Free The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo Page A

another. Pellegrina was very old. She had a large, sharp nose and bright, black eyes that shone like dark stars. It was Pellegrina who was responsible for Edward’s existence. It was she who had commissioned his making, she who had ordered his silk suits and his pocket watch, his jaunty hats and his bendable ears, his fine leather shoes and his jointed arms and legs, all from a master craftsman in her native France. It was Pellegrina who had given him as a gift to Abilene on her seventh birthday.
    And it was Pellegrina who came each night to tuck Abilene into her bed and Edward into his.
    “Will you tell us a story, Pellegrina?” Abilene asked her grandmother each night.
    “Not tonight, lady,” said Pellegrina.
    “When?” asked Abilene. “What night?”
    “Soon,” said Pellegrina. “Soon there will be a story.”
    And then she turned off the light, and Edward and Abilene lay in the dark of the bedroom.
    “I love you, Edward,” Abilene said each night after Pellegrina had left. She said those words and then she waited, almost as if she expected Edward to say something in return.
    Edward said nothing. He said nothing because, of course, he could not speak. He lay in his small bed next to Abilene’s large one. He stared up at the ceiling and listened to the sound of her breath entering and leaving her body, knowing that soon she would be asleep. Because Edward’s eyes were painted on and he could not close them, he was always awake.
    Sometimes, if Abilene put him into his bed on his side instead of on his back, he could see through the cracks in the curtains and out into the dark night. On clear nights, the stars shone, and their pinprick light comforted Edward in a way that he could not quite understand. Often, he stared at the stars all night until the dark finally gave way to dawn.



 
    A ND IN THIS MANNER, EDWARD’S days passed, one into the other. Nothing remarkable happened. Oh, there was the occasional small, domestic drama. Once, while Abilene was at school, the neighbor’s dog, a male brindled boxer inexplicably named Rosie, came into the house uninvited and unannounced and lifted his leg on the dining-room table, spraying the white tablecloth with urine. He then trotted over and sniffed Edward, and before Edward even had time to consider the implications of being sniffed by a dog, he was in Rosie’s mouth and Rosie was shaking him back and forth vigorously, growling and drooling.

    Fortunately, Abilene’s mother walked past the dining room and witnessed Edward’s suffering.
    “Drop it!” she shouted to Rosie.
    And Rosie, surprised into obedience, did as he was told.
    Edward’s silk suit was stained with drool and his head ached for several days afterward, but it was his ego that had suffered the most damage. Abilene’s mother had referred to him as “it,” and she was more outraged at the dog urine on her tablecloth than she was about the indignities that Edward had suffered at the jaws of Rosie.
    And then there was the time that a maid, new to the Tulane household and eager to impress her employers with her diligence, came upon Edward sitting on his chair in the dining room.
    “What’s this bunny doing here?” she said out loud.
    Edward did not care at all for the word bunny . He found it derogatory in the extreme.
    The maid bent over him and looked into his eyes.
    “Hmph,” she said. She stood back up. She put her hands on her hips. “I reckon you’re just like every other thing in this house, something needing to be cleaned and dusted.”
    And so the maid vacuumed Edward Tulane. She sucked each of his long ears up the vacuum-cleaner hose. She pawed at his clothes and beat his tail. She dusted his face with brutality and efficiency. And in her zeal to clean him, she vacuumed Edward’s gold pocket watch right off his lap. The watch went into the maw of the vacuum cleaner with a distressing clank that the maid did not even seem to hear.
    When she was done, she put the dining-room