The Cousins Read Online Free PDF

get killed?”
    “I leave it as fast as possible,” he had said, and grinned at her.
    This time he didn’t leave it.
    Because he was a stuntman the story was of more than passing interest, and was in the newspapers. The police investigated the accident and ruled it a suicide. The rain was heavy enough to wash away any skid marks, so no one ever really knew. He had not left a note. But motorcycles had been his specialty and he was too good to go off a mountain by mistake; and if he had, he would have jumped away. Grady always believed it was suicide. Taylor insisted it was an accident. The family told his mother it was an accident so she could live with it as best she could.
    Earlene decided Grady had to be sent away to an all-boys’ boarding school so he wouldn’t grow up in a house of women. It was her opinion, one that was common at the time, that putting the teenage boy into a cloistered male world would keep him from becoming gay. Julia agreed, and paid for it. Then Earlene took in a roommate—a woman friend of hers who liked to drink as much as she did—to keep her company, and gave her Grady’s room. From then on when Grady came home for holidays, he had to sleep on the living room couch.
    Taylor was devastated at the separation from her brother right after her father’s death, and it was then she began to compose her face into a little mask. She was relieved, in a way, that Grady would escape the abuse at home, at least for a time, and that she didn’t have to watch it anymore, but now she was in that house all alone. At first they wrote to each other, in a kind of code they had invented. Grady was apparently very happy away at school. But Earlene was jealous because her son wrote to his sister far more often than he deigned to write to his mother, and after Earlene went on one of her rampages looking for the letters Taylor had gotten from Grady, Taylor destroyed them to keep her secrets. Then Earlene stopped giving Taylor the pocket money with which she had bought envelopes and stamps, and told her she should spend her spare time doing her homework instead. Taylor got all A’s, had friends, became obedient and quiet, and no one but Grady ever knew what she was thinking again.
    As soon as Grady graduated from the fancy boarding school he became a stuntman like his father. It was easier for him to break in than it had been for Stan, because Stan had paved the way. Taylor went to a college for the deaf and then became a yoga teacher. Ever since her father’s “accident” she had stopped doing anything daring. The day after she graduated from college she married Tim, an artisan who made beautiful furniture, whom she had met at a party in senior year. Tim could sign because his parents were deaf, although he himself could hear perfectly.
    Earlene moved to San Diego with a different woman friend. For some strange reason, after Earlene moved away, Taylor and Tim bought a house in Topanga Canyon right near where she and Grady had so many painful childhood memories, and Grady bought one there, too.
    For a long time afterward, whenever Olivia got together with her cousin Jenny they talked about Stan’s death and tried to figure it out. No one else liked to mention it. What was done was done. When Jenny named her firstborn Sam, Olivia asked her if the S was for Stan, to keep his memory in the traditional Jewish way, even though Stan had left his religion and had probably committed suicide. Jenny seemed surprised. She said no, she just liked the name.
    He was, after all, just a cousin. It was up to his kids to keep up the tradition; but Grady hadn’t married and Taylor had chosen to be childless.
    It would be twenty years now since Stan went off Mulholland Drive, but sometimes Olivia still woke up thinking about it.

3
    S PRING HAD MADE its brief appearance and then disappeared, the way it always did in New York, and now summer was going. Olivia wondered why every year time seemed to go a little faster. Her friends