Read Online Indigo by Gina Linko - Free Book Online Page B

doesn’t really seem the type, does he?”
    “I don’t know,” I answered.
    “He seems like he knows you. Acts like it. I thought you knew him.”
    “I thought you knew him.”
    “I’ll tell you what. I watched him stick up for that boy with Down syndrome, Jarvis, you know who I’m talking about?”
    “I do.”
    “Kids were being awful to him in the cafeteria. That one greasy kid, Pollack? He actually shoved pudding in Jarvis’s face. It was ugly. Rennick took that douchebag by the collar and made him apologize to Jarvis. It was something.”
    “Yeah?” I said, feeling something for Rennick now. Pride?
    “He eats with Jarvis once in a while now. He seems nice enough. I don’t like to believe the gossip.”
    “Me either,” I said, thinking of what kids probably said about me, what I knew they said about me. “Thanks.”
    “Corrine?”
    “What?”
    “No one, and I mean no one , thinks that the death of a ninety-year-old lady is your fault.”
    I swallowed hard. “Thanks,” I said, and hung up quickly before Mia-Joy could hear the tears in my voice.

I woke up and my hands were itchy in that way they sometimes got. They couldn’t sit still, tapping out invisible rhythms on my palms or air-playing some invisible fiddle. Normally, I could practice the nerves out of my hands. I would grab my violin, and within the first few minutes I would just settle in, become completely still, aside from the motion of my bow on the strings and the flutter of my fingers from one string to another. In those moments, I felt so bold and sure about my place in the world.
    I missed the violin. I missed feeling good about myself.
    I didn’t even get out of my pajamas, just clicked in the next tape from Mom. My hands needed something to do.
    This was a new lady. Room 232, the tape said. Lila Twopenny. Her voice shook, like older people’s sometimes do, but I could quickly tell that although Mrs. Twopenny was at the end of her days, she still had her mind. She spokearticulately about dancing in a ballet company, working as a bit actress in seven films. And as she got going, her voice trilled like a songbird.
    She talked about her husband, Dodge, and her children, all girls. One named Nancy who died as an infant. Two other girls, Clara and Ruth. Twins.
    I drew the delicate line of her nose, the upturn at the end, the high-arched eyebrows.
    “Ruth had the touch,” Mrs. Twopenny said. My ears perked up, as well as the hairs on the back of my neck.
    I held my pencil still, very still. And then I hit REWIND , listened to that line one more time. “Ruth had the touch.”
    “Yes?” This was my mom’s voice on the tape, interviewing. Soothing, a little bit sleepy.
    “She had what they said was a healer’s hand. That’s what we called it back then. We didn’t have any science to explain it away. Plus it made it easier for us all to believe in miracles like that.”
    Mom had perked up now. “What miracles, Lila? Can you tell me?”
    Mrs. Twopenny cleared her throat, and I heard objects scuffling around on a table—getting a drink of water maybe? “I reckon Ruth knew at a young age. It hit her around twelve, I would say. She would heal right quick when she got scratched climbing the old oak down by the pond. But the first time I really stopped and paid attention was when Clara broke her wrist falling off of Dodge’s old white mare, Lucky.I pressed them bones in my own hand, could darn near feel the separation of the big bone in her wrist.” Mrs. Twopenny paused here, and I could picture her showing my mother where on the arm it occurred. I realized I was clamping down on my own wrist, feeling the bones, guessing whether it was the one near the thumb or the pinky.
    “We lived in Georgia at the time and rode all the way into Macon to get that bone set by a doctor who knew what he was doing. At the time, I thought it just so sweet that Ruth held Clara’s hand, her wrist, with this serious-type expression on her face the whole