Awake and Dreaming - Kit Pearson [8]
Rae always wanted Theo to watch TV with her when she was home, but Theo turned if off as soon as her mother left for work. She would read every evening until her book was finished, or until her eyes felt so gritty she had to stop and go to sleep.
Theo had found out about books two years ago. Rae only read the magazines that restaurant cutomers left behind, and she had never read to Theo.
But Theo had a faint memory of sitting on someone’s knee, looking at pictures of Peter Rabbit and Wild Things and a cat called Zoom while a kind voice told her about them. That must have been at her grandmother’s house in Victoria, before she turned three and went to live with Rae in Vancouver.
After that there were no more stories for years. But in grade two, after she’d learned to read, Theo had picked up a book called Charlotte’s Web in her classroom. She began it in free reading time, carried on secretly on her lap behind her desk, and finished it after she’d sneaked it home. She and Rae were in between apartments then, living at a shelter.
Theo had sat in a corner away from the other kids. She wept inside herself as the brave spider said goodbye and died. Those days immersed in Charlotte’s Web were like living in a brightly lit, safe room, like the fragrant warm barn where Charlotte and Wilbur lived.
From then on Theo escaped to that bright world whenever she could. Each of her schools had a library. At first Theo read the first book she grabbed from the shelf. She devoured picture books about George and Martha, chapter books about freckle juice and fried worms, and facts about building igloos and about faraway countries like India. Then one day she picked up Thumbelina and for a whole year she read nothing but fairy tales—thin and fat volumes about Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty and the Seven Swans.
Now her favourites were stories about families or stories about magic. Perfect books combined both, like the Narnia chronicles about four children who visited a magic land, or Half Magic, where a family found a coin that granted them half of each wish.
Theo knew the families in these books as well as if they were her own sisters and brothers. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in Little Women, Pauline, Petrova and Posy in Ballet Shoes, John, Susan, Titty and Roger in the “Swallows and Amazons” series …
Outside the window a siren wailed. Someone smashed a bottle and a man’s voice cursed. This was the scariest time of Theo’s evenings alone. After she finished reading, she couldn’t help thinking that someone might climb in the window, or that the rustling noises in the kitchen weren’t mice, but some kind of monster under the sink. Even if she had to pee, she couldn’t make herself get up this late; what if something was waiting in the bathroom to grab her? Sometimes she would wet the bed and Rae would yell at her in the morning.
If only Calico Cat were curled up on the end of her bed. Calico Cat had really belonged to the man down the hall in their last apartment. But many evenings she had come in Theo’s window and visited her, her elegant body twisting around Theo’s feet and purring. But when the landlord had raised the rent, they had had to leave that apartment, as they’d left so many. Did Calico Cat miss her? wondered Theo.
She clutched her old doll. Sabrina’s hair stood up in matted tufts all over her balding head. Her dirty rubber body smelled and she had a hole in one arm, carefully patched with a bandage. Her dress had once been pink but was now a stained grey.
But her blue eyes still opened and shut. Theo had had her for as long as she could remember. “It’s all right, Sabrina,” she whispered. “Don’t be scared.”
If she lay very still, she could usually escape into her going-to-sleep vision—what she would do if someone granted her a wish. If there really was magic, like a Psammead or a magic coin, Theo knew exactly what she’d wish for …
There would be four children, two boys and two girls. She