The Tell by Hester Kaplan Read Free Book Online

in the open kitchen behind them. The skin around the gunman’s eyes glistened and his lips pushed forward. He gestured with a tick of the gun for Caroline to give her bag up. She said no, and then: fuck you .
    This finally was the reason they shouldn’t be together; she said no when she should have said yes. Later on, Owen realized that moments of terror can have their own solipsistic lucidity. Back then, though, he began to piss down his leg. Caroline gave a look that seemed to say that the entire world was a disappointment, Owen at the top of her list—he, a big man and still a coward—and then she fell off her chair like a furious little girl, her hands obstinate on the tile, her skirt up to her waist revealing black underwear, her legs straight out, one shoe off. She had a startled expression. The sound of a jet roared through Owen’s head—but long after the shot had been fired. The timing was off and these were the moments that still stuttered until they slipped away from him out of frustration. It was disastrous, almost seven years later, to still detect the basaltic odor of Caroline’s death and he could only press his arm across his face to block it out. He couldn’t see her face anymore.
    He’d met Mira a year later, and then not on Whittier Street or in her house, but on Ives Street, outside his apartment in Fox Point, on a summer’s nighttime glittering sidewalk where she nearly hit him with her bike. They had an unhurried conversation, she still straddling the bike’s cracked leather seat, while they watched traffic drift down Wickenden. She’d come to find the boy who’d stolen ten dollars from Brindle. There was something defiant and assured about her, with her old-fashioned, clattery bike, her torn sneakers, her deep red lipstick, her funny, bright, and strange clothes. When they turned in the direction of the bay, Owen snuck a few sideways glances at her. He liked how she kept pushing her glasses up her nose with her index finger. It was bookish and sexy. He liked her long neck and high clavicle, her smokeless smoker’s voice. She was on a mission to save the kid by having him own up to what he did, but it was really Owen she’d end up saving. She’d drawn him out of his gloom and made him happier than he imagined he’d ever be. He believed he’d conjured her up to take him to this house, this bed, this body, that his heart already knew from a distance, because he’d have slipped away without her. He wouldn’t have survived otherwise. She’d suffered tragedy’s long legacy after the death of her parents, and she treated what had happened to him as something cherished and fragile, the bubble that held within it the belief that they were safe when they were loved and loved back.

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    O n the third floor of Mira’s house—servant quarters when there had once been servants—a series of small rooms ran off the hallway. There was a bed in each with a tamped-down mattress and air that was dusty with old grudges. In one room, Owen looked out at the State House and the dome’s Independent Man, a proud, gaudy marker. The hour glazed the edges of industry and blurred the city. It was a view he sometimes took alone, a way to see where he was.
    When Mira had shown him this same view on his first-ever tour of the house, he had wondered why it was that people in a new place always gazed outward first, inward second. For his part, he was half afraid to stare at Mira too much, as though he might wear out the slightly scary exhilaration he felt looking at her. She’d pointed out landmarks and ruins and said that when the city was smoothed out like this, she could imagine she was living in any century. She could put herself in the place of someone standing at this window a hundred years before, a great-grandmother, maybe. Owen hadn’t asked what she really meant by that, not because he was incurious but because he