Читать книгу Are We There Yet? - Дэвид Левитан, David Levithan, Рэйчел Кон - Страница 10

SEVEN YEARS APART. DANNY CAN REMEMBER THE MOMENT HIS FATHER called to say Elijah had been born. Elijah can’t picture Danny younger than ten, except from the photographs that hung around the house long after Danny left for college.

They never had to share a room, except when they went down to the shore. Spending the day by the pool, broken by stretches of playing on the beach. Danny was the Master Builder of sandcastles, Elijah his ready First Assistant. No two castles were the same, and in that way no two days were ever the same. One day would bring the Empire State Building, the next a dragon. Danny always sketched it first on the surface of the beach. Then Elijah dug, providing sand and more sand and more and more sand until he hit the water beneath and had to move a little bit over to start again. As Danny created windows out of Popsicle sticks and towers out of turned-over buckets, Elijah would wander wide to collect shells. Sometimes the shells would be decoration and other times they would become the residents of the castle. Extended shell families, each with a name and a story. As Danny dipped his hand in water to pat the walls smooth, Elijah would explain what went on inside, making the shape and the hour more real than Danny could have ever made alone.

There would always be extra shells, and at night Elijah would line them up on the dresser, sometimes according to size, sometimes according to colour. Then he would crawl into his bed and Danny would crawl only two feet away into his own bed. From there, Danny would read Elijah a story. Whatever older-kid books Danny was reading – Narnia being chronicled, time being wrinkled – he would send through the stillness to his brother. This was supposed to put Elijah to sleep, but it never did. He always wanted to find out where his brother would take him next.