You Remind Me of Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

him. She tilted her head and pressed her lips against his. He felt her tongue move softly, a little flick along the line of his mouth, and he jerked with surprise. Her hands held his cheeks, and her lips moved against his for a moment before she released him.
    “There,” she said. “Now you’ll remember me.”
    ——
    It was about 7:30 in the morning, Saturday, as he walked home, and he could still taste the dark, smoky pressure of her tongue as he hurried through the underpass with its walls of wet, dripping, rust-stained cement, past the little abandoned grocery store with its windows pasted over with newspaper, past the grade school, toward the rows of small houses that made up the street he lived on. As he walked down Deadwood Avenue, a dog barked at him from behind a fence, and a pickup carrying a thin, ancient man in a cowboy hat pulled slowly by on the street. It had been a dry spring, and the yards of the houses were yellow-green, the tired-looking color of the sod that covered the prairie hills on the outskirts of town. St. Bonaventure was little more than a cluster of houses and stores in the middle of a dry plain of wheat fields, asphalt roads, bare, rocky hills. He didn’t think of this often, but he was aware of it at that moment—the great expanse of the world beyond the borders, the woman, the mother he’d once been inside of, out there somewhere. His stomach felt fluttery, and he felt infected by the sadness that Chrissy had given to him with her long, slow look, with the weight of her mouth against his. His heart was still light and quick and hollow in its beating.
    Here was his house. Curtains drawn. The screen door with its aluminum curlicue molding.
    Inside, his father was asleep on the couch. His parents had been fighting again, and his dad was huddled there under an afghan, curled up, one pale bare foot uncovered, his face severe and drawn and pressed against the arm of the couch, frowning in his dreams. His hair stood up in stiff tufts, and his eyes shifted underneath their lids as Troy tucked the blanket over his exposed foot.
    He loved his father. That was what he should have told Chrissy. He loved his mother, who was still asleep in the bedroom. He loved Bruce and Michelle and Ray, all his people, his family. He didn’t want another life.

3
    January 6, 1966
    At the home for unwed mothers, Nora still holds out hope that the baby will stop growing, that it will die. Around her, the stomachs of the girls are swelling, becoming taut, and their souls are deflating. There is a smell of old fruit and eucalyptus, there is a large box television playing a game show, “What’s My Line,” a dozen expressionless girls staring at the screen, some of them smoking cigarettes or biting on their nails or clasping their hands in their laps. One of them is knitting. Knitting. This girl’s hands move steadily and the skein of blanket or sweater or shawl is slowly, line by line, becoming a cloth that shrouds the lump of her belly. Nora wants to kill this girl, whose face is as blank as a rabbit’s. Or she wants to kill the happy celebrities that the girl is watching as they tell their jokes. Or she wants to kill herself.
    She moves along the hallway, walking, creeping, one hand cupped beneath her belly, the other on the wall. She isn’t even showing yet, but still she holds her stomach uncertainly. There is a tickling feeling, like a spider spinning a web inside her, maybe she’s only imagining it. The walls are cold, warty plaster, painted smooth, and she runs her hands across them as if they are braille, supporting herself as she goes. Doors lined up. She suspects that the rooms are all identical, though she hasn’t seen anyone else’s. She knows: a single bed, a night table with a lamp and a Bible, a desk with empty drawers, a closet with identical cheap poly-cotton maternity smocks on hangers, a window with a bare, snowy tree in the center of it.
    It is not quite a prison, not quite a hospital. A