How I Live Now Read Free Page A

and a burning cigarette in one hand and some kind of striped Turkish slippers on his feet, and he said Come on we're going fishing.
    And I forgot to say I hate fishing, and fish too now that you mention it, and instead pulled myself out from under my blankets and put on some clothes without washing or anything and next thing I knew Edmond and Isaac and Piper and I were sitting in the jeep and bumping down a bumpy old road and the sun was streaming in the windows and it felt much nicer than usual to be alive even if it meant a bunch of fish were going to have to die.
    Edmond was driving with the rest of us crammed into the front seat and not wearing seat belts because there weren't any and Piper singing a song I'd never heard before with a funny jagged melody and her voice as pure as an angel.
    We got to a place by a river and parked the jeep and got out and Isaac carried all the fishing stuff, and Edmond brought lunch and a blanket to lie on and although the day wasn't very warm, I made a nest for myself by trampling down a little patch in the tall grass and put the blanket down and lay very still and as the sun rose up in the sky I warmed up even more and all I could hear was the sound of Edmond talking in a steady low stream of conversation to the fish, and Piper singing her odd song, and the occasional splash of the river or a bird rising into the air near us and singing its heart out.
    I was thinking about almost nothing except that bird and then Edmond was next to my ear whispering Skylark, and I just nodded, knowing it was futile to ask how he knew the answers to questions you hadn't even got around to asking yet. Then he handed me a hot cup of tea from the thermos and disappeared again back to the fishing.
    No one caught much of anything, except Piper who caught a trout and threw it back (Piper always throws fish back, said Edmond, and Isaac said nothing as usual). I couldn't have been happier as long as I didn't sit up because there was a coldish wind, so I lay there all dreamy and thought about Aunt Penn, and my life so far, and got a little bit of a flashback of what it was like to be happy.
    It was times like this when I let my guard down for something like half a nanosecond, that Mom had a habit of strolling into my brain. Even though she was dead, which made people put on this sickening pious kind of face and say Oh I'm SO sorry, like it was their fault and in fact if everyone wasn't so busy apologizing all the time about asking a perfectly normal question like Where's your mother? I might have managed to get more information out of someone than just She Died To Give You Life, which is the party line on Good Old Mom.
    It's a shame, starting out your first day on the planet as a murderer but there you go, I didn't have much choice at the time. Still, I could live quite happily without the labels I picked up because of it. Murderer or Poor Motherless Lamb.
    Which one would you choose, the rock or the hard place?
    Dad was one of those Never Mention Her Name Again type of fathers which if you ask me was extremely un-psychologically correct of him. Leah's father worked on Wall Street and shot himself one day when he lost $600 million of someone else's money and they never shut up about him in their house. Which, as Leah likes to point out, is not the perfect answer either.
    I sometimes wished someone would just fill me in on the simple boring things like did she have big feet or wear makeup and what was her favorite song and did she like dogs or have a nice voice and what books did she read etc. I made up my mind to ask Aunt Penn some of these questions when she came back from Oslo but I guess what you really want to know are the things you can't ask like Did she have eyes like yours and When you pushed my hair back was that what it feels like to have your mother do it and Did her hands look serious and quiet like yours and Did she ever have a chance to look at me with a complicated expression like the one on your