We Are Pirates: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

shocking is what it is.”
    “Maybe she was trying to steal another magazine,” he said weakly, and Marina just looked at him until he thought of something else. “Why do you have it? How did you get it?”
    “ Gwen stole it,” Marina said.
    “But what’s it doing here?”
    “I paid for it,” Marina said.
    “Why did you want it?”
    Marina licked the last of the icing off the wrapper of the cupcake and then looked wildly at Phil Needle’s. “I can’t believe I ate that,” she said. “I can’t believe you brought those damn things home.” Marina slid down the couch and grasped her belly with both hands through her shirt. “I wanted to show it to you.”
    “You didn’t have to show it to me,” Phil Needle said irritably. “I know what naked schoolgirls look like.” He heard himself and grinned over at Marina in her ugly pose on the couch. She agreed to laugh, and they both shrugged to indicate that something was over, but Phil Needle could not for the life of him think of what it was.
    “Do you really think this is an isolated case?” his wife asked him.
    Phil Needle looked out to sea but was distracted by his own face in a photograph sitting on top of the piano, among the ones of his ravenous wife and the little thief they’d conceived. He could not hear if Gwen was still crying down the hall. “She seems isolated,” he said finally, and got up without his cupcake or wife. He walked through the kitchen and passed the office and the room where Marina did her painting and paused for a moment at the door to the bathroom. He walked very quietly on the carpet, but he could not hear anything when he got there. He could open the door, or knock on it, and in the small room try to hug her and make her feel better. She would be crying into those dumb towels. He could tuck her hair, again, behind her ears. But he had to decide on a punishment. She would be punished, and, or, also, maybe, she hated him. So Phil Needle walked away and stood for a minute in the office doorway looking at the projection of the fake tree rattling against the fake window and the desk with the last of the invitations. On the other side of the wall, Gwen was furious, with furious words on her hands, although of course Phil Needle did not know, and could not have known, the terrors on the horizon, the bloodshed and the ravaged citizens. And yet at that moment he might not have been surprised. He felt unready. He had raced home to face the alarums of trouble, stopping only for cupcakes, and then had not been able to make himself useful. He’d said nothing. He’d ruined his wife’s diet. He was in a room by himself, sinking into his old couch to stare at a window that wasn’t even there. He was a landlubber, with no sea legs even in his own house, and his daughter, his baby, was storming in the next room, unhinged, unanchored and grounded.

Chapter 2
    Don’t start with Gwen. She lay grounded and alone in bed looking up. In her old room in the better house, there were stars on the ceiling. They weren’t real stars, of course, and they didn’t even look like real stars, but they were stand-ins, a reminder that over the roof was the sky, full of airplanes and other planets. Her new ceiling was white and reminded her of nothing. In a few minutes everyone would start with her, but right now it was 5:51 A .M. She was supposed to get up at 5:45, but the clock radio her father had bought for her, at this point in her life, ran the numbers too quickly when you were setting it. Her father had said it was her responsibility to get herself up on time, though Gwen could not see how that could be true. It wasn’t her responsibility. It was everyone else who wanted her to go to every single place she went.
    They were playing Tortuga. “You Ain’t Hittin’.” This was one of the few things she liked. She held an imaginary cigarette to her lips and blew white smoke at the ceiling. Her room was still ransacked, with drawers gaping open and empty