Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

bite myself.” She picked up a basket of rolls from the island counter.
    As I was following her out of the kitchen the wall phone sounded its soft burbling ring. I answered. It was Kevin, returning Michelle’s earlier call, he said.
    I handed the receiver to her.
    Her voice was cool and she didn’t bother with a greeting. “I wanted to let you know I won’t be able to go sailing with you Sunday.”
    I’d started for the dining room, but this made me stop and turn around in the doorway.
    Michelle said, “I’ve changed my mind, that’s all. I just don’t want to go.”
    A pause, then an exasperated sigh. “No, Kevin, I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t want to go, that’s all. I’m sorry you don’t understand. We’re just sitting down to dinner. Good night.”
    She dropped the receiver into its cradle with a clink.
    I stood gaping at her. She brushed past me into the dining room, sat down and spooned pasta salad onto her plate.
    “Mish,” I said. “What’s up? What was that all about?”
    “You heard what I said to him.” Her clear blue eyes were wide, expressionless. “May I have some tea?”
    I realized I was still holding the glass pitcher, and I put it into her reaching hands. I didn’t know what to make of the way she was acting. “For heaven’s sake. You were looking forward to going boating with Kevin. What happened? Why did you speak to him that way? It was downright mean, Mish.”
    “Rachel,” Mother said, “why don’t you sit down?”
    I dropped into my chair. “Mish?”
    “It was a mistake to accept the invitation in the first place. I shouldn’t let him think I’m interested in a—a relationship.” She spat out the word as if it felt slimy on her tongue.
    I could have sworn a relationship was exactly what she was interested in. I glanced at Mother, who was carefully slicing a tiny section from an asparagus stalk. Turning back to my sister, I chose my words more carefully and kept my voice even. “It’s just that you seemed so happy to see him.”
    “I was happy to see him,” Michelle said. “But that doesn’t mean I want to have a romance with him. It’s unfair to let him believe I do.” 
    Dumbfounded, I sat back and watched her slice her asparagus exactly as Mother did hers. I glanced from one to the other. Mother didn’t seem at all surprised by any of this.
    She caught my eye and smiled. “Have you made any plans for Saturday? While Michelle and I are at the conference.”
    I hesitated. Hiding boyfriends from Mother’s analysis was an old habit for me, but I’d never before felt such an urgent need for secrecy.
    I spoke down at my plate, avoiding her gaze. “I have a lot of reading I need to catch up on.”
    “Well, you deserve a rest,” she said, “after a stressful week.”
    She reached to squeeze my hand, and her touch stirred guilt and a desire to be honest with her, to repay the solicitude she lavished on me. But at the same time I felt an almost overpowering impulse to draw away. The same old push and pull, as familiar to me as my own breathing in and out.
    I left my hand where it was, allowed her to break the contact.
    They began talking about the professional conference they would attend the next day, and terms like interpersonal press and dissociative fugue and depersonalization made me tune out. When they discussed psychology, my mother and sister were in a world I couldn’t enter.
    I ate my dinner, lifting my head only once to listen to the raspy bark of a fox somewhere outside.

Chapter Four
    I stood at the door of Mother’s bedroom. I had a few minutes, but only a few.
    It was early Friday evening. Down in the kitchen Rosario made occasional clinking sounds as she prepared dinner. Michelle wasn’t home yet and Mother had a late session at the home of a woman she was treating for agoraphobia.
    I just wanted to look at the picture of Michelle and our father. In and out, it wouldn’t take a minute.
    Yet I hesitated, time slipping away, as I tried to put down the paralyzing sense of wrong that kept my hand from the doorknob. Privacy was sacred to Mother. Not even her daughters could walk into her room without permission.
    “Do it,” I whispered. I grabbed the knob, twisted it, pushed the door open. The room was in shadow, the deep peach color of the walls and bedcovers robbed of vibrancy.
    Leaving the door ajar so I could hear anyone coming along the hall, I tiptoed across a strip of polished floor and stepped onto the big blue