Read Online Mockingbird by Sean Stewart - Free Book Online Page B

couple I judged to be transplanted Canadians did better. But the class of the field was one young woman who had clearly trained as a figure skater. While the rest of them milled and slipped and tottered their way about, clinging to the boards or creeping gingerly along, she swept around the rink backwards, her head cocked over one shoulder to see where she was going, controlled and wholly beautiful. The hair she wore in a short swing was the same beautiful auburn shade Momma used to get out of the Clairol box. She was going terrifically fast, but her strides were long and smooth, nearly motionless, so that she seemed to glide swiftly and effortlessly among the other skaters, soaring like a gull among pigeons.
    (“You will never be as pretty as your sister.” We’re at Candy’s junior high-school graduation. Momma has leaned over and whispered it to me, so softly that Daddy, on the other side of her, can’t hear. “It’s not just the dress and the smile,” she whispers. “She is pretty and you are plain.” I sit stiffly in my chair. “O baby,” she whispers.
    Her breath is warm against my neck. I can smell her hair-spray. “Oh, baby, and I’m just so sorry.” Something wet and hot touches my neck. It’s one of her tears. I know the way they feel, oh yes.)
    â€œCandy.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI got lost for a minute,” I said carefully. “In my head.” The whiteness was back, the whiteness that had eaten my thoughts away just before the Widow mounted me the day we buried Momma. “Candy. Candy, help me.”
    â€œOh shit, Toni, what can I do?”
    A cold whiteness, like the ice below.
    The light in the Galleria’s atrium dimmed, as if it were a movie theatre and the show was starting. Silence fell over the two Mexican women who had been bantering at the table next to us. Down below, the skaters faltered and looked up, all except for the young woman with auburn hair. The light failed and darkness came on, but still she soared and circled, gathering speed, weaving between the boys cluttering the ice and their parents and the teenaged girls and the elderly couple who stood still, looking up at the darkening sky as if suddenly afraid. A silence stretched out, carved by her skates cutting into the ice. She gathered herself and then she leapt, high, high in the air, arms and legs spinning, and her auburn hair.
    I didn’t see her come down. Blindness washed through me, and I smelled peaches.
    â€œSugar!” I tried to push back my chair, tried to stand up and keep moving, tried to look away from the ice and the skaters circling, circling. My right foot froze to the carpet, ice racing up it from the rink far below. I wrenched it up, pulling with both hands. People were staring but I didn’t care. All I cared about was living, living, not letting the goddess come for me, not letting her blot me out.
    The smell of peaches suddenly redoubled and my head spun with it. Heat, flies, fruit and liquor. Secrets. Sex. “No,” I whispered.
    It didn’t save me.
    d
    â€œToni? Toni—come sit out here with me for a minute. I’m going to tell you a story.” I am eighteen. It’s later on the night of Candy’s junior-high graduation. I am still angry, so angry at what Momma said to me, whispering that Candy was pretty and I was plain.
    Momma is sitting in the garden with her back to the French doors, but somehow she has sensed me tiptoeing barefoot across the kitchen tiles. I could pretend not to hear her, but I don’t. I have come to dread Momma’s stories, but living in this family has made me honest. Bitterly, resentfully honest. I scorn to lie.
    Momma has the most beautiful voice. Sometimes she claims to have been an actress in her younger days. I can’t prove that, but no one who hears her speak can deny the power of her voice; not clear at all, but worn soft with smoking and tears and bourbon,