The Breath of Suspension Read Online Free Page B

smiled. “I rather liked that.” She turned and, without a backward look, walked into the darkness toward her house.
    I headed back toward the Infirmary, fingers and toes tingling. The moon was now shining full silver, coating the bare trees.
    My return path took me past the spot at the base of the knoll where the boys had attacked Aya. There were no traces of the scuffle in the sand. The scene, with its dull-faced black-booted farm boys and its tormented cripple in their center, had receded in my mind to a medieval painting, a side panel to the Crucifixion... or a scene in the life of a saint.
    I stood and looked up at the knoll. With a tightening of my scalp, I saw the silhouette of a figure sitting thoughtfully at its top. In the moonlight that ominous twisted shape showed me something of what the boys had feared, for I recognized Aya Ngomo.
    “Good evening, Aya.” She had heard me clambering up the hill, and was not at all surprised to see me. That should have told me something.
    “Hello, Vikram.” She looked past my shoulder at the stars. “Have you ever wanted to float away into the sky? Just to drift between the stars?”
    I thought about holding my breath and slowly rising through the clouds. But it didn’t even occur to me to tell her about it; this was something so private I had never articulated it.
    “There are too many places to travel on this Earth,” I said instead. “I’ve only seen a few of them myself.”
    “Oh? We’re stuck here in the dunes of Michigan. What lies outside?” Her tone was faintly mocking, not at all what a crippled girl’s should have been. All these young ladies were too wise. “What wonders have you seen, Vikram?”
    Her tone was interrogative in a way I didn’t like. I didn’t feel like admitting that Milwaukee was my big trip, and somehow the story I had told Laurena about Chicago seemed inadequate to Aya’s attention.
    “Boston,” I said. I’d read enough about the capital of Russian New England to fake a visit there. And I’d always intended to go.
    “Really?” The romantic name excited her. “Then you can tell me about the new Cathedral they’re building there. What does the bell tower look like?”
    Bell tower? What a question! “Russian Second Empire,” I said. It seemed reasonable. I knew the Boston Public Library was built in that style, just across Copley Square from the Cathedral.
    She frowned. “I thought they were using the remains of an old skyscraper to hang the bells—that’s what’s so interesting about it. I must have misunderstood....” Her eyes were on me. I don’t think Aya really saw the truth someone was concealing, though it often seemed that way. Instead, the way she looked at you reminded you that you yourself knew the truth, even if she didn’t, and made you ashamed for not speaking it.
    “Why are you sitting out here, Aya?”
    “I was waiting for you.” Aya told the truth herself, though not always all of it. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that she had understood my rendezvous with Laurena and had positioned herself to catch me on my return from it. “I wanted to show you something.”
    Despite the sudden weariness that I felt, the sense that the world was too complicated and difficult to deal with, I sat down next to her on the cold ground. “What is it, Aya?”
    “My mother died when I was born. My father not long after, both, I think, from the same disease that makes me what I am.” She didn’t give me time to speak some standard commiseration but rushed on. “But before he died, he told me a story. At least I remember it as being him. Perhaps it was just a dream. The sort of vision that comes to someone with a distorted nervous system.”
    Remember this, Thomas. Aya Ngomo never had a vision that she did not attribute to some physical cause. Of course, the Lord performs His miracles through the universe He Himself has created, and thus can use a congenitally defective nervous system to convey His