Read Online Blackwood by Gwenda Bond - Free Book Online

able to keep it."
      Miranda didn't ask for her mom's forgiveness, but she wanted it all the same. She eased down on the hillside next to the headstone and pulled up a yellow dandelion growing on the top of the grave. She shivered at the idea of her mom down there in the cold, damp dark.
      The tombstones on either side were close. There'd be no room for her dad's marker to go next to her mom's. Not that they – not that she – could afford one.
      She heard Phillips climbing down the hill to join her. He must have been stomping as loud as he could through the grass, to give her fair warning to compose herself. He wasn't turning out to be anything like she expected.
      She patted the ground beside her. He kicked at the grass, then sat down.
      "Phillips Rawling, meet Anna-Marie," Miranda said.
      Phillips didn't say anything.
      "She was great," Miranda said.
      "I'm sorry."
      "You say that a lot."
      "Sorry," he said, then, "Last one, promise."
      They stayed like that for a few minutes, not talking. Low, gray clouds passed overhead. The rolling hills of the cemetery grounds were dotted with purple-flowering bushes and a few trees. This was a peaceful place, even with the highway so nearby.
      "I can't believe he's gone," she said. "I still can't believe she is."
      "What was he like?"
      Miranda shrugged. Before her mom had gotten sick, he'd been different. Quieter, not so much of a crazy talker or drinker. Able to hold a steady job. Her mom could make him smile with such little effort. She read Miranda book after book, Narnia and Alice and the first couple of Spiderwicks, while he drank a beer or two, no more, content to listen.
      She plucked another dandelion, this one already transformed to a head of white cotton spokes. "He wasn't able to be himself anymore. Not after she died… Losing someone, sometimes it's too much. He felt it too much. He couldn't shut out the dark."
      She blew on the dandelion, scattering the white particles all over Phillips' shirt.
      "Thanks," he said, brushing them off. "You have a thing for coating me with random substances you want to tell me about?"
      Miranda laid back instead of answering, grass brushing her ears, and watched the clouds. "I don't know what's going to happen to me. I never really thought beyond taking care of him. Never made any plans." She thought. "Never figured there was any point making them."
      Phillips took a moment to respond. "That part is a good thing though. Right?"
      Miranda didn't answer. Was it?
      Phillips hauled himself up on his knees and reached over her. He touched the headstone. "Nice to meet you, AnnaMarie," he said.
      Miranda smiled up at him, without meaning to. This was a boy who lent himself to wondering about. Especially when he jolted up, a sudden uneasiness overtaking his whole body – she wondered why.
      He gave her a stricken look. "I don't think you should go home…" he hesitated. "You shouldn't be alone. Come to my house? You can meet my mom."
      She agreed, despite the fact he was wrong. She was alone. But she'd be that way for the rest of her life. There was no reason to rush home and embrace it.
     
    Phillips heard the words the moment after he touched her mother's headstone, the moment he looked down and found her smiling at him with the first genuine approval he'd seen cross her face. One voice, low and right in his ear, glass clear: Curse-bearer. Curse-bearer, she is a curse-born child.
      He couldn't figure out how to tell her.
      So, he didn't. Not yet, at least. He angled the car up the driveway toward the white two-story house that had originally belonged to his "gifted" grandmother. It was the kind of house that should feel comfortable to anybody – the sort of place pictured in Webster's next to the word home. Maybe that was why he felt nothing when he saw it. The normal white and normal wood and normal shape were too normal to be connected to him.
      "Like something