The Book of Phoebe by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

Author:Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504029414
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Chapter Seven

Marlys arrived one afternoon in early December. It was sunny and eerily balmy—more of a March day when it’s going out like a lamb. She handed me a folder with the name of the people who would adopt my baby typed on the cover. Just as I was opening the folder, and Marlys was digging into the Good Humors, a terrorist bomb exploded very near by. I knew it had to be close because my eardrums hurt badly and I was more aware of pain than a loud noise.

While we held our hands to our ears, the Pension Rapp shook, and Ben’s garret took the biggest beating. The blurred little windows in the eaves shattered, and one of the balconies plummeted into the street. Marlys screamed, and I don’t know what I did. We looked through the jagged window holes down where the balcony had been. Madame Besette was already outside, hysterical. A few blocks away we could see black smoke tunneling skyward and hear echos of distant shouting.

“That’s Saul’s,” Ben said, oblivious to the destruction done to his art. All the canvases that had been suspended were lying scattered across the studio.

We bypassed the quaint elevator and ran down all the stairs, I as lithe as ever, surprisingly. The Greek boys were organizing an evacuation, and at the same time trying to calm the elderly couple trapped in the elevator cage, which was askew. Out on the sidewalk Madame Besette twisted locks of her red hair and babbled incoherently as she paced back and forth in front of the twisted, broken balcony. Great chunks of old brick clung to the inner side of it, but it hadn’t landed on anyone, and thank God I never went out onto it when I had been so sorely tempted.

We ran down the Avenue Rapp passing the metal Art Nouveau building. The pear, and two artichokes besides, had rolled into the road, and there were dents in the sidewalk where they’d originally landed. We turned into the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, and took a left onto the Avenue de Tourville, where there was pandemonium. Debris was thickly strewn across the entire ground like the pigeon feed of the French bag ladies. Just as the Musée Rodin came into view, I noticed a shoe, kind of a trendy low boot that the students were wearing a lot. Marlys stepped in front of us, grabbed Ben’s head and mine, and stuffed us into her armpits. But her dancer’s reflexes weren’t quite quick enough. We all three had wondered and realized at the same time about the two white sticks protruding from the gory shoe-boot. Is it fibula and tibia, or fibia and tibula? That’s what I kept asking myself as Marlys dragged us away. Marlys wrote me a year later to tell me that in her mind she kept thinking, Is that shoe mine? She said she was afraid to look down at her feet. Ben never said.

I didn’t take my head out of Marlys’ lapel, and I didn’t open my eyes until Ben pulled me off her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.