Read Online Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot - Free Book Online Page B

doesn’t somebody tell them what’s wrong? There might be hope, and no great problem, and nobody’s telling them that, either. She starts to stand, to look around, to demand something from someone. She feels Tom’s hand on her arm and looks down. “Lila,” he says. “Lila, please.”
    Those words. She is so very weary of hearing them on important occasions. There was a time, early on, when she wanted her and Tom to be together, but “Lila, please,” he said.
    She said, “Other people do it all the time.”
    â€œLila, please, we can’t talk about this. I know they’re almost grown, but the girls would be devastated. They’re close to their mother, and I don’t want to lose them. Maybe it’ll be different once they’re out on their own.”
    Which they now are, but even then, Lila doubted it. She foresaw family events rolling into the future—graduations, weddings, births of grandchildren—in a festive parallel universe, followed by various crises, disintegrations, disasters and deaths. All the this and that, forbidding a move. And she was right.
    Now this. She has an impulse to say, “I hope you’re happy now.”
    She still can’t hear small sounds, like his voice, very well, although shouting and screaming from elsewhere feel as if they’re drilling holes in her head.
    Prayers used to be promises, bargains: “If I get a doll for Christmas, I promise I’ll always be good.” Or “If I get a good mark on this test,” or “If I get asked to that party”—and always, in return, the promise she’d be good. She guesses she never kept it very well; but she would now. “I’ll give up anything, I’ll do anything. I’ll be so good in my life, if I can only, please, have my life.”
    Tom is her only really outstanding sin—old-fashioned, unfamiliar word that even at this terrible, bargaining moment doesn’t feel like the right one. Without him, she would be lonely and sad, but alive. And she is not young any more, and at least she would remember love, and there must be other pleasures: wisdom, meekness, generosity, all those virtues she seems to have put off acquiring. She isn’t stupid; she could probably get the hang of goodness.
    â€œLila!” His voice now is sharp, and she can hear him quite sharply. “Settle down, Lila. Come on, now, sit down.” She realizes she is still standing and that Tom, looking up at her, seems worried. Or disappointed. Or irritable. She can’t always tell the difference. Sometimes there isn’t much difference. Disappointments and worries irritate him, as a rule; cause and effect blurring together.
    â€œYes,” she says, “okay,” and obediently sits.
    He keeps a grip, not tight, on her arm. “Keep calm. We need to be calm.” He should speak only for himself. He has not earned the full-hearted place in her life that would allow him to speak for her.
    Her skin marks easily. There are already flushes of blood around the white marks where his fingers grasped her arm. And her bones are thin. As it turns out, there’s not much to her. Tiny freckles on the backs of her hands would sizzle in flames; her bones would collapse at the slightest downward spiral, shatter at a touch of land.
    Or, she remembers, ocean.
    This is the sort of circumstance in which the deft, sausage-fingered, life-saving Geoff might have come in handy.
    Or, more likely, he’d do well in the aftermath, stitching together the uncountable bits and pieces that may fall from the sky.
    Poor Geoff, perhaps she was unfair. Perhaps she is also unfair to Tom, and to other people along the line, and to herself, as well.
    Don’t think and don’t look. Keep the mind in the air.
    On Geoff, connected as he is anyway with life converted from death. Six years she spent with him, slightly longer than she has so far been with Tom.
    The night