Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Read Free Page B

bed.
    “He will have an heir.”
    “The murderer—”
    “— our murderer—”
    “—will have an heir.”
    “Our sister will grow heavy with his child.”
    They start toward the new queen, one on each side of the bed.
    “She will bear his child.”
    “She will not be our sister.”
    “She will be his.”
    “His forever.”
    The ghostly queens stand beside the bed, close enough to touch. The new queen grips her hands together, her knuckles turning white.
    “She is not his.”
    “She is ours.”
    “ Ours .”
    “She is our sister.”
    “He will not have her—”
    “—will not keep her—”
    “—we will not let him.”
    “Please,” the new queen whispers. “Please let me be.”
    When the servants find her in the morning, she is lying in a great, clotted darkness of blood. Her body is already cold.
    One month later, the king begins to look for his fourth wife.

Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day
    1.
    It is early morning, barely dawn. It rained all night, and it will be raining again soon. The air tastes green and fresh and heavy. The park is deserted. I walk along the path, carrying the teddy bear in my left hand, as if it were something as normal as a newspaper. Somewhere ahead of me, the Wall is waiting.
    2.
    It was July and raining; there was a thunderstorm working up. You’d been dead for three months. I was in my room; I was reading. One of the guys who had served with you came to your funeral. I can’t even remember his name, but he’d had both his legs amputated at the knee, and he was in a wheelchair. He was the only person who talked to me like I was old enough to understand what was going on. He gave me All Quiet on the Western Front and said, “This is about what happened to your brother and what happened to me.” I read it that night, and then I read it again, and then I went to the library, and I started reading like it was life. I read everything I could get my hands on, including a lot of stuff the librarians didn’t think a thirteen year old kid should be reading. But everybody in town knew about Dad, and Mom just said, “It’s educational, ain’t it?” and hung up the phone.
    That day I was reading A Separate Peace , lying on my bed with a headache throbbing in my eyes. It’d be another two years before anybody figured out I needed glasses. But the headache was all right; it was like the book and like what was happening in my mind. I heard a crash through the wall, from your room, a crash that felt like the Last Trump. I lay there for a moment, my tongue thick in my mouth and my heart banging in my chest, and then I got up and went out into the hall.
    Your door was open; it hadn’t been open since you’d gotten on the plane in Knoxville. I looked in. Mom was on her knees, leaning into your closet, throwing things into a big cardboard box. The crash had been your track trophy missing the box and breaking against the floor. The little running figure that had been on top of it was halfway across the room, lying hard and cold and helpless between the bed and the hall door, as if he’d been struck down trying to escape.
    “Mom?” I said.
    She sat back on her heels and pushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “Yes.”
    “What?”
    “Yes, I’m throwing out all his things. I refuse to have a goddamn shrine in my house for the rest of my life.” The glare she gave me was like a dog getting ready to bite. She wasn’t crying; she wasn’t anywhere close to crying. I knew she’d broken your trophy on purpose.
    “Mom, shouldn’t you—”
    “Get out,” she said.
    I stood there, the book still in my hand, one finger still marking my place. I stared at her.
    “Didn’t you hear me? Get out !”
    I went back to my room and closed the door. The thunder started about ten minutes later, and for a while it was like there was another war on, between Mom and the thunder. Everything of yours that was breakable, she broke.
    She dragged the cardboard box out to the curb in