mind: a woman long dead, who wasn’t really an aunt, and who probably wasn’t even especially fond of Lila. Has she ever mentioned Aunt June to Tom? She’s told him so much, it’s hard to keep track.
    Each summer of her childhood, her parents and Lila and Don made the hundred-mile drive to spend a week with her mother’s parents. As they turned in the laneway, Lila’s grandmother would be stepping from the old brick farmhouse, her hair wrapped in a thin braid around her head, her arms open, her print housedress (whatever happened to housedresses? Same thing that happened to housewives, Lila supposes) protected by an apron, her face flushed from the heat of her kitchen.
    Lila flew from the back seat into those arms. Don tore off to the barn and its haymows and kittens and breathtaking sweet-sour smells. Later the two of them would cross paths, switch places, and sometimes they were even together, climbing into trees and haymows, catching frogs, wading in the little river.
    Every year, that small summer period was suspended from real time. In that household, people even older than her parents were in charge, and those older people were wholly indulgent, embracing. Lila, off her watchful