Secret Heart Read Online Free Page A

screamedand clawed the air and the ring was filled with wildness. The animals loved us, though. The trainers whispered into their ears and they did their acts for love.”
    She watched Joe.
    “You believe that?”
    Joe blinked and saw the roaring beasts. He saw the trainers in shining clothes, dancing on tiptoe, holding whips and chairs.
    “Yes.”
    “Then my grandfather had his arm ripped off. Right here where we're standing.”
    “Wh-what by?”
    “A tiger. And mebbe that's when things started to change. When the animals stopped being close to us. When things would never be the same again.”
    She looked up toward the trapeze.
    “There's no t-tigers now?” Joe said.
    She narrowed her eyes as she turned to him.
    “What do you think, Joe?”
    “I can't … tell.” He looked inside himself. He thought of last night. “I think there are.”
    She shook her head.
    “No. There's no tigers now, Joe.”
    She took off her coat. She wore a spangled costume. She quickly climbed the rope ladder that dangled by the central pole. She climbed through the safety net spread out above the ring. She stood on a tiny platform. She unfastened a trapeze and set it swinging back andforward beneath the faded stars and sun and moon. Then she leaped with her arms outstretched and held it tight. She swung from her arms, from her knees, moving gracefully through the blue shade, and her spangles shone and her face gleamed. Then she leaped, and tumbled, and seemed to hang motionless for a moment, held in the air above by nothing, as if she could stay there as long as she wanted. Then a somersault and she dropped into the net.
    She lay there dead still, then swung herself over the edge of the net and back to earth again.
    Joe's eyes were shining.
    “That was brilliant,” he said.
    “No, it wasn't. My mother, now she was really something. And her mother…”
    “Your m-mother? Where's she now?”
    She toed the dust again.
    “In Russia.”
    “R-Russia?”
    “She trains kids in circus skills.”
    “She trained you?”
    “She should have stayed longer and trained me for longer. She shouldn't have cleared off to bloody Russia.”
    She put her coat back on.
    “What else d'you want to see?” she said.
    “D-dunno.” He stared at her, concentrated, tried to compose the question on his tongue. “Where h-have I seen you before, Corinna?”
    She shook her head.
    “Nowhere.”
    “When I saw you this morning…I was sure…”
    She waited, patient, as he framed the words.
    “Was sure,” he said, “I'd s-seen you before.”
    “I know that.”
    “Have I?”
    “Course not. I have never been to Helmouth and you have never been out of Helmouth.” She toed the sawdust and hung her head. “But I thought it too.” She watched him from the corners of her eyes. “You don't know what it means, do you?”
    “N—”
    “When you recognize somebody you've never seen before, it sometimes means you were with them in another life.”
    Joe breathed the dusty air. He looked down at his hands, which shone with a blue light that seemed to come from inside them.
    Corinna laughed.
    “Maybe we were tigers together,” she said. “Or elephants. Or a circus act way way back when it all started… Maybe we were each other's catcher, Joe. Maybe we were the greatest fliers the world had ever seen. Once, long long ago. You think it's nonsense.”
    In his head, Joe leaped through empty air with his arms outstretched. He looked into Corinna's eyes, eyes he knew he'd seen before.
    “No,” he said. “Not n-non—”
    “Whatever we think doesn't matter. If it's true, that we were together before, then it means there are things to do together in this life as well. And there'll be nothing we can do about it.”
    She giggled as one of the gray dogs in frocks scuttled under the edge of the tent and tottered to them on its hind legs. She scooped the dog into her arms and smiled.
    “Mebbe we were pretty little dancing dogs like you.”
    Her face fell.
    “I could