Mr. X Read Online Free Page B

he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table and patting people on the back.
    They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can’t remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember—the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday—is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.
    It begins with a sudden awareness of the warmth and color of the light, as if I had never before really noticed how this rich, vibrant substance streamed from above to coat the world like a liquid. I saw the brightness gather in a shining skin on the backs of my mother’s hands. Then the earth opened beneath me, and I plummeted downward and away from the picnic table, too startled to be frightened. I came to rest and found myself in a large, untidy room. Books covered a table and stood in piles on the floor. In the distance, an embittered voice ranted about smoke and gold. My eyes fastened on the mantel, where a fern drooped beside a fox stepping delicately toward the edge of a glass dome. The weights of a brass clock swung this way–that way on the other side of the fox’s confinement. I had been
pushed back
: I was in the museum of the past.
    It ended so quickly that I did not have time to react. In the space between two halves of a second I had traveled at enormous speed back to my chair at the picnic table, restored to the present. A fraction of a beat ahead of the moment when I had seen the sunlight glowing on my mother’s hands, Uncle James was still telling the same joke to Uncle Clark, Aunt May still smiling at compliments to her fried chicken—I’m inventing these details to suggest the normality of the scene, but all I remember is what I just described. By then, the sensations in my body would have built to an almost unbearable pitch.
    “You scrambled off the picnic bench,” Star told me, not once but many times, retelling this story to help herself deal with it. “I asked if anything was wrong, but you just put your hands over your eyes and started running. Toby tried to grab you, but you scooted past him and ran right into that ladder. Down it went, I don’t know how a little thing like you had the strength, the ladder fell smash into the table, right next to my mother. Food went flying straight up in the air. Clarence was pouring Kool-Aid into his cup, and the jug got away from him and landed in the cake.
    “After you got past the top of the table, you fell down flat and stiffened up like a board. The spasms hit you so hard you bounced off the ground. Foam was coming out of your mouth. I heard Uncle Clark say something about rabies, and I clouted him on the side of his head without even breaking stride. Some of those people were so busy mopping at themselves and taking care of Momma, they didn’t know what was happening to you! I swear, I was so scared I thought I was going to faint. When I got my arms around you, I couldn’t even hold you still.
    “Then you went limp. I picked you up and put you to bed. After a while, Nettie and May came in to feel your forehead and tell me about everybody they ever knew who had fits. I put up with it as long as I could, and then I shooed them out.
    “The doctor said it could have been anything. Too much excitement. Dehydration. He picked you up and put you on his lap and said, ‘Neddie, your mommy says you put your hands over your eyes before all the trouble started. Was that because you saw something you didn’t like?’ ”
    What age was I, when she slipped that in? Eight?
    “Now, that struck me, because I was wondering the same thing. You were too young to answer him, and besides, I don’t think you remembered anything that happened. But, honey, you covered your eyes the next year, too, and you did it again on your fifth birthday. Did you see something that made you unhappy?”
    I never told Star what happened