Read The Cry of the Owl for Free Online

Aeronautics. For the last three months. I live at the Camelot Apartments.”
    “Why’d you leave New York? I should think—”
    “I wanted a change. A change of scene.”
    “That’s my only reason, too. I was earning more in Scranton. Everyone thought I was crazy leaving my job, but I was living at home and I thought I was getting pretty o-old for that,” she said with a shy smile.
    He was surprised, surprised to silence by her naïveté. When she drawled certain words, it was not for effect, but rather the way a child might drawl words, by accident or from habit. She must be in her early twenties, he thought, but she was like a girl much younger, an adolescent.
    She carried her coffee to the gate-leg table and set it on a dark-blue place mat. “Here’s an ashtray,” she said, pushing one on the table a couple of inches toward him. “Don’t you want to sit down?”
    “Thank you.” He sat down in the straight chair opposite her. Immediately, he wanted to get up again, to leave. He was ashamed, and he did not want the girl to see his shame. As soon as he finished the cigarette, he thought, he would go. He looked at her long, relaxed hand gently stirring her coffee with a teaspoon.
    “Do you believe in strange encounters?”
    He looked at her face. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean—accidents, I guess. Like my meeting you tonight. They’re in all great books. Well, not all, I suppose, but a lot of them. People who meet by accident are destined to meet. It’s so much more important than being introduced to someone, because that’s just a matter of someone else knowing them already and introducing youto them. I met Greg—he’s my fiancé—through Rita, at the bank where I work, but some of my closest friends I’ve met by accident.” She spoke slowly and steadily.
    “You mean—you believe in fate.”
    “Of course. And people represent things.” Her eyes looked distant and sad.
    “Yes,” he agreed vaguely, thinking that she had certainly represented something to him before he ever spoke to her. But now? She did not seem to have the wisdom, the common sense, perhaps, that he had attributed to her when he watched her through the window. “And what do I represent to you?”
    “I don’t know yet. But something. I’ll know soon. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.” She lifted her coffee cup at last and sipped. “The time I was depressed, there was a stranger in the house, a friend of my father’s staying with us a few days. I didn’t like him, and I felt he represented death. Then a week after he left, my little brother came down with spinal meningitis and then he died.”
    Robert stared at her, shocked to silence. Death was the last thing he’d expected her to talk of. And her words reminded him of his own dream, his damned recurrent dream.
    “What do I represent to you?” she asked.
    He cleared his throat, embarrassed. “A girl with a home, a job—a fiancé. A girl who’s happy and content.”
    She laughed, a slow, soft laugh. “I’ve never thought of myself as content.”
    “People never do, I suppose. It’s just the way you looked to me. I was feeling low and you looked happy to me. That’s why I liked tolook at you.” He did not feel he had to apologize or be ashamed of that any more. She wasn’t the kind of girl who’d assume he had been watching her undress. She seemed too innocent for that.
    “What were you depressed about?” she asked.
    “Oh, nothing that I can talk about.” He frowned. “None of this makes any sense unless I say that life is meaningless unless you’re living it for some other person. I was living for you since September—even though I didn’t know you.” He scowled at the table, feeling he had just delivered a minor Gettysburg Address. The girl was going to laugh, ignore it, or just say, “Um-hm.”
    She sighed. “I know what you mean. I really do.”
    He looked up from the table, solemn-faced. “You work at Humbert Corners?”
    “Yes, in the bank