Things Invisible to See Read Online Free PDF Page B

ten years ago, holding on his bare wrist the great horned owl he had tamed to sit on his desk during lectures. Time had taken the owl but hardly touched Hal. His hair was still black and wavy, parted at the side, his features still fine, though he had put on a little weight.
    And there in soft focus and ivory satin, straight and simple as a Doric column, stood Nell the bride, between her sisters in their taffeta bridesmaid’s dresses. Vicky and Helen might have been twins in this picture: both tall and slender—none of them had changed very much—with those green eyes that Grandpa called “the Ericson eyes,” as one calls a disease or a star after the person who discovered it. Nell’s eyes were brown, like the eyes of some sad, clever animal, the last of its kind on the planet.
    The bridegroom was not present. The marriage had lasted six months, during which he managed not to appear in so much as a snapshot.
    Nell turned off the light and the photographs fell asleep, and the light over the second landing came on.
    “It’s me, Grandpa,” called Nell.
    “I knew it was you,” he called back. Grandpa Ericson was a small, pale man, nearly bald. In his white long johns, he looked like a friendly gnome. “I just wanted to light your way.”
    “Somebody’s following us,” whispered Davy.
    “Those pictures can’t see you,” said Nell. “I’ve told you a hundred times they’re not alive.”
    He’s looking right at me, whispered Clare to the Ancestress. Can he see us?
    He sees us, but he forgets what he has seen. We pass through his thoughts like water.
    The two spirits floated after Nell and Davy, arrived at the rooms on the third floor, took a turn to the left, and entered the attic. It was filled with suitcases, linens, outgrown clothes, broken toys, books, framed Sunday school certificates, and half a dozen electric fans. In an overstuffed chair in the middle of the room, Grandpa was reading the Bible by the light of a floor lamp with a purple silk shade. His bed, his bookshelf, on which stood his bust of Andrew Still, founder of osteopathy, and his little bureau made a room within the larger room. Helen had installed his beehive in the window (he’d brought it all the way from Corunna) with the hope of attracting bees, though this arrangement cut off most of the natural light.
    Grandpa? whispered Clare.
    He did not stir, though he had good hearing for a man of his age. She followed the Ancestress out of the attic. They passed the bathroom, where the tub squatted on cracked legs over Helen’s twelve sterling place settings, as if hatching them.
    They passed through the closed door ahead of them into the room that Nell and Davy had shared since the divorce. “The maid’s room,” Helen called it, from the days when you could get a maid for nothing but her room and board. Davy was curled up in one bed, sucking his thumb hard, clutching the knotted bath towel he took with him into the uncharted waters of sleep.
    On the opposite bed lay the clutter of Nell’s lesson plans. Nell sat hunched over her desk, her tweed jacket thrown over her shoulders. On the lapel gleamed a golden eagle, from whose mouth dangled a heart. The heart was inscribed, in a flourishing hand, “My Heart Is with the U.S.A.”
    Her fourth graders liked to open the heart and say hello to Davy gazing out at them from the left side. She’d replaced Davy’s father with a picture of Clark Gable till something better came along.
    From where Clare hovered over the dressing table, she could look down on Nell’s Madame Du Barry Beauty Box. The wooden carrying case lay open, and Madame Du Barry, silhouetted on the pale blue lid, was showing Clare her best side. Tins of rouge, eye shadow, bottles of perfume and lotion—all rose like the landscape of a toy city.
    Downstairs, Helen turned off the lights.
    Come , said the Ancestress. When the human lights go out, you can see your way by the light from the stars.
    Seeing that Hal was asleep, Helen