Read Online Spin by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online

transit broker, a Minang man named Jala whose import-export business served as cover for his more lucrative emigration brokerage. Everybody on the docks knew Jala, she said. She was bidding for berths against a bunch of crazy-utopian kibbutzim, so it wasn’t a done deal, but she was cautiously optimistic.
    “Be careful,” I said. “There might still be people looking for us.”
    “Not as far as I can tell, but…” She shrugged. She glanced at the notebook in my hand. “Writing again?”
    “It takes my mind off the pain.”
    “You can hold the pen okay?”
    “It’s like terminal arthritis, but I can deal with it.”
So far
, I thought. “The distraction is worth the discomfort.”
    But it wasn’t just that, of course. Nor was it simply graphomania. The writing was a way to externalize what felt threatened.
    “It’s really very well done,” Diane said.
    I looked at her, horrified. “You
read
it?”
    “You asked me to. You begged me to, Tyler.”
    “Was I delirious?”
    “Apparently… though you seemed fairly rational at the time.”
    “I wasn’t writing with an audience in mind.” And I was shocked that I had forgotten showing it to her. How much else might already have slipped away?
    “I won’t look at it again, then. But what you wrote—” She cocked her head. “I’m amazed and flattered you felt so strongly about me, way back then.”
    “It could hardly come as a surprise.”
    “More than you might think. But it’s a paradox, Tyler. The girl on the page is indifferent, almost cruel.”
    “I never thought of you that way.”
    “It’s not your opinion that worries me. It’s mine.”
    I had been sitting up in bed, imagining this was an act of strength, evidence of my own stoicism. More likely it was evidence that the painkillers were temporarily in charge. I shivered. Shivering was the first sign of a resurgent fever. “You want to know when I fell in love with you? Maybe I should write about that. It’s important. It was when I was ten—”
    “Tyler, Tyler. Nobody falls in love when they’re ten.”
    “It was when St. Augustine died.”
    St. Augustine was a lively black-and-white pedigreed springer spaniel who had been Diane’s particular pet. “St. Dog,” she had called him.
    She winced. “That’s just macabre.”
    But I was serious. E. D. Lawton had bought the dog impulsively, probably because he wanted something to decorate the hearth at the Big House, like a pair of antique andirons. But St. Dog had resisted his fate. St. Dog was decorative enough, but he was also inquisitive and full of mischief. In time E.D. came to despise him; Carol Lawton ignored him; Jason was fondly bemused by him. It was Diane, who had been twelve, who bonded with him. They brought out the best in each other. For six months St. Dog had followed her everywhere except the school bus. The two of them played together on the big lawn summer evenings, and that was when I first noticed Diane in a particular way— the first time I took pleasure in simply watching her. She would run with St. Dog until she was exhausted, and St. Dog was always patient while she got her breath back. She was attentive to the animal in ways none of the other Lawtons even tried to be—she was sensitive to his moods, as St. Augustine was to hers.
    I couldn’t have said why I liked this about her. But in the uneasy, emotionally charged world of the Lawtons it was an oasis of uncomplicated affection. If I’d been a dog, I might have been jealous. Instead it impressed on me that Diane was special, different from her family in important ways. She met the world with an emotional openness the other Lawtons had lost or never learned.
    St. Augustine died suddenly and prematurely—he was still hardly more than a pup—that autumn. Diane was grief-stricken, and I realized I was in love with her…
    No, that
does
sound macabre. I didn’t fall in love with her because she mourned her dog. I fell in love with her because she was
capable
of