The Shadow Thief by Marc Levy

Author:Marc Levy [Levy, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9782361320775
Publisher: Versilio
Published: 2014-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

“What’s wrong?” asked my mother when I got back to the house.

“Everything’s fine, what’s worrying you?”

“You postponed your return and let your girlfriend go home on her own, just to spend an evening with your mother?”

I sat down next to her at the kitchen table and took her hands in mine.

“I miss you,” I told her, giving her a kiss on the forehead.

“Well, I hope you’ll tell me later what’s troubling you.”

We ate in the living room; Mom had made my favorite meal: macaroni and cheese with ham, just like the old days. She sat next to me on the sofa and watched me enjoying it, not touching her own plate.

I was getting ready to clean up when she took me by the hand and told me that the dishes could wait. She asked me if I wouldn’t mind inviting her up to my attic. We went upstairs, pulled down the ladder, opened the trapdoor, and sat down beneath the skylight.

I hesitated a moment before asking her a question that had been on the tip of my tongue for such a long time.

“Have you ever heard anything from Dad?”

Mom narrowed her eyes. I recognized that old nurse’s look she got whenever she was trying to figure out if I was coming down with something or if I was pretending to be sick to get out of a math test.

“Do you still think about him a lot?” she asked me.

“Whenever a man his age comes into the emergency room, I always get nervous. I’m afraid it’s him, and each time I ask myself what I’d do if he didn’t recognize me.”

“He’d recognize you right away.”

“Why didn’t he ever come to see me?”

“It took me a long time to forgive him. Probably too long. It made me say things I regret, but that was because I still loved him. I never stopped loving your father. We do terrible things when love and hate coincide, things we blame ourselves for later. The thing I condemned him for the most wasn’t the fact that he left me—I eventually accepted my share of responsibility. My despair was imagining him happy with another woman. I resented your father a great deal for loving her so much. I need to tell you a secret, and I know how old-fashioned I sound, but he’s the only man I’ve ever been with. If I saw him again today, I’d thank him for giving me the best gift there is: you.”

It wasn’t my mother’s shadow that told me that secret, it was really her.

I pulled her to me and told her that I loved her.

Certain precious moments in your life come down to so little in the end. If I hadn’t stayed that night, I don’t think I would have ever had that conversation with my mother. When we left the attic, I turned toward the skylight one last time and silently thanked my shadow.

*

I’d set my alarm to go off at three A.M. I got dressed and tiptoed out of the house, taking the road that led to the school.

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