Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons [Anne Rivers Siddons]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780061748776
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-01-09T13:00:00+00:00

It was upon me then, the time of urgency and endings: there was nothing, now, between me and December graduation. No break existed so that I could say “after vacation.” Nor could I say “this time next quarter.” There would not, for me, be a next quarter. The sense of imploding time was terrifying.

Paul said more than once that I reminded him of an overtuned violin. I wept more often, and more easily, that fall than I ever have since, even in the days after Stephen’s death, even after they found the cancer. Those two horrors were beyond weeping. But in that last autumn at Randolph, everything touched me like an electrical charge, and everything brought quick, tremulous tears. I would walk across the campus in the grape-colored early dusk of October and smell the smoke from the Friday night pep rally bonfires, and I would think, “This is the last time I’ll ever smell that smell, or see this light.” The Saturday thunder of the drums from the stadium, on bronze afternoons, made my heart hurt. I would walk into the steamy clatter of Harry’s out of a nippy November wind and the dreary, banal little scene would move me to blindness with its sweetness and beauty. The light from my drawing board lamp on a night of blowing rain, seen through the bank of windows in McCandless, struck me to the quick. Next quarter another head would lean over into its white pool. Even the midge-whine of chapter meetings, and the fretful scramble of rush, made me nostalgic. Ginger’s white grin made me want to run across the room and hug her, and I often did. Once or twice I even did it to Fig, who colored and simpered.

I found that I could hardly bear to look at Cecie. Whenever I did, and saw her red head bent over her books, or received her full, sweet kitten’s smile, loss nearly drowned me. I had to turn my head away frequently, lest she see the tears in my eyes. I had the sense, at those times, that it was Cecie’s ghost I saw; that the essential Cecie had moved on somewhere else, somewhere I could not follow. I found that I was starting a great many sentences to her with “Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember, it was only a year ago,” she said to me once. “What’s the matter with you? You’d think you were going to Inner Mongolia for the rest of your life.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to forget it,” I said. “I want to keep all of it, everything we said and did and laughed at, everything we read. And I want you to remember it, too.”

“I’m not going to forget it, ol’ Kate,” she said seriously. “And I’m not going to die, either, and you’re not. Stop acting like December was the end of everything. We’ll see each other. I’ll come to New York next summer, if you still want me to, and we’re all going to meet at Ginger’s in March, remember.

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