You Are My Only by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online

you wanted?”
    â€œI suppose.”
    I wish I could turn and see him, but that would throw our balance. I wish I could touch my hand to his in a way that would let him know I am grateful.
    â€œReady?” he asks after saying nothing for a spell, and I feel the bike budge and shift, cut and weave, until at last we find ourselves gliding smoothly. Arlen keeps to the sidewalk wherever he can. On the roads, he pedals straight down the margins. It’s still early enough that the traffic is light, and only three cars so far have honked at us crazy.
    â€œYou’re good at this,” I tell him.
    â€œHolding on is its own talent,” he says.
    It’s miles to the big station; I know as much. We’ve maybe gone one mile, and this is not your simple and easy. I try not to think of the hurricane eyes inside of Peter, the hurricane wrath. If I find Baby, Peter will forgive me. If I find Baby, finding Baby will be all that matters.
    â€œYou okay up there?” Arlen calls to me.
    â€œJust fine,” I call back. The sun has come up like a squint on the horizon. Most everything we travel by is pink. The glass in the shops. The windshields on cars. The glint flecks in the sidewalks and on the streets. I haven’t seen a cop drive by. I’ve seen no posters on the trees. No one and nothing but me and Arlen searching for Baby. We take a ninety-degree angle hard and wobble our way back to a glide. My elbows hurt more than my fingers.
    â€œHow about you? You okay?” I call over my shoulder.
    â€œTime is of the essence,” Arlen says.
    There’s breeze in my hair, in my heart. Baby, I think, I’m coming for you , because this is the logic best as I can calculate: whoever took her will disappear as quick as the first train out will take them. They wouldn’t leave last night, when the police and their big-nosed dogs were hunting. But they’d leave right now, under dawn’s smoky cover, when the police are still stirring into coffee.
    â€œArlen,” I say, “you are my hero.”
    â€œLeast I could do,” he says, puffing.
Sophie

    â€œThat’s it?” my mother asks. “That’s all you’ve written?”
    She holds the single page as if it’s a smelly onion peel, shakes it as if it’s crumbs, knocks it down between her hamburger and the ketchup. Her name tilts on her uniform pocket. Her hair slips free from her bun. She had a misery day and I’ve worsened it plenty. “One page,” she says, “and not a single mention of the buckyball.”
    I swallow the last of my chips and meet her eyes. I steal a look toward my essay, blooming grease spots.
    â€œThe buckyball, Sophie. The roundest round molecule, the most symmetrical large molecule of all.” She closes her eyes and sinks her face into the bones of her hands, and when the next piece of her hair falls loose, she sighs. Suddenly I wish I could tell Mother about Joey and his aunts, about the cat and the dog, about Father Latour and the red hills of New Mexico, the clover fields, the cottonwoods, the acacia. What, I asked, is acacia? Acacia, Miss Cloris answered. Some call them whistling thorns. Whistling thorns, I would say to my mother. why can’t we talk about that?
    The light of the real day is gone. The lamplight is harsh. My mother’s hands are blue blooded and thin and heavy with her chin, and in the silence I remember her years ago, on the floor of a lost house, beside me. She’d bought a long roll of waxed white paper and pots of finger paints and said, “we’ll paint what we dream.” There wasn’t white in her hair. There wasn’t night beneath her eyes. She’d unrolled the paper across the width of the floor, and all afternoon we painted dreams. Hers were blue like sky. Mine were yellow-pink, like sun. Afterward, for the whole next week, her fingers were the color of the purple inside shadows.
    â€œMother,” I say now,