The Risen Read Online Free

to go elsewhere. Clothes, length of hair, where we could or could not go, Grandfather made those decisions.
    But our mother had a subversive streak. For years she read to us every night, though she sensed early on that Bill, by temperament as much as Grandfather’s influence, had little interest in what existed only in the imagination. She made sure our bedroom bookshelves held as much fiction as nonfiction. Twain and Poe and London, then Hemingway and Steinbeck. She loved nineteenth-century novels, especially Austen and Dickens, but the book she cherished most was Look Homeward, Angel, a novel set just fifty miles from Sylva . I suppose it was selfish on my part encouraging you toward literature, my mothertold me her last week alive, but it was as if your grandfather wished to erase any part of me in the both of you. He was a hard, intolerant man, overly pragmatic too, as such men almost always are. I wanted you and your brother to see there could be more within you, much more. And I succeeded, you first but eventually Bill too, though of course Leslie deserves more credit than I do. And yet, my mother said, if y ou had gone into medicine, your life . . .
    My mother had stopped there, the only sounds the beeps and wheezes of machines measuring her ebbing life. When I asked if she wanted me to read more Wolfe or Austen, my mother nodded no and closed her eyes for a few minutes. It had exhausted her, this speaking of matters not spoken of before. A final act of tidying up, much the same as she’d made sure the house was swept and mopped, counters cleared of clutter, before leaving to enter the hospital—that is how I’ve come to view those last days I spent with her. But she knew some things cannot be tidied up.
    That’s what novels so often get wrong, knowingly get wrong, my mother had said when she reopened her eyes. You make certain choices and you leave life never knowing if they were right or wrong. When your father died, I didn’t know how to go on. I knew raising Bill and you without himwould be harder, but what I couldn’t bear was how much I missed your father. I couldn’t escape that feeling, not even for a few minutes. I loved him that much. At night when you and Bill were in bed, I’d cry myself to sleep. When Bill was at school and you were napping, I’d cry then too. There were mornings my body felt such a gray heaviness, I could barely rise from the bed, and I kept thinking, Tomorrow will be better, but it wasn’t. So one day I told myself that I must act as though your father was never in my life, that I wouldn’t look at pictures of him or read letters he’d written me. I wouldn’t talk about him, and if someone else did, I’d change the subject. I talked about him to you and Bill but never told you of how much I loved him and how much I missed him, or how much of your father I saw in you and Bill. I feared if I spoke of it, especially to you two, I’d never be able to hold the loss in again. I’d lie in bed and never get up. But now I believe perhaps I should have, that the worst thing was not speaking of how much I loved him, because even though your father was no longer alive, you’d know the love that brought you into this world was still alive in me, and so a part of him had not died.
    When I’d reminded my mother that she had told me of that love on a rainy day in Asheville, she’d replied, Yes, and maybe too late, and not to Bill, only you. Maybe you were right not to have spoken of it before, I’d said. If youhad been overcome by it, unable to leave bed, Bill and I would have been raised by Grandfather. Yes, but we’ll never know, will we ? my mother responded, and nodded at the copy of Pride and Prejudice by her bedside. Austen knew these things. She understood why we need art.
    Yet my mother was only partly correct about our not knowing. There are some choices you make and you do know, ever afterward, to your last