The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [144]
Phoebe still thought about Faith, of course, but remembering her sister had become a calmer experience. She was gone. The gap between them would be impossible to cross, and it seemed to Phoebe now that her sister was the loser for it. She would miss everything—Faith, who loved so much to be at the center of action.
And yet. And yet.
What came to Phoebe now, looking down at the city and bay, was a day when her whole family, even her parents, had played hide-and-seek by a field in Golden Gate Park. A sunlit afternoon, an oceany wind, glimmers of moisture on every leaf. Faith hid first. They all split up to look, Phoebe poking through the pinecones and eucalyptus leaves with a stick, then wobbling among the bushes surrounding the field, not expecting to find Faith—Phoebe was four years old at the most, too little yet to win these games, or even really compete.
Yet to her own surprise, Phoebe parted a clump of bushes and there sat Faith in a tiny clearing. She was grinning from ear to ear. “You found me,” she whispered. “You won!” But instead of calling out to everyone else and ending the round, Faith had taken Phoebe’s hand and guided her to the soft place where she sat. They waited together, hiding, Phoebe folded in her sister’s lap surrounded by her breath and heartbeat and warm long hair. She felt the cross-hatching of sun and shadow on her face, smelled rainsoaked earth and eucalyptus leaves and was overwhelmed by an almost unbearable happiness. She’d won the game.
Phoebe squirmed to look up at Faith, but her sister’s eyes were attuned to movement outside the branches, where the rest of the family was looking for them. A trickle of flute music reached her, faint, meandering, and something had risen in Phoebe, a joyous belief that at any time her plain surroundings might part to reveal this radiant, hidden place. And Faith would be there, waiting for Phoebe to climb into her lap.
JENNIFER EGAN
Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, The Keep, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Books by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad
The Keep
Look at Me
Emerald City and Other Stories
The Invisible Circus
BOOKS BY JENNIFER EGAN
EMERALD CITY
These eleven masterful stories—the first collection from acclaimed author Jennifer Egan—deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters—models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls—are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations. Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City are seamless evocations of self-discovery.
Fiction/978-0-307-38753-0
THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS
In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest that yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith’s lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan’s remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.
Fiction/978-0-307-38752-3
THE KEEP
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle