The Other Son Read Free Page B

to the square. The man who got off the bike was short and had a rucksack on his back. He sat down at a free table next to Eduardo and nodded when their eyes met. The man was pale, with cropped hair, and there was something familiar about his eyes….
    Eduardo smiled at him and went on reading his paper. He found the list of international league tables, scanned it, and frowned at Málaga’s lack of progress. He didn’t want to have to support Barca or Real; for him it was Málaga or nothing.
    A gust of wind swept across the square, catching the top edge of the paper and folding it down, fluttering silently.
    At the same moment, he heard the ticking sound of the bicycle. Eduardo looked up at the cyclist who left on his bike and disappeared. Eduardo turned his attention to the paper again.
    Then an image forced its way into Eduardo’s consciousness, an image of the cyclist. An image telling him that something wasn’t right, that something was missing. His gaze moved to the table where the man had just been sitting. What had he seen? Had the man looked smaller when he left? Was something missing? Had he forgotten something? A jacket? No, something else. He leaned over. The rucksack was there under the chair. But it seemed alive somehow. As if Eduardo could see something that wasn’t visible, some sort of life inside it that would soon make the rucksack move.
    —
    The speed of a feeling is perhaps slightly quicker than the speed of light. So Eduardo had time to feel a nanosecond of gratitude. A brief but warm and intense feeling of gratitude that the hand of God had led his two beloved sons away from the hopeless situation that engulfed him in that instant and blew him to pieces.
    The heat from the brutal, intense explosion vaporized everything in the vicinity.
    Everything that had previously been Eduardo Garcia vanished into infinite nothingness.

The underground train rushed through the tunnel.
    The train car was half-full of passengers. Most were busy with their cell phones. A few were talking quietly among themselves. Some were staring into space. A woman a few seats away from Sophie was talking on her phone, conducting a character assassination of a friend in an innocent voice.
    Sophie leaned her head against the cold glass.
    She wanted to call someone and just talk. About nothing. Just be ordinary. But that was impossible, because she wasn’t ordinary.
    Sometimes she forced her way back into it. Into being
ordinary
. As if to provide herself with an alibi. Only temporarily, often to dinners where ordinary people got drunk, where ordinary men got too close and sought ordinary or not-so-ordinary attention, affirmation perhaps, possibly just love. She could never figure it out.
    And no one questioned her right to be or not to be in that world. All the
ordinary
people treated her with a mixture of distance, consideration, and exaggerated respect. She, Sophie, the widow with a son in a wheelchair; the label had become her defense. And that was how she wanted it, to protect Albert and herself. Isolated, no close ties, nothing but a shell, impersonal in a personable way—anything to stop people from wondering and asking questions.
    At Östermalmstorg she got off and walked through the streets around Stureplan for a while, checking she wasn’t being followed. Then she hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address in the city center.
    As they approached the roundabout at Sergels torg she leaned forward.
    “Hang on,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. Can you go around the roundabout twice, then head up Sveavägen toward Frescati?”
    The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Sure, lady. No problem.”
    Sophie turned around and looked out the rear window. As usual, no one was following her. Sophie faced front again. She was constantly on her guard.
    Outside: traffic, people, cars, and an indistinct reflection of herself in the window. Sophie looked away.
    The taxi stopped at Kräftriket by some handsome old