Teresa had stood in this exact same place in front of the house on Divisadero Street hundreds of times. She had felt the concrete beneath her bare feet, she had worked in the yard where the new owners had planted lettuce and yellow summer squash. It was still early, and no one in the house noticed that Teresa was standing outside, but it was clear they were now waking up; slowly the lights were switched on in every room. The wind was moving off the river, it reached out for miles and brought with it the promise of cool water. And if Teresa half closed her eyes she could see through the windows into the rooms beyond the glass. She could see Dina walking along the upstairs hallway, carrying a pad of violet note paper with her so that she could go into her bedroom and write a long letter to Bergen. She could see King Connors and Reuben, each of them dreaming about southern California, a place where there were lemon trees and the past was no farther away than the day before. And then she saw Silver. Not the man who had passed her only a few hours before on the River Road, but the boy he used to be. He was at the window, up on the second floor, trapped behind the glass.
And for a moment the air was thick with all of those nights Teresa had waited, nights when she believed that she and Silver were tied together with string, forced to ride on the back of a white horse forever, fated to wander through the desert at midnight, searching for oranges and water and a few pale hours of peace. He was still up there; there on the second floor he was forever the same, just as Teresa had always imagined him, caught in a house that now belonged to someone else, trapped behind a pane of glass that always trembled at this time of year when the wind rose off the river, and the nights were filled with a thousand stars, and the wisteria Dina had planted outside the door so long ago had just begun to bloom.
On that morning, when the sky was the color of pearls and the scent of the river traveled from one house to another all over town, Teresa listened carefully for the sound of crickets, but the only sound she heard was the one made by the boy running his fingernails along the pane of glass. Teresa stared upward, and she let them go, one by one—Dina and Reuben and King Connors, and finally, Silver. They slowly unraveled right before her eyes, until no one was left. Up in those rooms where they had slept for so long, nothing moved behind the glass; the windows were open, but it was only the thin curtains that waved back and forth, and by the time Teresa had turned away from the house, all of the windows were dark.
About the Author
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. She wrote her first novel, Property Of, while studying creative writing at Stanford University, and since then has published more than thirty books for readers of all ages, including the recent New York Times bestsellers The Museum of Extraordinary Things and The Dove keepers. Two of her novels, Practical Magic and Aquamarine, have been made into films, and Here on Earth was an Oprah’s Book Club choice. All told, Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty languages and one hundred foreign editions. She lives outside of Boston.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion there of in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Alice Hoffman
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5241-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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