the song reader by lisa tucker

Author:lisa tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Downtown Press
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter

seventeen

It was as if that baseball bat she kept under her bed had protected Tommy and me from nightmares, too. Or maybe it was our apartment, small, more than a little run-down, but the only home either of us had ever known. We didn’t cry as the movers hurried back and forth, lugging the dismantled pieces of our happiness. We’d been told it would all be put back together again once we got to Juanita’s, and it wasn’t untrue. Tommy got the sewing room, after Juanita stuffed her old Singer into a closet and pushed her boxes of patterns back on the shelf to fit his puzzles and board games. I got a section of the basement separated from the washer and dryer by a bedsheet hanging from a steel beam.

The very first night I heard Tommy yelling. There was no need for me to run up the wooden steps; Juanita and Dad were already there, quieting him down, offering water and the comfort of another trip to the bathroom. I heard their tired footsteps and muffled voices again and again: that night, that week, that month. In the mornings, Tommy always said he couldn’t remember anything about the dreams except they were scary. I suggested monsters, ghosts, mean kids, but he said no, scarier. I wondered aloud what could be scarier than a monster even though I knew the answer. After all, my dreams didn’t have monsters in them, either.

I had one of the worst nightmares only a few weeks after we moved to Juanita’s. We were back in Agnes’s house in the dream. The house was bigger, four floors instead of two, with a giant attic. The stairs were different: dark wood, each step wide as our kitchen table. I had to broad jump from one to the other while holding the rail tightly so I wouldn’t fall through the huge cracks. I was hurrying because I thought I heard my mother yelling.

When I opened the attic door, I saw Mary Beth sitting in the middle of the room, surrounded by people I didn’t know. They were staring at something on the floor. It was my old tape recorder, the one I’d thrown away when the battery box rusted, but it was shiny black again, and I heard Mom’s voice coming out of it louder and clearer than when the thing was new.

A large woman with orange hair told Mary Beth it was time for her to go with them. I said she had to stay here, but then I looked around at the strangers; they were all murmuring “no” and shaking their heads. The woman grabbed my sister’s arm, and all the others started grabbing her, too, pushing her toward the doorway. Mary Beth looked back at me and started crying, and I could hear Mom’s voice even louder than before. I woke up with my face smashed into the pillow, gasping for breath.

There was only one window in my makeshift bedroom, a little rectangle near the ceiling, but I’d pushed my dresser against the wall so I could climb up and look out.

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.