A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb Read Free Book Online Page A

seat of Mr. Brown's car, the sun blinding me in the rearview mirror.
     
     
    All evening, I hovered as Mr. Brown and his wife made dinner to gether, listened to television as they paid bills, read, and talked in bed. After they had turned off the light and settled into each other's arms, just as I was passing through the wall into the gar den, Mr. Brown's voice stopped me.
       "I thought of a baby name."
       "Boy or girl?" she asked.
       "Erin," he said. "Could go either way."
       I had never heard them discuss children except as a distant possibility during their courtship. The idea frightened me. By their words I knew that this was a conversation that had been visited many times, most likely while I gave them time alone in bed. All my past hosts had been childless. I had not been drawn to children over the decades; nor had I been repelled by them on trains, in parks, laughing in the nurseries of homes my hosts vis ited, but this was different. This would be the flesh of my host. A child in my every room and in each hour of my existence.
       "Spelled how?" asked Mrs. Brown.
       "A I R O H N G," he said.
       She laughed in the dark.
       "Silent G," he explained.
       I stayed perfectly still, half in and half out of the bedroom wall.
       "Maybe for a girl," she said. "Got any other boy names?"
       "Chauncey."
       Mrs. Brown let out another laugh. "We'll have to fork it out for those karate lessons so he won't get thrashed every day."
       "Okay, how about Butch?" said Mr. Brown. "For a girl."
       It was dark, but I saw him stop her laugh with a kiss.
       "Let's get started then," she said.
       "I thought you wanted to wait so you wouldn't be a blimp in the summer."
       "I don't mind, as long as you wait on me hand and foot."
       I fled the rustle of sheets and hovered in the living room. Something stronger than logic tore at me. I drifted restlessly through their other rooms, sometimes shifting a curtain or making the floor creak without meaning to. I was a caged panther. I sat on their roof and stared at the stars, but I couldn't explain my terror. Was it some instinctual knowledge that an infant would be aware of my presence? That thought knotted at my throat. Would a baby be frightened of me? Some deep voice answered yes, you are a danger to children. I realized suddenly that I no longer felt welcome in Mr. Brown's house. I was an intruder. I tried to re member feeling at home in the houses of my other hosts but in stead saw a hideous flash of a cellar door and a shelf of baskets. I flew to the car, thinking I might feel safer there, but as I sat in the dark garage, huddled in the back seat, I began to weep. I wept a waterless river, sobbing without relief. I thought of running away to the classroom or the library, but I knew I could not. They were too far away. I couldn't go alone. I was a prisoner, crying bone-dry tears until the morning.
     
     
     
     
    Four
     
     
    The NEXT MORNING, I meant to watch Mr. Brown write, but as I circled his desk, I kept thinking about James and worrying about a baby at the Browns' house. When the first bell rang, I looked down at the manuscript. Mr. Brown had written and erased the same sentence so many times, the paper had worn through.
       By the time James's class began to arrive that afternoon, I was fairly humiliated by my own need for comfort. I sat in the desk in the last row and wouldn't meet James's eyes as he sat down beside me. I could tell, by the way he was watching me without speak ing, that he sensed something was wrong. Mr. Brown was leafing through papers on his desk. He stopped on one and silently read it back and front.
       "Listen up," he said then. "Here's a good example of descrip tion." Then he read aloud: "The library smells like old books—a thousand leather doorways into other worlds." Mr. Brown paused and glanced up at the room, but especially at James for one mo ment. "I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a