The Blue Line Read Online Free PDF Page A

and you recognized the hands that went with the eyes. They were Mommy’s hands.”
    Julia looked puzzled. Her grandmother paused, then whispered in a sympathetic tone: “I know,
mi amor
, it’s difficult for us to imagine. Your mother asked you for help without knowing it, and you saw what was going to happen through her eyes.”
    â€œMommy never asks me to help her,” Julia said sulkily.
    â€œShe did on the boat.”
    â€œBut Mommy didn’t call out to me on the boat!” Julia protested.
    â€œYour mother doesn’t know she called you because it comes from the heart, not the head. She didn’t think,
I’ll ask Julia to help me
, but when she was on the boat . . .”
    â€œShe was screaming and she was scratching Dad,” Julia interrupted, screwing her face up again, her little fingers outstretched.
    â€œYes, because she was very scared, and without thinking about it, her fear called out to you. Like when the telephone rings. And you answered.”
    â€œYou mean my inner eye answered?”
    â€œExactly. We can respond to other people’s feelings with our inner eye, you and me. That’s how it works. And most of the time, what we see hasn’t happened yet. It’ll happen the next day, or the day after, or even later.”
    â€œSo the telephone rings backward?”
    â€œSomething like that. The person who is calling us—our source—is experiencing what they see in the future.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThat’s just the way it is. When our inner eye answers, we set off on a journey through time. Our gift lets us go forward or backward while everyone else is caught in the present.”
    â€œIs that why it’s a gift?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy is it a good thing to travel through time?”
    â€œBecause we can help other people. Like you helped Anna.”
    â€œBut it was the twins who . . .”
    â€œWe’ve already talked about this, Julia. You’re the one who wanted Anna to learn to swim. You’re the one who took those containers on the boat. If you hadn’t done that,
mi amor
, I wouldn’t be able to tell you our secret, and your inner eye would wither by itself.”
    â€œI would have lost my gift?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI don’t want to lose it, Mama Fina.”

4.
    DECRYPTION

    Boreal Autumn
    2006
    S he stands at the top of the stairs, dumbfounded.
Come on
,
it’s perfectly natural to want to be alone in the bathroom
. All the same. He has never felt the need to lock himself in before.
    She lingers there for a moment, then retraces her steps slowly, needing to clear her thoughts, to put some distance between the two of them. Get too close and love suffocates. The other person’s presence becomes oppressive. So you learn to live without seeing each other, the way you stop noticing the pedestal table in the hallway.
    Julia comes back downstairs and sits in the living room. She has already laid the table and tossed a salad. Distracted, sitting on the sofa in the dark, she stares through the window at the corridor of shadows formed by the elms and maples.
    It is the same ritual after each journey. She has to be sittingdown, alone. When she was younger, she would wait for the dead of night and the privacy of silence. She needed to go back over her journey while the world was extinguished so she wouldn’t have to worry about being caught unawares. She is practiced enough now not to have to wait until midnight. She can blank out the world with her eyes wide open. Only the sequence of images already etched in her mind flashes before her eyes. The images come back to her, not like the blurred recollections of memory but with a clarity and precision that sight alone can produce. It’s like a store of pictures compressed between her eyes and her brain. Her pupils are contracted even though she’s in the dark because she is staring at a light