The Cry of the Owl Read Online Free PDF Page B

liked—I liked to watch you in the kitchen. Cooking. Hanging curtains. I’m not trying to explain. I can’t. But I don’t want you to be afraid. I’m not a criminal. I was lonely and depressed and I watched a girl in a kitchen. Do you see?” In her silence, he felt she didn’t see, couldn’t. And who could? His teeth chattered. His body felt cool from sweat. “I don’t expect you to understand that. I don’t expect you to excuse it. I simply want to try to explain and I can’t. I’m sure I can’t, because I don’t know the real reason myself. Not the real reason.” He moistened his cold lips. The girl would scorn him now. He could never think of her again without also thinking of the fact she knew him and despised him. “Perhaps you should go in. It’s so cold.”
    “It’s snowing,” said the girl in a surprised tone.
    Robert turned his head quickly toward the driveway, saw that little flakes were coming down, then a smile pulled at his mouth. The snowseemed absurd, and to mention it now, more absurd. “Good night, Miss Thierolf. Goodbye.”
    “Wait.”
    He turned around.
    She was standing facing him, her hand no longer on the doorknob. “If you’re depressed—I don’t think you should be more depressed because of—because I—”
    He understood. “Thank you.”
    “Depressions can be awful. They’re like a disease. They can make people go out of their minds.”
    He didn’t know what to say to that.
    “I hope you don’t get too depressed,” she added.
    “I hope you’re never depressed,” he said as if he were making a wish. An unnecessary wish, he thought.
    “Oh, I have been. Three years ago. But not lately, thank goodness.”
    The slow, emphatic way she said the last words made him feel less tense. She had said them in a tone she might have used to someone she had known a long while. He did not want to leave her.
    “Would you like to come in?” she asked. She opened the door, went in, and held the door for him.
    He went toward her, too stunned for the moment to do anything else. He walked into the kitchen.
    She took off her coat and the white muffler and hung them in a small closet by the door, glancing at him over her shoulder as if she were still a bit afraid.
    He was standing in the middle of the floor.
    “I just thought it was silly, if we were talking, to stand out in the cold,” she said.
    He nodded. “Thank you.”
    “Do you want to take off your coat? Would you like some coffee? I just made this.”
    He took off his overcoat, folded it inside out, and laid it across the back of a straight chair by the door. “Thank you very much, but I’ve stopped drinking coffee. It’s apt to keep me awake.” He stared at her in an unbelieving way, at her soft hair so close to him now, only six feet away, at her gray eyes—they had flecks of blue in them. Here, so near he could touch them, were the white curtains he had seen her put up, the oven door he had seen her so often bend to open. And something else struck him: his pleasure or satisfaction in seeing her more closely now was no greater than when he had looked at her through the window, and he foresaw that getting to know her even slightly would be to diminish her and what she stood for to him—happiness and calmness and the absence of any kind of strain.
    She was heating the glass percolator of coffee. As she watched it, she turned her head to look at him two or three times. “I suppose you think I’m insane, asking you to come in,” she said, “but after a couple of minutes, I wasn’t afraid of you at all. Are you from around here?”
    “I’m from New York.”
    “Really? I’m from Scranton. I’ve only been up here four months.” She poured a cup of coffee.
    And what brought you, he started to say. But he didn’t even care to know. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “May I?”
    “Oh, of cour-rse.” She shook her head at his offer of a cigarette. “Do you have a job in Langley?”
    “Yes. I work at Langley