The Cousins Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked like Stan, and Earlene didn’t like either of them. She preferred Taylor, who looked like her. Olivia suspected there were other things none of them knew about. Earlene drank too much, and she hit. What the family heard was the tip of the iceberg: perhaps they would never know the rest.
    One summer evening, when Grady was about eight and Olivia was home from college, while the family was in the living room watching TV, Olivia was taken by an unexpected depression smashing through her like a black rock. She went to her bedroom and sat on the floor, in the corner, behind the desk, her arms around her knees, thinking about Grady. Then he was beside her. He had a way of creeping around the house without your even knowing until he was there. He crouched beside her, his small body seeking her warmth, and she put her arm around him. Then she started to cry.
There is abuse going on here
, she thought,
and there’s nothing I can do about it
. Poor little Grady—what would become of him?
    It was the winter when she was seven that Taylor got meningitis. She had a fever so high she almost died, and when she came back to Mandelay that summer the children had been warned she would be different. She was deaf.
    To the family it was The Tragedy, but to Earlene it was The Cross I Have to Bear. She acted as if it was she and not Taylor who was inconvenienced by this lonely world of silence. Taylor had started going to a public school for the deaf, to keep her speech and learn to lip-read. She also had to learn to sign so she could communicate with the deaf community, of which she would now be a part. Earlene, Stan and Grady had to learn to sign too, so they could speak to her.
    Grady and Taylor swung from tree to tree like Tarzan, they collected cardboard cartons and lashed them together, the air in the boxes acting as an air bag, and jumped into them from the top of the house. Taylor screamed when she fell through the air, a pure, high scream from the most secret part of her being, and so did he.
    And then it was the early seventies. Grady and Taylor were fourteen and twelve. Their special bond, which had strengthened through the years, was enhanced by their discovery that their rapid fingers could make fun of people in public and no one else would know. Their grandfather had died, and Earlene had stopped accompanying them on their summer visits to their doting grandmother; she’d had, she said, as much of that boring place as she could take. This, of course, delighted them.
    Olivia had gone through her first divorce. She wondered when Stan would finally get around to his, even though he was living with Earlene again. His prophecy about his career had come true: he was allowed to be very versatile in the kinds of stunts he performed. Olivia didn’t like action movies, but she went to all of his and tried to figure out which one he was. Afterward she would sit through the list of credits and feel proud when she saw his name.
    When he came for his brief visits to Mandelay he still liked to shock the family with macho stories about carousing with the boys. He looked like a weathered old cowboy now, more dashing than ever. He would recount the times he had narrowly escaped death at work, and list his injuries. There were quite a lot of them—he was almost forty.
    Late one rainy winter night, his wife and children asleep in the house, Stan got on one of his motorcycles and rode up Mulholland Drive, a dangerous, winding road with a cliff on one side and a sheer drop on the other. It was actually four in the morning, and he took this trip for no reason anyone knew of, or certainly not one he wished to divulge. They knew he had not been sleeping well, and that he often stayed up all night alone watching television, but he had never gone out for a nocturnal ride before, especially in the rain.
    Olivia remembered the way she had asked him questions when she was growing up. “When you take a motorcycle off a mountain, how come you don’t