View From a Kite Read Online Free

was like a rainbow, with fragments of flowers, and bunnies in bonnets, and candle-lit birthday cakes crinkling in the wind. We took it to Dominion Beach and he ran along the sand in his bare feet, stubbing his toes on rocks and cursing, glancing back over his shoulder to see if it had taken off yet. Eventually it went so high we had no more string and I couldn’t hold it, we had to hang on to it together. It flew out over the hungry licking ocean. I was screaming with excitement, scared it would fall in the water and be eaten by the waves.
    â€œImagine the view!” he kept yelling. “Imagine what it looks like from up there, Gwennie! You could see for hundreds of miles!” Then he stumbled, and there was only me to hang on. It lifted me off my feet.
    â€œLet go! Let go!” shrieked my mother from where she sat, sideways in the front passenger seat, feet on the ground, stockings rolled down and her dress lifted past her knees to let the air circulate. I let go, and the earth smacked me and the kite twisted out of sight.
    â€œGone to heaven,” he said, before I could think about crying. “It’s taking all the bad luck away, Gwen. In China they have a special ceremony called Driving Away the Devil; they fly kites and then turn them loose so they carry away all the bad luck.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t have made such a big kite,” my mother came puffing up, cross as blazes. “Gwen might have been dragged into the water and drowned!”
    â€œHorse feathers,” he said. “She’s too lucky for that. We’ll make another one,” he added, sensing that I wasn’t quite ready to trade good luck for my wonderful kite.
    Gradually we acquired a shelf of kite makings: scraps of spinnaker cloth tightly woven, as brilliant as my favorite crayons; bamboo that he split into lath; softwood dowelling an eighth of an inch thick and as straight as could be found. Glue, X-acto knives, fine twine he got from a fishing supply outfit, an eyeleter and a box of silver eyelets I liked to stir up and trickle through my fingers. He made me a butterfly kite for my seventh birthday, and a bird with chimes for my eighth. He made box kites, double-bowed kites, a series of circles in a row to make a caterpillar. We sent payloads up the string: parachutes on a paper clip that popped off when they hit a knot close to the top and drifted back to the ground; bags of confetti that burst apart and scattered to the wind. I took pieces of paper with my birthday wish written in invisible ink and attached them with tiny pieces of Scotch tape, so the wind could pluck them off and send them to heaven.
    That was Robert, that was him, back when he was my father.
    A few months before my eleventh birthday we went to the Bell museum in Baddeck and gazed spellbound at the huge photographs and the tetrahedral bits and pieces hung from the ceiling. Then we went home, in a kite-making fever, and started making cells to have the best, biggest kite ever ready for my birthday. But his quiet sits in the dark got longer and longer and then he went into the hospital for a rest. I finished the kite myself, then hung it in my room. It took up too much space and collected dust. My mother nagged about it every time she came in to clean, but I wouldn’t let her take it down. I guess I was waiting for him to come back. He came home after a month, with a lot of pills, and went to bed to rest some more. The man who flew kites never came back, and then the kite was too big and in the way and covered with dust and I needed the space to hang my mobile of beach glass and sand dollars. I took the kite down, I don’t know where it went.

CHAPTER 4
    Doctor Robichaud is sitting behind his desk, protected by walnut veneer, piles of papers, his white coat, and a rack of coloured pens. He clears his throat and says, “We think you originally contracted tuberculosis when you were a small child. We’ve got hold of the