sewtness in my life

Wading through the diapers, Shelley poked her finger into my chest and was about to say something dour when the PA system interrupted her. Jacob, you have a call on line two. Jacob, line two. She glared at me as I backed away, leaving her pomegranatefaced amid the ruins of my tower. Maybe he stepped out, Ricky said, grinning. Hot date. Go ahead and laugh, I said. Hes got a better shot than we do any night of the week. This place is crawling with eligible widows. I joked only to calm my nerves. The quiet made me anxious. I fetched the extra key from its hiding place in the bushes. Wait here. Hell I am. Why Because youre sixfive and have green hair and my grandfather doesnt know you and owns lots of guns. Ricky shrugged and stuck another wad of tobacco in his cheek. He went to stretch himself on a lawn chair as I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. My grandfather lay facedown in a bed of creeper, his legs sprawled out and one arm twisted beneath him as if hed fallen from a great height. I thought surely he was dead.

His undershirt was soaked with blood, his pants were torn, and one shoe was missing. For a long moment I just stared, the beam of my flashlight shivering across his body. When I could breathe again I said his name, but he didnt move. I sank to my knees and pressed the flat of my hand against his back. The blood that soaked through was still warm. I could feel him breathing ever so shallowly. Even though the dream was always the same and wed been over it a hundred times, Dr. Golan still made me describe it in every session. Its like he was crosamining my subconscious, looking for some clue he might have missed the ninetyninth time around. And in the dream, whats your grandfather saying The same stuff as always, I said. About the bird and the loop and the grave. His last words. I nodded. Dr. Golan tented his fingers and pressed them to his chin, the very picture of a thoughtful brainshrinker. Any new ideas about what they might mean Yeah. Jack and shit.

Come on. You dont mean that. I wanted to act like I didnt care about the last words, but I did. Theyd been eating away at me almost as much as the nightmares. I felt like I owed it to my grandfather not to dismiss the last thing he said to anyone in the world as delusional nonsense, and Dr. Golan was convinced that understanding them might help purge my awful dreams. So I tried. I looked at my aunt, a question on my face that I didnt quite know how to ask. She managed a weak smile and said, I found it in your grandfathers desk when we were cleaning out the house. He wrote your name in the front. I think he meant for you to have it. God bless Aunt Susie. She had a heart after all. Neat. I didnt know your grandpa was a reader, my mom said, trying to lighten the mood. That was thoughtful. Yes, said my dad through clenched teeth. Thank you, Susan. I opened the book. Sure enough, the title page bore an inscription in my grandfathers shaky handwriting. I got up to leave, afraid I might start crying in front of everyone, and something slipped out from between the pages and fell to the floor. I bent to pick it up. It was a letter. Emerson. The letter. I felt the blood drain from my face.

My mother leaned toward me and in a tense whisper asked if I needed a drink of water, which was Momspeak for keep it together, people are staring. I said, I feel a little, uh and then, with one hand over my stomach, I bolted to my room. * * * The letter was handwritten on fine, unlined paper in looping script so ornate it was almost calligraphy, the black ink varying in tone like that of an old fountain pen. It read: As promised, the writer had enclosed an old snapshot. I held it under the glow of my desk lamp, trying to read some detail in the womans silhouetted face, but there was none to find. The image was so strange, and yet it was nothing like my grandfathers pictures. There were no tricks here. It was just a womana woman smoking a pipe. It looked like Sherlock Holmess pipe, curved and drooping from her lips. My eyes kept coming back to it. Was this what my grandfather had meant for me to find Yes, I thought, it has to benot the letters of Emerson, but a letter, tucked inside Emersons book.

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But who was this headmistress, this Peregrine woman I studied the envelope for a return address but found only a fading postmark that read Cairnholm Is., Cymru, UK. UKthat was Britain. I knew from studying atlases as a kid that Cymru meant Wales. Cairnholm Is had to be the island Miss Peregrine had mentioned in her letter. Could it have been the same island where my grandfather lived as a Nine months ago hed told me to find the bird. Nine years ago he had sworn that the s home where hed lived was protected by oneby a bird who smoked a pipe. At age seven Id taken this statement literally, but the headmistress in the picture was smoking a pipe, and her name was Peregrine, a kind of hawk. What if the bird my grandfather wanted me to find was actually the woman whod rescued himthe headmistress of the s home Maybe she was still on the island, after all these years, old as dirt but sustained by a few of her wards, whod grown up but never left.

For the first time, my grandfathers last words began to make a strange kind of sense. He wanted me to go to the island and find this woman, his old headmistress. If anyone knew the secrets of his childhood, it would be her. But the envelopes postmark was fifteen years old. Was it possible she was still alive I did some quick calculations in my head: If shed been running a s home in 1939 and was, say, twentyfive at the time, then shed be in her late nineties today. So it was possiblethere were people older than that in Englewood who still lived by themselves and droveand even if Miss Peregrine had passed away in the time since shed sent the letter, there might still be people on Cairnholm who could help me, people who had known Grandpa Portman as a kid. People who knew his secrets.