The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Read Online Free PDF Page B

“It has to be strong, to beat the flu. And last us through these insane times. You stay here, I’m sure we’ve kept him waiting.”
    She disappeared into the house, the bright electric lights of her dress burning into my eyes.
    Another world. My life if I had been born in another time. Ruth was the same, but what else would have changed? I looked down at my hand, empty now but still bearing the pink pinch of my wedding ring. Married. I should have guessed Nathan might be at war. Of course I would not find him here, waiting for me in this world.
    I looked around and saw, all along the path of Patchin Place, leading right up to my aunt’s door, a peculiar thing: a trail of bread crumbs scattered on the stones. I felt the strange magic contraction of the worlds. I stared at those bread crumbs a long time before I began to follow them, one every few feet, back down Patchin Place toward the gate. It never occurred to me to look up, to see who might have left them, not until I reached out my hand to touch one, to be sure it was real, and a voice yanked me back: “Gretel!” I looked up and felt a black bolt in my brain.
    For there at the gates stood a fairy-tale man, removing his feathered cap. “I’ve been pacing the block. You took so long!” he shouted. There is the thing you hope for, and then, beyond it . . .
    As fox faced as ever, smiling, with skin and muscle and blood and all the spinning, churning apparatus of life: “Why did you take so long?”
    I can barely write the words. It was my brother, Felix.
    “Y OU CAN ’ T BE here,” I said. “You can’t.”
    He asked me, laughing, why not?
    I stared at him a long time before I answered, “Because you’re dead.”
    “S ORRY TO DISAPPOINT you, bubs. I’m still kicking.” A well-remembered laugh. Red hair cut close on the sides, those few freckles still haunting his skin, pale eyes flashing. “No,” I said, bracing myself against the wall. “I was there, I watched you, I held your hand.”
    That smile again. “Well, it’s Halloween! The dead walk the earth! Let’s go inside and have Ruth make us a drink.” A shout from inside, and the sound of shattered glass and laughter.
    But as he turned I gripped his arm, tight. His arm, solid and strong and alive. Not gaunt anymore, not thin or weak. He looked at me seriously now. I thought of the last time I had seen him, trying to swallow a spoon of poison, the wirework of tendons shifting in that arm. And here. Alive. How does the heart keep beating?
    “Greta?” he asked, his face focused on mine now. We stood, regarding each other, and I’m sure it was only face-to-face that you could recognize our similarity. The lashless eyes that hid so much, the full red lips that gave away everything, the coloring of skin and hair that were mere variations, as if a passing shadow had briefly fallen over me.
    “Felix, something’s happened,” I said firmly. “I’m not myself.”
    He stood quietly for a moment and I watched his smile tense in the streetlight. I held his hand tightly and would not let my eyes leave him. Tall in his lederhosen, neck bare to the night wind. Here was the old nightmare, arriving on schedule as it had every night, this time brought on not by my sleeping mind but by Dr. Cerletti’s magic wand.
    Some partygoers arrived, looked at us, and smiled; I smoothed my apron over my dirndl. I saw that, together, we were characters wandering far from their storybook.
    “I know you’ve been sad,” Felix was saying to me after they went inside. “I know it’s been hard with Nathan gone. I know that’s why you went to the doctor; I’m sure he didn’t expect these side effects.”
    I looked up and saw the moon had risen between the buildings, but then realized it was dangling from a window, on a fishing line, lit from within by a candle, and I saw in that window a pretty female Harlequin making it swing above the crowd. From behind her a man dressed as a black cat kissed the nape of her