Daughters of the Revolution Read Online Free Page A

exactly. The way out of this was up.
    Rebozos, still wearing the orange life vest, knit a bandage with silver needles and thin white yarn. “I’ve shot a cat for supper,” he called out.
    The cormorant flew straight up and away from them. Heck paddled on, making up the time he’d lost. His head felt light. He would not mention the life vest; it was beneath him. (But he and Rebozos might not be friends after this.) He rose above it and flew along the shoreline. He saw open land where a fire pond looked like a blue bladder in a brown body. He saw fins in the water, slicing through the offshore swells. He saw Mad Rock, two miles out, and two figures in a kayak, paddling away from the rock; one of them wore an orange life jacket. He saw a baseball sailing into the air. He saw his mother covering her mouth with her hand—was she ashamed?—and Lil’s face, smiling at him, one of her front teeth folded slightly over the other. He saw Mrs. O’Greefe, holding her arms against her chest, her dress transparent in the rain. Water ran backward up his face, forcing tears into his eyes. Mrs. X. sat up and removed the cloth from her face. The pilot dipped, rode first on one wing, then on the other. For an instant, Heck saw an impossible thing: a kitten with large ears and almond-shaped eyes standing on the rock. “Where did you learn to fly?” the passenger asked the pilot.
    “I am a Wampanoag brave,” the pilot said. “This is our ancestral air.”
    The wing dipped, and when it rose again, the kitten had disappeared.

    She wrapped herself in her thrift-store kimono and walked to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. But the milk carton stood empty on the counter and the percolator sucked in the brew with an esophageal hiss. She left Heck’s little mess for later and looked in on EV, who also breathed as if she were drinking through a straw.
    Back in bed, she planned her escape, an hour of reading. But Heck’s shy eyes watched her in the dark and made her wet with desire. She saw herself through his eyes, from the outside; the way he looked at her, the way men looked at her, helped her to see herself this way. O’Greefe, cheap as a two-cent stamp, had the heat cranked down, but the bed held a memory of warmth. The kimono, silky but not silk, also held her own heat in. She ran her hands over her skin, her breasts larger than before EV, and saw herself as if she were a bird flying overhead and looking down at a woman unfolding under her unfolding kimono. Even her mouth felt aroused.
    “Veux-tu que je débarrasse la table?”
she whispered, the language all silk and velvet and pearls.
    The apartment roared like a hollow shell. She folded and unfolded herself, lying tangled under the warm, ugly Hudson Bay blanket her Uncle Frank had given them for a wedding present, a practical and insinuating gift, made to last.
    The spongy mattress (Heck’s parents’ ancient nuptial bed) held her in a watery embrace. She wanted a lot. She wanted more. She had everything she needed. She turned her head, opened her mouth and swallowed—like a pill—her little cry of ecstasy.
    Wind whipped the water up in peaks. The Brewsters’ sitter shook sand from the blanket and packed the canvas boat bag, preparing to take her two charges home. She’d broughtthem to the beach with a thermos of hot chocolate and they’d made a castle, although the sand pecked at their eyes and faces, and their hands went numb from digging moats and pressing cold sand into turrets. Just now, she’d caught the older one, the boy, watching her when she squatted among the rocks to pee. She’d made them put their hands over their eyes and sing “Frère Jacques” in a round so they wouldn’t hear her splashing, but this one, his eyes were wide open.
    The boy was also the first to see the two men spill into the gray water about two hundred yards offshore. He pointed, and the sitter doubted what she saw—two men? No direct signal, no sound told her that what she saw was