Silent to the Bone Read Online Free Page A

get her doctorate. She had a class on Thursday afternoons and was not scheduled to be home until four, the time the bus would normally drop me off. Unprepared for a two-and-a-half-mile trek across campus in the rain, I decided to walk the short distance to Schuyler Place, where I could call my mother and wait out of the rain.
    Margaret welcomed me as if I were a walk-in customer even though in her business there aren’t any walk-ins since everything is done by appointment. She told me to call my mother and tell her that she would drive me home as soon as she finished work. In the meantime, I should go on back and make myself at home. Which I did.
    I got into the habit of stopping at Schuyler Place every Thursday after school. In little ways Margaret let me know that she liked my company. She lay in a supply of after-school snacks, and she gave me a key to the back door, the one that opened the add-on living room. Even on the Thursdays when she was busy in the office, she would take time to come on back to say hi and to ask me how school was. And we both began to take it for granted that she would drive me home.
    After seeing Branwell at the Behavioral Center theday that he had chosen MARGARET, I decided to stop at her place and talk to her about him and tell her what I was trying to do.
    Margaret was tied up in the office, so I went to hang out in the add-on living room, as I usually did. I was glad to be left alone. If you’re a guy and not a girl, and you’re my age—just weeks past thirteen—you’re too old to have a baby-sitter but too young to be one. So to be left really alone is like a gift of civil rights.
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    I have mentioned that one of the things that Branwell and I have always had in common is that both of our fathers work at the university. My dad, Roderick Kane, is the registrar. He keeps the university records. He doesn’t teach. He is an administrator.
    Branwell’s dad, Dr. Stefan Zamborska, is a well-known geneticist. He is a doctor of philosophy, a Ph.D. He teaches one class a semester, but most of his time is spent in the Biotech Lab, working on the Genome Project. If you ask him what he does, Dr. Z will tell you that he is a map maker. And that is true. He is part of the team that is making a map of all the genes in the human body. Dr. Z is well-respected in his field. Which means that he is somewhat famous. Somewhat famous means that People magazine is notlikely to write a story about him, but The Journal of Genetic Research will print anything he has to say.
    Dr. Zamborska is admired by the people he works with, not only for the work he does but also for the kind of parent he is. He arranged for baby-sitters only when absolutely necessary, and most often the baby-sitter he asked was my half sister, Margaret.
    Margaret’s mother is another Ph.D.—there are always a lot of them around a university. She is a professor in the psychology department, where she supervises students who are getting master’s degrees. When Margaret was twelve years old, my mother was one of her mother’s graduate students. It doesn’t take advanced math to figure out how my father met my mother and how Margaret wound up being my half sister.
    Margaret was visiting Tower Hill Road the night that Mrs. Zamborska was killed. The accident happened on the Saturday night of a weekend when Dad had visiting privileges. My mother and father took Branwell in while Dr. Zamborska went to the hospital with his wife. Margaret always said that that was when she bonded with Branwell and began her career as his chief (and usually only ) baby-sitter.
    Margaret never baby-sat for my father, but she oftendid for Branwell’s. Her visits to our house were just that— visits. I like Margaret, and she likes me, but she doesn’t like my mother. I like my mother very much and can understand why my father prefers mine to hers, but I can also understand why Margaret doesn’t. I guess she