Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

shampoo had streamed into her eye, and she had kept a hand pressed to it for the rest of the day, quailing away from him whenever he walked past. Ever since then, he had been careful to roll the soap back from her face as it thickened, snapping it into the tub. When it came time to rinse, Caroline tilted her head back and shut her eyes so tightly that they shivered. Lewis braced her in the water, his palm against the smooth of her back.
    With a green cotton washcloth and a bar of flecked soap, he washed her chin and her jaw, her round dimpled elbows, the small of her back and the spine of her foot. His sleeves were drawn to his upper arms, his fingertips slowly crimping. His hands passed from station to station with careful diligent presses and strokes. Caroline paddled her duck through the water, then squeezed it and watched the air bubble from under its belly. He washed her arms and her legs and the soft small bowl of her stomach. He washed the hollows of her knees, soaped her neck and soaped her chest, and felt her heart, the size of a robin’s egg, pounding beneath him. Her heart, he thought, was driving her blood, and her blood was sustaining her cells, and her cells were investing her body with time. He washed her shoulder blades and the walls of her torso and imagined them expanding as she grew: her muscles would band and bundle, her bones flare open like the frame of an umbrella. He washed the shallow white shoulders that would take on curve and breadth, the waist that would taper, the hips that would round. The vents and breaches, valleys and slopes, that would become as rare and significant to some new husband as they now were to him. The face that, through the measure of its creases, would someday reveal by accident what it now revealed by intent: the feelings that were traveling through her life. He washed her fragile, dissilient, pink-fingered hands. The hands that would unfold and color with age. The hands that would learn how to catch a ball and knot a shoelace, how to hold a pencil and unlock a door, how to drive a car, how to wave farewell, how to shake hello. The hands that would learn how to touch another person, how to carry a child, and on some far day how to die.
    The water was lapping against the wall of the tub. Lewis found himself gazing into the twitch of his reflection: his lips and eyes were tense with thought beside a reef of dissipating bubbles. Caroline watched for a moment, then splashed him with a palm of cupped water. When Lewis looked at her through the tiny wet globes that dotted his glasses, she laughed, and he felt some weary thing inside of him ascend and disperse, like fog lifting from a bay. He polished his glasses and his mouth curled into a smile.
    When he pulled the bath plug, Caroline started, surprised, as she often was, by the sudden deep gurgle and surge. He welcomed her into the wings of a towel as the water serpent-whirled down the drain.
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    Number of days we spent together: 144. Number of days we spent apart (supposing that Archbishop James Usher of Meath, who calculated the date of the Creation at 23 October 4004 B.C., was correct): 2,195,195. Number of days since I last saw her: 43. Number of days since I began writing this story: 3. Number of days in her life thus far: 613. Number of days in mine thus far: 12,418; projected: 12,419. Number of times we walked to the park: 102. Number of swings on the swing set there: 3; strap swings: 2; bucket swings: 1. Number of times she rode the bucket swing: 77; the strap swing: 1. Number of times she rode the strap swing and fell: 1. Number of times I pushed her on the bucket swing, average per session: 22; total: 1,694. Number of puzzles we constructed: 194. Number of towers we assembled from large cardboard blocks: 112; demolished: 111. Number of stories I told: 58. Number of diapers I changed: 517. Number of lullabies I sang: 64. Number of days I watched, while Caroline napped, Caroline: 74; the television: 23; the sky: 7.