What's Left of Her Read Online Free PDF

compounds the belief that he does not want to know what happens in their bedroom. Then his father speaks.
    “Oh, God, forgive me, Evie. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Great animal sounds pouring out like a wounded bear. “I’d never hurt you. Never. Christ, I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me, Evie, forgive me.”
    Over and over, the begging keeps on; Rupe’s tormented voice, ragged with misery and self-recrimination, pleads for absolution. Evie does not reply and it is this silence that marks the beginning of what Quinn will later think of as “the end.”
    Quinn sneaks down the stairs and works his way out the back door, mindless of the dog and cat curled into one another, the perfect portrait he wanted to sketch minutes ago. He slumps against an oak tree, picking blades of grass and splitting them between his fingers, thinking of his mother, his father, and how he will have to face them at dinner, have to pretend he knows nothing, pretend normal, even if the side of his mother’s face is red and welted. Is it the left side? Or right, just below the mole? Quinn plays the sound over and over in his head, imagining the second Rupe’s hand connects to Evie’s soft skin, imagining the shock on his father’s face, the pain on his mother’s and then reverse, his father in pain, his mother shocked. Maybe she fell back a step, two steps, stumbled, though he heard no other sound, but maybe she had. Maybe there will be a bruise, bright blue and purple, seeping and spreading, shouting to the world that Rupe Burnes hit his wife.
    But when she finally calls him to dinner, there is nothing more remarkable than a faint pink on her cheekbone—left side, which Quinn should have figured with his father being right-handed and all. It takes a good ten minutes before Quinn works up the nerve to look at either of his parents. He picks at the fried chicken leg on his plate, gnaws the meat on the bone. Annalise keeps the conversation going with her ridiculous chatter about Mrs. Pole’s cat, Sophie, who ended up in Mr. Landini’s garden and got tangled in his tomato cages, somehow. That story leads into the next one about Mrs. Swedenjim who hung her underwear, big white ones, on the clothesline in her backyard . Giggle, giggle.
    No one else laughs. Rupe clears his throat, Evie says nothing and Quinn forces himself to look at them. Evie is chewing, mouth moving slowly up and down, a mindless rhythm, eyes fixed on her glass of water. The mark on her left cheek is faint, a splotch that could be attributed to a skin irritation, sleeping on a scratchy surface, even putting her makeup on wrong. Any one of these if you didn’t know the truth.
    Rupe is the one who looks like he’s been beaten up. His head is bent like a dog that’s been kicked in the gut and left on the side of the road, eyes sunk in their sockets, hair sticking out, big shoulders slumped, jaw slack. Most nights, he is the one who laughs and teases Annalise as she blabs about one thing or another, but not tonight. Rupe picks at a lone chicken thigh, which in itself would attest to a problem since he usually piles three or four on his plate.
    If only Quinn hadn’t heard, then he too could be lost in his own world, chomping down chicken and rice, his brain already past dinner, past the kitchen and the clatter of dishes and the silence of his parents, and out in the backyard, setting up canvas and paints as he waits for the sunset. If he hadn’t heard, he would be thinking of the heat of summer on his hands, beating into his fingers as he strokes the canvas with brilliant oranges and yellows, reddish pinks and magentas. He has a gift, his mother says, a natural gift, of color and sensation, a melding of the two that enables him to translate what he sees and feels onto canvas.
    Perception, she calls it. He has perception, a sense of knowing before it happens, a feel that it will happen even before he knows what “it” is.
    A gift that right now feels like a