Summer Light: A Novel Read Free Page B

her, could just go away, and it made her stomach hurt so much, she had to hold her breath.
    Kylie stared at the giant-father. Although he was so large, he was very handsome. He had bristly brownish-gray hair with blue eyes that looked so sad to Kylie she wondered why people seemed to be laughing every time he opened his mouth. The stewardess laughed, the other hockey players laughed, the pretty blond lady in the shiny black stockings laughed.
    “If you don’t help,” the angel warned, “I’ll disappear. I won’t talk to you anymore.”
    “There are other angels,” Kylie said.
    “But I have something really, really good to tell you…help me or I’ll go. I really will….”
    “I don’t even know what you want me to do,” Kylie pleaded.
    “Stop talking,” Kylie’s mother begged. “Kylie, honey, there’s no one there.”
    “Mommy, there is,” Kylie whispered.
    But when she looked back, the little angel was gone. The man was staring instead, peering through the crack in the curtain. Kylie almost jumped—his eyes were so big, and they looked exactly like the angel’s. Looking up, Kylie saw Mommy frowning at the man. For some crazy reason, the man started to smile.
    Kylie glanced out the window. Bits of fog were covering the ground, so she knew they were getting near the sea, closer to home. Just then, she heard a snap. It sounded like boys at school sticking their fingers in their mouths and making their cheeks pop. Conversations paused for a second, but nothing happened and people resumed talking. The plane’s lights flickered once, but no one seemed to notice. The plane just kept flying, the engines buzzing.
    “People are going to get hurt, aren’t they?” Kylie asked her mother.
    Mommy blinked. She stared at Kylie for a long time, her head tilted a little. Her eyebrows grew closer together, forming a small valley of worry between them.
    “Plane crash,” Kylie said.
    “Kylie,” her mother said. “Stop.”
    Kylie had seen crashes on TV—fire and smoke and people screaming. Closing her eyes, she could see it now: All the people on this flight would be grabbing each other, crying for their mommies and daddies, trying to wish the plane back into the sky.
    “I wish my daddy—” Kylie started to say. She would have finished with “was here,” but her mother interrupted her with a firm hand on Kylie’s upper arm.
    “I mean it,” Mommy whispered, her eyes bright and her voice scratchy. Tears puddled over her mother’s lashes and spilled down her cheeks. Kylie watched the drops, wanting to kneel up and kiss them off. Her seat belt strained across her lap, and she couldn’t get there. “I can’t stand it,” her mother said, wiping the tears herself. “I’m tired. I don’t want to hear another word about angels, plane crashes, or your father. Do you hear me?”
    Kylie watched Mommy’s throat moving, as if a rock was caught there and she was trying to swallow it down. The more her mother wiped her tears, the faster they came. Kylie craned her neck for the girl angel up front, but she couldn’t see her anymore.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” Kylie announced.
    Her mother exhaled. Very patiently, she undid her own seat belt, then Kylie’s.
    “I can go myself,” Kylie told her.
    “I’ll take you,” Mommy said.
    “I’m big,” Kylie insisted. Maybe if she did what that little angel had asked, helped her kiss her father, maybe she would save the whole plane. “I can do it.”
    “Okay,” Mommy said.

    May watched Kylie look back, then forward. Assessing the length of the line to use the bathroom at the rear of the plane, she—smart girl!—brushed through the curtain to use one up front in business class. Tilting her head, May kept her eye on her. She watched until Kylie had asked the flight attendant to open the door, and then she relaxed. She needed this moment to compose herself.
    She talks to angels, May thought. She’s only six, she’s crazy, she’s not clairvoyant at all,