The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett Page B

as small as a child: the top of her head barely reached his nose and her figure was very slight. Sitting close to her in the car, though, always aware that she’d approached him, he saw that he’d missed the beauty of her eyes, her fine skin, and her wide, mobile mouth. Nor had he noticed, before, how sharply she observed those around her. On their rides, as she navigated the bumps and turns or steered around a frightened rabbit, she had something to say about all the other boarders at her mother’s house. This one looked worried, those two had quarreled, that one’s cough had changed. What, he wondered, did she say about him? Imagining her talking to Eudora, he began on Wednesdays to dress more carefully, tending to his fingernails and smoothing lotion on his hands.
    One afternoon, aware of her perched on the window seat as he listed geological periods, Permian, Devonian, Carboniferous, he stopped mid-sentence and started talking, instead, about how each of us possessed at least one gift. No matter how poorly we’d been educated, no matter how deprived our lives, we each had something worthy of sharing. “That’s why I started these sessions,” he said, walking toward the window. “I believe that absolutely. Look—”
    Swiftly he bent down, tugged away from Naomi the tablet of drawing paper she always had with her, and on which we’d seen her sketch our surroundings and sometimes our faces, and held it up. Leo and Ephraim side by side, an excellent likeness of both.
    â€œA perfect example,” Miles said. “Naomi’s gift, one of Naomi’s gifts, is the way she can draw anything.”
    She frowned and took the tablet back, flipping the pages to a drawing of roosting crows and wondering what else he thought he knew about her. He was studying her, she thought. As if she were a rock formation hiding a big skull. All month she’d felt his gaze following her as she dropped off laundry or picked up his library list, and often, now, despite the months when she’d been invisible to him, he looked at her intently and wanted to talk. His glances had prickled her skin as she sketched and she was almost sure he’d been eavesdropping on her and Eudora earlier, in the hall. She should have asked him for work simply, bluntly, instead of trying to charm him—why had she done that? On their last few drives she’d spoken little and answered his questions tersely, trying to act more like an employee than a companion, but he’d sensed nothing. Oblivious, like all the antiques: her mother, Eudora’s parents, Mr. Baum who sold her fabric and buttons, the fat geese who ran the village with their swollen middles and scrawny necks. All of them sure they knew how the world worked, unaware that their advice was useless and that they had nothing to say to her. What did they know about what she felt, what she needed, how the world was shimmering beyond these mountains, waiting for her to grasp it? They’d forgotten everything important about being alive.
    â€œAnd so,” Miles was saying, having swerved back to his original subject, “when you consider the comparative paucity of the fossil record…”
    Arrayed before him, we looked up obediently: more geese, Naomi thought. But we weren’t as stupid as she believed. We were people trying to learn something in a situation that offered little else, and at a time when we needed the distraction. That November, while Naomi was already trying to undo what she’d set in motion, also brought President Wilson’s reelection. Despite his campaign promises, no one really believed he’d be able to keep us out of the war much longer. November was the news from France, the battles at Verdun and the Somme just grinding to their end. It was rain and a new cook in the kitchen and two orderlies leaving; it was Morris and Pinkie back in the infirmary and Sam—age twenty-six, beloved first of Pearl