Read Online 999 by Al Sarrantonio - Free Book Online

wished to comfort; at other times it seemed to be herself she wished to comfort; sometimes she was angry at Father, and sometimes at Father’s enemies; sometimes, for no reason we could comprehend, she was angry at us. Especially Rosalind, who at fourteen and a half, a lanky, long-limbed girl with frowning eyes, had a stubborn way of seeming to be thinking for herself, furrowing her brow and sucking at her lips, brooding silent in that space where even a mother can’t follow. So if Rosalind stiffened in Mother’s arms, nearly as tall as Mother now, Mother might lean back to sure into her face, gripping Rosalind’s shoulders with red-gleaming talon-sharp fingernails and pushing Rosalind from her— What’s wrong with you? Why are you looking at me like that? How dare you look at me, your mother—like that!
    Mother’s beautiful face like a mask. A porcelain-cosmetic mask. A mask that might shatter suddenly, like glass, if her blood beat too furiously in her veins.
    So Rosalind shrank from her and crept away to hide in a corner of Cross Hill. Thinking never never never would she grow up to be so beautiful and so angry a woman.
    But it was Father, so changed, who most frightened us. Where once Judge Roderick Matheson had been impeccably groomed, never allowing himself to be glimpsed in other than fresh-laundered clothes, his hair neatly combed, now he often wore rumpled clothes, ran his hands violently through his hair, shaved in such a way (we speculated) as to leave his skin pained, reddened; he was Father, still, and his face was Father’s much-photographed face, yet, it almost seemed, something older, rougher, ravaged sought to push its way through. His eyes, liquidy-brown, usually warm and ingratiating, had a dull glassy look; his mouth twisted as if he were arguing with himself.
    Father was a hurt, innocent man. A man betrayed, hounded and persecuted by his enemies and by the “ravenous, insatiable, unconscionable media"—the reason we hadn’t been allowed to read newspapers or watch TV. Father was an angry man and, sometimes, we had to admit, a dangerous man. For, like Mother, he swung between moods: now distressed, now furious; now optimistic, now enervated; now grieving for his family, now grieving for himself and his blighted career; now youthful, vigorous, now an aging, embittered man.
    In his speech-voice, at the dinner table, he might declaim, as if speaking to others, not just us, Dear wife, dear children! Bear with me! We will return one day soon to our rightful lives. I will redeem the name of Matheson, I will redeem us all—that is my vow. I will seal it with—my blood .
    Face flushed with wine, eyes prankishly narrowed, Father might take up his fork and, before Mother could prevent him, stab it into the back of his hand as if stabbing a small hairless creature that had unaccountably crawled up beside his plate.
    We flinched, but dared not cry out. What was required from us was a murmur— Yes, yes Father . For crying at such times generally displeased Father for its suggestion that, though we were children quickly murmured Yes, yes Father we did not truly believe our own words.
    “It’s like he died after all, isn’t it? In jail. His eyes …”
    It was after one of Father’s strange elated outbursts at the dinner table that Stephen uttered this remark in a drawling voice unlike his normal voice; Stephen whose life had been, until Father’s arrest, soccer, football, basketball, sports video games and the intense, rapidly shifting friendships of boy and girl classmates at his school; Stephen, handsome as Roderick Matheson had been as a boy, with his father’s broad face and sharply defined cheekbones.
    Graeme shrugged and walked away.
    Rosalind said something quick and hurtful to Stephen, called him an ignorant asshole, and walked away.
    Lying then awake and miserable most of the night. Pressing her damp face into her pillow. Thinking Can eyes die? A man’s eyes—die? And the rest of the man