African terrorist deep Lin第二节.docVIP

Chapter 29 　　The first time I saw him, I was too frightened to say anything and too awestruck to touch him. He was not a freak or a devil, but perfect in every way, a beautiful boy. After the long wait to meet him, I found myself overcome by the sudden change, not so much his physical presence, his arrival after being hidden away, but the change in me to something more sublimely human. Tess smiled at my confusion and the look in my eyes as I beheld him.　　You wont break him, she said.　　My son. Our child. Ten fingers, ten toes. Good color, great lungs, a natural at the breast. I held him in my arms and remembered the twins in their matching yellow jumpers, my mother singing to me as she scrubbed my back in the bathtub, my father holding my hand when we climbed the bleachers at an autumn football game. Then I remembered Clara, my first mother, how I loved to crawl under the billows of her skirts, and the scent of witch hazel on my father Abrams cheek, his feathery moustache as he pressed his lips against my skin. I kissed our boy and considered the ordinary miracle of birth, the wonder of my wife, and was grateful for the human child.　　We named him Edward, and he thrived. Born two weeks before Christmas 1970, he became our darling boy, and over those first few months, the three of us settled into the house that Mom and Charlie had bought for us in the new development up in the woods. At first, I could not bear the thought of living there, but they surprised us on our second anniversary, and with Tess pregnant and the bills mounting, I could not say no. The house was larger than we needed, especially before the baby came, and I built a small studio, moving in the old piano. I taught music to seventh graders and ran the student orchestra at Mark Twain Middle School, and in the evenings and on weekends, when I didnt have to mind the baby, I worked on my music, dreaming of a composition that evoked the flow of one life into another.　　For inspiration, I would sometimes