Read Online The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen - Free Book Online

it was my dog—”
    “I can swim perfectly well—”
    “Gordie was kind enough—”
    “Newfs have this instinct—”
    “—like I would have learned anything I cared about.”
    The more confusedly their voices entwined the more stolid grew Paul’s silence. Jess, it was impossible not to notice, held herself equally still, so that through their very inaction, a commonality was forged. Paul stole a glance. She really looked completely different from the last time—the only time—he’d seen her. Then she’d been willowy, almost gangly, with hair to her waist. She’d worn braces on her teeth, been tan and freckled, towered above him. Now his father’s first child was his height or a hair shorter, and her skin moon-pale, and her figure filled out. She was solid-looking, the way a bird can seem plump without being fat. He forgot what their age difference was—ten years, eleven? She must be in her early twenties.
    His father and Biscuit and the scrawny red-haired dude finished up their story. Paul waited a beat and turned to his father. “What does all that have to do”—inclining his head toward the stove—“with her?”
    “Nothing,” his father admitted. “A coincidence. We’re having an unusual afternoon.”
    “You think?” Paul knew his father would probably have welcomed some help juggling the company, but he did not feel it within him to offer any. He wasn’t sure why seeing Jess should make him angry, but he was aware of wanting to hit something. He flashed a sardonic smile. Then, in a manner he understood was rude, he crossed to a cupboard, leaving a trail of large damp sock prints on the floor, and got down an unopened package of Hydrox. He turned to face the room at large and executed a small bow. “A pleasure. Now if you’ll excuse me.” And strode through the doorway toward the front hall.
    “Hey, Paul . . . ?” His father’s voice sought after him.
    “Book report,” Paul yelled back, fraudulently. He grabbed his backpack and clomped up the stairs in the way his mother had spoken to him about many times. In his room he kicked the door shut, peeled off his wet cargo pants and socks, pulled on a pair of sweats, switched on his desk lamp, tore open the Hydrox, and inserted a cookie in his mouth, all in fluid progression.Then he sat very still, not chewing.
    Though he’d met his half sister just once, a long time ago, the memory was vivid. It had been summertime; he must have been just about to turn six. Biscuit (precocious in many things but not in toilet training) had been, at three, still in diapers. They’d spent two weeks together, his whole family and Jess, upstate where his mother’s parents had a cabin on Cabruda Lake. Jess had been a teenager then and accordingly remarkable to him, with her guitar, her braces, her friendship bracelets, her long, heavy hair.
    He’d felt rich on that holiday, rich with the sudden acquisition of her. He’d known, because his parents had told him, what “half sister” meant: Daddy is her father but her mother is another lady . Even so, he couldn’t fully dispel the impression he’d formed, upon first hearing the term, of a mythical being, half sister and half something else, the way a centaur or a mermaid was halfand-half. And half his, too, for that was what sister meant, only in this case the word seemed far more exotic and advantageous than in the case of his other sister, never mind that Biscuit was a hundred percent his: she cried and stank and was liable to put his things in her mouth.
    This one played with him. She threw him like a torpedo through the water and taught him how to spit high in the air like a fountain. She showed him how to make food for the fairies she said lived in the woods, grinding pine needles and tree sap into a sticky porridge, which they set out on leaf-platters upon tablecloths of moss. She combed his hair, after swimming, into a Mohawk, and used some of her own mousse to make it stiff. She instructed him on how