Nancy Willard Reader by Willard Nancy;

Author:Willard, Nancy; [Willard, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1790453
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-03-20T21:31:00+00:00

She ended the sentence, but he did not bend over to sign.

“Erica, have you ever read the letters of Nostradamus?”

“Never heard of him,” said Erica. “Who is he?”

“A prophet. Born in the sixteenth century. There’s a medium in California who gets prophecies from him. Your mother doesn’t believe a word, but maybe you’d like to read through them.”

From the desk drawer he pulled out a package of mimeographed sheets and put them into her hand. She took them cautiously, as if they might burn her.

“What does he say will happen?”

“He predicts a great explosion on the West Coast, possibly an invasion.”

After he had turned off the lights and she lay in bed waiting for sleep, she heard the loud whisperings of his prayers from the next room, and listening hard, she caught the sound of her own name.

A man’s voice filled the cabin with the information that they were flying at thirty thousand feet. Yet it seemed to Erica that they were standing still, that nothing in this country was moving and nothing would ever change. Far across the shining pasture of clouds stood a farmhouse in an orchard, bleached white as in a negative, for all that showed her a dark face on earth gave her a light one here.

Fasten your seatbelts, please, flashed the sign over the aisle, and she tightened her grasp on Anatole, who was beginning to squirm on her lap.

“There will be a twenty-minute delay,” crackled the pilot’s voice, “due to fog in Buffalo.”

But beyond the window, the sky dazzled her and hurt her eyes: a floor of clouds, inflated with light, stretched for miles in every direction.

“Why is it so nice up here and so bad down there?” asked a child’s voice behind her.

“The weather,” said a woman’s voice, “is on earth.”

Two hours later they plunged into a gray rain and touched down in Detroit.

From the passenger’s entrance, she could see her mother standing behind the lobby railing. In her bulky plaid coat and babushka, she looked like a peasant woman around whom chic young girls eddied and vanished. How round her face looked under the pincurl bangs springing from under her scarf. Erica had worn scarves as a child, and curls—wetted every morning and spun around her mother’s fingers. In the winter they always froze on the way to school and wept down the back of her dress all morning.

“I’m here!” called Erica.

“Aw,” cooed her mother, reaching out to kiss Anatole’s sweetly indifferent cheek, “what a little skeezix!”

They all three collided in an awkward embrace.

“You’re too thin,” said her mother, pulling back. “Have you been dieting again? Where’s your suitcase?”

“I’m carrying it. This—here.”

She pointed to the flight bag over her shoulder. Her mother shook her head, the way she’d shaken it the last time Erica came home, with her best taffeta dress mashed into her book bag.

“How’s Daddy?”

“Very quiet,” said her mother. They walked toward the main exit across acres of light that filled the terminal—for all its traffic—with a luminous emptiness. “I don’t believe he’s said three words today.

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