The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I spotted the dusty flash of blue.
    —Look, I said, edging away. I’m just—
    The old man was watching me with a gaze at once hopeful and hopeless, like a starved dog too weak to walk.
    —No—wait. I’m coming back.
    Like a drunk, I staggered through the rubbish—weaving and plowing, stepping high-kneed over objects, muddling through bricks and concrete and shoes and handbags and a whole lot of charred bits I didn’t want to see too closely.
    The bottle was three quarters full and hot to the touch. But at the first swallow my throat took charge and I’d gulped more than half of it—plastic-tasting, dishwater warm—before I realized what I was doing and forced myself to cap it and put it in the bag to take back to him.
    Kneeling beside him. Rocks digging into my knees. He was shivering, breaths rasping and uneven; his gaze didn’t meet mine but strayed above it, fixed fretfully on something I didn’t see.
    I was fumbling for the water when he reached his hand to my face. Carefully, with his bony old flat-pad fingers, he brushed the hair from my eyes and plucked a thorn of glass from my eyebrow and then patted me on the head.
    “There, there.” His voice was very faint, very scratchy, very cordial, with a ghastly pulmonary whistle. We looked at each other, for a longstrange moment that I’ve never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was—and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.
    Then he lolled back again, so limply I thought he was dead.—“Here,” I said, awkwardly, slipping my hand under his shoulder. “That’s good.” I held up his head as best I could, and helped him drink from the bottle. He could only take a little and most of it ran down his chin.
    Again falling back. Effort too much.
    “Pippa,” he said thickly.
    I looked down at his burnt, reddened face, stirred by something familiar in his eyes, which were rusty and clear. I had seen him before. And I had seen the girl too, the briefest snapshot, an autumn-leaf lucidity: rusty eyebrows, honey-brown eyes. Her face was reflected in his. Where was she?
    He was trying to say something. Cracked lips working. He wanted to know where Pippa was.
    Wheezing and gasping for breath. “Here,” I said, agitated, “try to lie still.”
    “She should take the train, it’s so much faster. Unless they bring her in a car.”
    “Don’t worry,” I said, leaning closer. I wasn’t worried. Someone would be in to get us shortly, I was sure of it. “I’ll wait till they come.”
    “You’re so kind.” His hand (cold, dry as powder) tightening on mine. “I haven’t seen you since you were a little boy again. You were all grown up the last time we spoke.”
    “But I’m Theo,” I said, after a slightly confused pause.
    “Of course you are.” His gaze, like his handclasp, was steady and kind. “And you’ve made the very best choice, I’m sure of it. The Mozart is so much nicer than the Gluck, don’t you think?”
    I didn’t know what to say.
    “It’ll be easier the two of you. They’re so hard on you children in the auditions—” Coughing. Lips slick with blood, thick and red. “No second chances.”
    “Listen—” It felt wrong, letting him think I was someone else.
    “Oh, but you play it so beautifully, my dear, the pair of you. TheG major. It keeps running through my mind. Lightly, lightly, touch and go—”
    Humming a few shapeless notes. A song. It was a song.
    “… and I must have told you, how I went for piano lessons, at the old Armenian lady’s? There was a green lizard that lived in the palm tree, green like a candy drop, I loved to watch for him… flashing on the windowsill… fairy lights in the garden… du pays saint … twenty minutes to walk it but it seemed like miles…”
    He faded for a minute; I could feel his