Bradbury Stories by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page B

doesn’t look like you,” said Jane simply. “Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere.”
    They looked at her for a long moment.
    â€œAny more pictures, Mrs. Bentley?” asked Alice. “Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?”
    The girls chortled.
    â€œI don’t have to show you anything!” said Mrs. Bentley.
    â€œThen we don’t have to believe you,” replied Jane.
    â€œBut this picture proves I was young!”
    â€œThat’s some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it.”
    â€œI was married!”
    â€œWhere’s Mr. Bentley?”
    â€œHe’s been gone a long time. If he were here, he’d tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two.”
    â€œBut he’s not here and he can’t tell, so what does that prove?”
    â€œI have a marriage certificate.”
    â€œYou could have borrowed that, too. Only way I’ll believe you were ever young”—Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herself—“is if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten.”
    â€œThousands of people saw me but they’re dead, you little fool—or ill, in other towns. I don’t know a soul here, just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young.”
    â€œWell, there you are !” Jane blinked at her companions. “Nobody saw her!”
    â€œListen!” Mrs. Bentley seized the girl’s wrist. “You must take these things on faith. Someday you’ll be as old as I. People will say the same. ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!’ One day you’ll be like me!”
    â€œNo, we won’t!” said the girls. “Will we?” they asked one another.
    â€œWait and see!” said Mrs. Bentley.
    And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.
    â€œYour mother,” she said to Jane. “Haven’t you noticed, over the years, the change?”
    â€œNo,” said Jane. “She’s always the same.”
    And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: “Helen Bentley, is that you? ”
    â€œI guess we better go home,” said Jane. “Thanks for the ring. It just fits me.”
    â€œThanks for the comb. It’s fine.”
    â€œThanks for the picture of the little girl.”
    â€œCome back—you can’t have those!” Mrs. Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. “They’re mine! ”
    â€œDon’t!” said Tom, following the girls. “Give them back!”
    â€œNo, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks!” cried Alice.
    So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness.
    â€œI’m sorry,” said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs. Bentley. He went away.
    They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs. Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I’m empty, empty; it’s part of my life.
    She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, “Does it really belong to me?”
    Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and