The Age of Miracles Read Online Free PDF

disasters.
    After breakfast, I tried Hanna’s cell phone, but it just rang and rang. I knew it was different for her: Hanna’s life was noisy with sisters, her house a maze of bunk beds and shared sinks where the washing machine ran perpetually just to keep up with the dresses that piled each night in the laundry basket. It took two station wagons to carry her family away.
    In my house, I could hear the floors creak.
    By the time my father came home from the hospital in the late afternoon, the winds had calmed, and a low fog was rolling in from the coast, obscuring the slow motion of our sun across the sky.
    “Had my headlights on the whole way home,” said my father. “Couldn’t see five feet in front of me in that fog.”
    He looked exhausted, but it was a relief to see him standing in our kitchen.
    He ate half a sandwich standing up. Then he cleared the counters of the dishes we’d left out the day before and wiped everything down with a sponge. He watered my mother’s orchids, and then he stood at the sink, washing his hands for a long time.
    “You should get some sleep,” said my mother. She was wrapped in the same gray sweater she’d worn the day before.
    “I’m too wired,” he said.
    “You should lie down, at least.”
    He looked out the window and surveyed the back deck. He pointed at the dead bird. “When did that happen?”
    “Last night,” I said.
    He nodded and slid open the drawer, where he kept a supply of surgical gloves for use in household jobs. I followed him outside.
    “It’s a shame,” he said, crouching low near the bird.
    A troupe of ants had discovered the body and were marching back and forth from the edge of the deck, descending deep into the feathers, and emerging with tiny bits of the bird on their backs.
    My father flapped a white trash bag in the air until it snapped open and inflated.
    “Maybe it’s because gravity changed,” I said.
    “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Birds have always had trouble with our windows. Their eyesight isn’t very good.”
    He stretched a surgical glove over each of his hands. A wave of rubbery dust floated off the wrist cuffs. I could smell the latex where I stood.
    He closed one gloved palm over the bird’s rib cage, the wings sagging like tree branches as he lifted it into the air. Two black eyes the size of peppercorns remained motionless in its head. A few lost ants ran in frantic circles across my father’s wrist.
    “Sorry about what happened at work,” I said.
    “What do you mean?” said my father. He let the bird slip from his hand and into the bag. The sound was wet and echoey against the plastic. He blew on his wrist to get rid of the ants.
    “A woman died, right?” I said.
    “What?”
    He looked at me, surprised. I understood then that it was a mistake to mention it.
    My father was quiet. I could feel my cheeks turning hot and red. He used two fingers like tweezers to pick up the last stray feather from the deck and drop it into the sack. Then he rubbed his forehead with the back of one bent wrist.
    “No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one died.”
    This was the first lie I ever heard my father tell—or the first time I knew that he was lying. But it would not be the last. And not the boldest, either.
    On the deck where the bird had lain, a hundred ants ran in circles, in search of their lost feast.
    My father pulled the trash bag’s drawstring shut and tied it firmly at the top.
    “You and your mom worry too much as it is,” he said. “I told you two that nothing would happen overnight, and see? Nothing did.”
    We took the bag to the garbage cans on the other side of the house. The bird’s dark silhouette showed through the white plastic as we walked, the body folding in on itself as the bag swung in time to my father’s quick paces.
    He pulled the hose out to the deck and washed away the ants and the blood, but a spot of grease would remain on the window for weeks, like skid marks after a car