Free The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel by Daniel Stern

house now and she stood up and began to run. She hopped over the stream, conserving her breath in deep draughts. Near the road she saw, as she crossed it, two children skipping rope, racing each other; they seemed to be moving incredibly slowly because of her own speed. Things looked so different when you were moving. She had just learned the meaning of the word kinetic in dance class and had decided that people ought to keep moving as much as possible all the time. That’s what she would do if she ever got away.
    She was panting when she reached the foot of the hill. She walked up the stone steps slowly, one careful step at a time. Halfway up, she heard a sound that certainly didn’t belong to the open air of the afternoon. It was a violin accompanied by a piano. It was the recording that she had left the other day. When she reached the top and walked through the transplanted flowers and bushes, she saw Lang leaning against the glass wall nearest her, making notes on a pad. She had assumed he would be in Indianapolis with her father.
    There was a long terrace that curved around the asymmetrical shape of the house. On either end of the terrace the glass that was the main substance of the house was replaced by a dark wood, rich and grainy in texture. There was no furniture in the house except for the beds, which were built into the walls in each bedroom. She opened the door softly.
    She leaned against the closed door and listened to the Brahms for a moment. A partition separated them, but Lang was too absorbed in what he was writing to notice her silent entrance.
    Finally she said, “Hello.”
    He turned sharply and in the same instant thrust the pad and pencil into his pocket. “What are you doing here, Elizabeth?” They had never been alone before.
    “I didn’t know you’d be here, honest I didn’t. I just came to see the house and maybe to listen to some music alone.” This last was not exactly true, but it sounded good on the spur of the moment.
    Lang grinned. “Yes, it’s a beautiful concerto. I heard Heifetz do it last year in Carnegie Hall.”
    “Do you go there often?” Elly dropped to the floor, facing Lang, and stared at him in just the same way as she had that first evening at the dinner table. It did not, however, unnerve him now.
    “As often as I can. I’m pretty busy. My wife loves music very much.” As he said this last, it sounded to him quite irrelevant and he felt like a fool for feeling it necessary to mention Lorraine to this child. What was he afraid of?
    “Does she?” Elly asked rhetorically, with the same clear-eyed gaze.
    “As a matter of fact she doesn’t,” he was forced to admit. “I usually have to drag her to concerts.”
    Elly laughed. “Nobody drags me. I can’t get enough out here. Sometimes we go into Indianapolis and even Chicago. Who’s your favorite composer—Brahms? I don’t know, I love Bach, especially the choral stuff—so rich. You know what I like about you?” She stopped, suddenly ashamed, the sound of the violin loud in the silence.
    “Yes, go on, please, Elizabeth.” He was, against his will, fascinated by the tumbling of words from the pale-pink lips. “What do you like about me?”
    “I’m being presumptuous, I guess,” she said. “There’s no reason for it, I suppose, but it seems to me that you’re so much a stranger here, so much like me in that way.”
    “It doesn’t take much to tell that I’m a stranger here,” he said. He was playing naïve. He knew the difference between being a stranger and “so much a stranger here like me.”
    “Never mind, I can’t make it clear.”
    “Yes, I understand what you mean, Elly.” ( How did she know? ) “How do you like your house?”
    “Oh, it’s wonderful. Do you know what I’ve been calling myself—I don’t know why I want to tell you this: the girl in the house in the hill.”
    Lang laughed. “It sounds like a song. That’s wonderful.”
    “Mr. John Marron Lang,” Elly said—there