Read Online Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer - Free Book Online Page B

across the wide expanse of grass and pulledup a chair next to her. She guessed that he must have been close to thirty-five then, and she remembered that he was as thin and graceful as a praying mantis, and that he wore Italian leather sandals with black ankle socks.
    Although the children’s wing was separate from the rest of the hospital, the front lawn was common ground, and that day she had been placed on one of the mildewed canvas lawn chairs, a white oval of sun block centered on her nose, the work of a thoughtful nurse’s aide. This was recreation hour, and all of the children sat unmoving on the lawn, as if in an extended game of Statues. Every day most of them drank little fluted cups of apple juice cloudy with Thorazine, and all their eyes were bright, their pupils huge. The taste of the apple juice stayed with her for years, “hitting me in the way that an old knee injury might ache during rainy season. I taste it at the back of my throat, the thick, phlegmy sweetness of it, and I also remember the nurse’s encouraging smile and nod as I swallowed it all.”
    Being sedated, it turned out, did not loosen the roaring from her. All it did was make her less able to focus on it. Lucy still heard the roaring full-volume each day, the intangible sound of cars on a freeway, but she only had the energy to acknowledge its presence, and she became slowly used to it.
    “Well,” the man said, lowering himself carefully onto the chair as if into steaming bathwater, “you seem to be enjoying the sun.” He took a pack of Kents from his shirt pocket and tapped out a single cigarette. “Smoke?” he asked, then laughed. “No, I guess you don’t.” He lit the cigarette with a narrow silver lighter and took several deep drags. Then he leaned backin his chair, closing his eyes. After a while he said, “I’m Reuben Levin. You’re the one who doesn’t speak, aren’t you?” He laughed once more, gently. “That’s like those horrible puzzles that ask you to find out which man is the liar. ‘A’ says he’s not the liar, ‘B’ says ‘A’ is lying, et cetera. You have to figure out which man it is. So I guess if you don’t answer me it’s either because you just don’t want to or because you really are the one who won’t speak. I heard a few nurses talking about you, if it really is you.”
    He finished his cigarette, dropping the stub lightly on the grass. “It’s supposed to grow into a cigarette tree now,” he said, “like in that song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ We’ll have to come back and check in a couple of years.” He stood up suddenly, and she could see that his face had already begun to flush with sun. “It’s much too hot out here,” he said. “I’m going in.” He leaned over then and kissed her high on her forehead, right where the middle part scalloped down into a widow’s peak. “There,” he said in a low voice. “It’s been good talking with you.”
    The next time Lucy saw him she was with her parents in the solarium. The room’s name was misleading; light came in modestly there, filtered through tinted glass. Everything was cool blue, like the diving section of a heavily chlorinated swimming pool. Her parents had brought along things she used to love to eat: long red licorice whips and packets of cocoa mix with tiny marshmallows that bloat when you pour in boiling water. “Look who’s over there,” her father said, poking her mother. He named an actor who had done a lot of specials for public television.
    Her mother strained to see across the room, and after a moment she nodded. “Yes, I think you’re right,” she said. “I heard somewhere that he had a nervous breakdown, but I had no idea he was here.” The actor was talking and laughing with visitors, but they did not interest Lucy. A few feet away, though, sat Levin, the man from the lawn, flanked by a woman and a small boy. The woman and the boy were doing all the talking, “their hands flying up around their