Free The Live-Forever Machine by Kenneth Oppel Page B

mother.
    He started with the bookcases, feeling behind each row with his hand, searching for the photo album he had seen only once, years ago. Nothing. He burrowed through the desk drawers, like a thief searching for valuables. He rifled through the night table. Nothing. He opened the huge clothes trunk. Just looking at the wool sweaters made him hot, and when he turned through them, his skin crawled. He pulled up a chair to inspect the highest shelves of the closet. Nothing. Sweat dampened his back. He scuttled on his belly underneath the bed, like a giant beetle, pushing through stray books and dust-clotted debris.
    It wasn’t here. Where, then?
    He stepped out into the hallway and jumped for the cord handle that hung down from theceiling. The trap door swung out. He eased the wooden ladder all the way to the floor, latched it, and climbed up.
    It was exquisitely hot under the pitched roof. The air burned in his nostrils. A tiny dirt-streaked window in the ceiling let in some light, enough for him to see the cardboard boxes and plastic garbage bags piled up on all sides of the trap door. The boxes were all labelled in neat writing, like museum display cases: Linens, Winter Clothing, LPs, Christmas Decorations. Many were simply labelled with his mother’s name, and Eric guessed they held her clothing, jewellery—things his father couldn’t bear to get rid of.
    Most of the larger boxes were sealed with masking tape. Crouching over, Eric shifted them out of the way to see farther back into the attic. And there, pressed against the eaves, was a smaller box, folded closed, marked Photographs. He dragged it towards the ladder and pulled out the cardboard flaps.
    Inside was the photograph album. A few loose pictures slipped from between the pages as he lifted it out of the box. He balanced it on his pointy knees, opened the cover.
    There she was.
    He brought the album closer to his face, angling it so that the pictures caught morelight. She was slender, of medium height, with long, dark hair: nice-looking. In the first picture, she was with Dad, standing by a bridge with tall lamp posts. Trees and old stone buildings lined the far bank of the river. The Eiffel Tower stood in the background, outlined in neon. Dad was looking straight into the camera, smiling, but his mother was looking away at the Eiffel Tower, her face very still and serious, half-turned in profile. Eric felt his skin crawl. It was virtually the same pose as Gabriella della Signatura’s.
    Underneath the photo, in handwriting he’d never seen before—his mother’s, he guessed—it said “City of Light.” In the next picture, his mother was standing alone in front of a fountain with a winged statue at its centre. She was smiling, but her eyes were still solemn.
    He studied her face carefully, but couldn’t see any similarities to his own features. Maybe, he thought bitterly, if he’d looked more like her, Dad would have paid him more attention. Maybe. But he was built like Dad: same narrow bones, same skinny face.
    Eric flipped ahead through the album. There were more shots of Paris, and then some back here in the city, in places that he knew. His mother wasn’t smiling in most of the pictures; when she was, there was a forced look about it.
    Near the back of the album, she was pregnant, getting bigger; then, on a page by itself, was a picture of her, all slim again, a little tired-looking, sitting in the living room, holding a baby in her arms.
    That’s me, he realized.
    He waited for a surge of emotion, but it didn’t come. He didn’t feel as if he were part of the picture. He didn’t have any memory of being held like that. It was him, and yet it wasn’t him at all.
    In the photo, the living room looked exactly the same as it did now—not a piece of furniture out of place. Dad must have kept it like that on purpose. It wasn’t normal. Dad hadn’t even tried to forget her. More than that—he was doing all he could to remember. It didn’t make