Juggling Fire Read Online Free Page A

disappeared. Nothing stuck to me.
    He took my hands and pried them away from him. He grabbed the baseball cap off his head and shoved it backward onto mine.
    “Good night, Rachel,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”
    Then he walked out the door.
    What kind of father walks away and doesn’t come back? And in the morning, Mom was baking bread as if nothing had happened. “Want a piece to knead?” she asked when I got up.
    “Is he gone?” I answered. He must have slipped out when I was asleep. I should have stayed awake so I could stop him.
    “We’ll put some buns and a loaf in the freezer,” said Mom, nodding. “Dad can eat it when he comes back.”
    I climbed on the chair beside her and made buns like faces, with raisins for eyes and blueberries in a circle for mouths. Every mouth was scowling. The dough was greasy under my fingers.
    “How many sleeps until he comes back?” I asked her.
    “He’s not feeling well. He feels better in the mountains,” she said. “He’s always been like that.”
    She hadn’t even looked directly at me. Obviously Mom didn’t know when Dad was coming back.
    Every morning I checked the freezer for my bag of buns. One morning it was gone.
    But Dad hadn’t come home.
    I quit rolling right around then. I wasn’t into somersaults anymore or walking on my hands. I walked on stilts that had rigid boots permanently attached right to the crosspiece. All I had to do was step into them and shove off and I’d be hovering over everyone else. I also began juggling seriously. I juggled anything I could find. I picked up apples or potatoes from the root cellar or even stones from the forest. I’d practice for hours until the light dimmed. Of course, regular life must have gone on then. I did schoolwork and ate meals, but juggling relaxed me. It made me forget that Dad was gone. I had to concentrate on the balls.
    Sometimes I think I picked juggling because of the challenge. Without depth perception I had to kind of feel for the balls. Maybe I wouldn’t have tried it if I hadn’t listened to a story tape about Beethoven. I couldn’t get over that he’d composed symphonies even though he was deaf.
    In the evenings, I memorized fairy tales. I’d done it back before I could even read. I’d memorized picturebooks that Mom and Dad read to me and recited the words while I turned the pages. Then in the toboggan, watching the butts of our dogs hunched over in their harnesses, I’d have something to do that didn’t freeze my fingers like turning pages did.
    My fingers, stuck in my armpits, are tingling. I shake them over the sleeping bag for a minute and stick them back in to thaw some more.
    Becky says that people who don’t have a written language memorize their histories instead. Anthropologists are amazed at the accuracy of their accounts, going back sometimes for hundreds of years. I, however, wasn’t aiming for truth. At least not until recently.
    Only the far corners of my bag are still frigid. I explore them with my feet, stretching so that my own heat spreads to the corners. Time to tell Brooks a story.
    And so the princess traveled on with the merry prince and their loyal steeds. They rode through open glades and splashed through pebbled creeks and climbed the steep faces of mighty mountains. The wind was fresh on their faces, the air was crisp and bright in a late summer sky, and their hearts were full of wonder as they trotted across this new and lovely land, searching for a mythical lake that was rumored to be the source of all true stories.
    I’ve been dozing like a baby with my legs drawn up to my stomach and my arms wrapped around my waist. I’m almost warm. I poke my head out into the growing darkness. The sky has blown clear, and stars stretch with a zillion pulses of faraway light from one side of the valley to the other.
    I haven’t wrapped up my camp for the night, I realize. I need to be ready in case a bear comes sniffing around.
    The memory of being cold is so recent