Torn Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

in his socks to the next landing. Which door? He tried one: a child’s bedroom with Superman wallpaper. He found the bathroom on his second try. He went in and locked the door. The room was big with bright lights and giant mirrors, not like a Belfast bathroom at all. He stared at the oddly-shaped elliptical pink sink, the toilet bowl with its padded seat, and the unfamiliar bottles of shampoo and jars of God-knows-what. He ran the bath and stripped off his clothes. He had never seen himself so naked and illuminated. He climbed into the pink tub and soaked himself for half an hour. He dried himself on the biggest towel he had ever seen, wrapped it around himself, grabbed his clothes and hurried back upstairs to his room, where he put on the Jockey shorts and the loose white sweatshirt and thick work socks he found neatly folded on the top of his chest of drawers. His Aunt Kate must have left them for him while he was in the bathroom. He stepped into his old jeans.
    He went downstairs and stood on the bottom step.
    His aunt and uncle were in the kitchen, Kate working around the stove, Matthew sitting in a rattan easy-chair, reading a book. The room was big and bright, a combined kitchen-family room, with a round wooden table and six chairs. Beside his uncle’s rattan chair was a small varnished table, its top crowded with a black telephone, a mug full of pens and pencils and several magazines and books, and its lower shelf filled with two thick phone books, one on top of the other. The walls were papered in the same kind of paper as in Declan’s room—yellow and white.
    Declan looked to the right. Opposite the kitchen there was a living room, also big—every room in this house was big. His aunt and uncle had not yet seen him. Declan walked into the living room. There was a wide stone fireplace flanked by two high book-shelves full of books and binders; an upright piano was set against the wall; there was a TV, a long brown sofa, old and worn, two matching chairs, two unmatched chairs—one a high-backed dark red velvet wing chair and the other a black-painted wooden rocker—and cushions of many shapes and colors. On the floor there was an Indian carpet. A long coffee table made of what looked to Declan like a giant tree knot which had been polished and varnished sat in front of the sofa. There were many paintings on the walls of trees and mountains, beach and sky, rocks and driftwood, ocean storms, all painted in a—what was it called, impressionistic?— style.
    In Belfast, the first things you noticed in a Catholic home, thought Declan, were the pictures of the Pope and Our Lady of Perpetual Succor and the Sacred Heart on the walls; they leaped out at you. But here it was different. His uncle and aunt had the usual Pope in the kitchen and Sacred Heart in the living room, but perhaps because of the sheer size of the rooms, they were hardly noticeable. There were no holy pictures in his room now that he thought of it, only seascape paintings like the ones in the living room.
    A door from the living room led out onto a front porch facing the ocean. The porch was wide and had a couple of old couches. Some of the couch springs had burst their way through the worn fabric.
    Declan left the living room, walked pastthe stairs, and stood silently in the kitchen doorway. Kate pulled out a chair. “Ah, you’re up. Sit yourself down, Declan, and I’ll make you some Canadian pancakes. Ana and Thomas are not yet up. Is it tea you’d want, or coffee? We’ve become the great breakfast coffee drinkers so we have . . . “
    As she chattered on, she pulled gently at the neck and shoulders of Declan’s sweatshirt the way his mother used to. She could not stand to see folds and creases in clothes that should be smooth, he remembered.
    â€œ . . . be sure to buy you some decent clothes tomorrow when the store is open, and shoes, the Lord knows you need shoes . . . “ He leaned away