Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

pain over her features.
    “I could never be sure how much damage was done,” she said at last, quiet and slow. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you are ready to remember. But, oh, Rachel, I wish you didn’t have to.”
    Her solemn face, her brimming eyes, the deep weary sadness in her voice suggested something terrible, and I couldn’t imagine what it was. I opened my mouth, wanting to stop her from saying what I’d begged to hear. But I didn’t speak, because equally strong was the need to know what she would tell me.
    “When your father died in that horrifying accident—” Her voice broke on a husky note. She cleared her throat, then met my eyes. Still, she hesitated.
    I ran my tongue over dry lips. “Mother, what?”
    “You were devastated by it.”
    “But—” I faltered. “It’s normal for a child to grieve over a parent’s death.” Somewhere far back in my mind a memory stirred, little more than a feeling, a welling sorrow. “I told you I remember crying about it. Vaguely.”
    She shook her head. “I’m not talking about ordinary grief. There was nothing ordinary about it.” Her dark eyes peered into mine, so intently that I drew back. “You really don’t remember what you did?”
    I managed barely a whisper. “What I did?”
    She raised her chin and went on. “It’s not an exaggeration to say you were traumatized by the loss of your father. It almost destroyed you. I’ll be honest, I was afraid you’d never recover. More than once I thought I’d be forced to hospitalize you, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
    I sat in stunned silence. My mind went blank, my memory offered nothing.
    She squeezed her eyes shut for a second. Tears seeped through her dark lashes and ran down her cheeks. “The suddenness of it, and not being allowed to see his body, not being able to really say goodbye to him. He was so mangled—” She raised a trembling hand to her mouth. “I couldn’t imagine letting you see him. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”
    She turned to me, imploring. “You have to understand, I was torn apart myself, I wasn’t capable of making decisions. Now I think I might have been wrong. Maybe if you’d seen him—” She paused, took a deep shuddering breath. “It’s so hard to judge what to do when a child’s emotions are involved. Everything has lifelong consequences.”
    She hugged the photo tight against her, but when I grasped one edge of the frame she allowed me to take it. With a fingertip I traced the lines of my father’s face, his shoulders, the arms that held Michelle. My father, my dead father. Mangled. Why couldn’t I feel anything for him beyond a vague sense of loss?
    Mother gently removed the picture from my hands and laid it beside her on the couch, out of my reach. “You were so angry at your father for leaving you. Anger’s a normal part of grieving, but with you it was extreme. You’d fly into rages and destroy things that belonged to him.”
    “Rages?” I said in confusion.
    “One day I left you alone for just a few minutes, I thought you were reading and I went out in the yard for a few minutes, and you tore all the pictures of your father out of the scrapbooks and burned them in the fireplace. But this one—” She glanced at the silver-framed photo. “It was in a desk drawer and you overlooked it.”
    My hands formed tight fists in my lap. My nails dug into my palms, but I noted the pain abstractly and did nothing to lessen it. I could imagine the auburn-haired little girl feeding photos to the flames. I could almost feel the heat on my hands. But something in me resisted, wouldn’t allow me to put myself in that child’s skin, to make her me. 
    “Don’t dwell on it,” Mother said. “Please. You’re a grown woman now, you’ve made a wonderful success of your life, there’s no reason to relive old heartaches.”
    I jumped up, stumbled a few steps on stiff legs, jerked around to face her. “How could I do something like that and not remember? How could I be so grief-stricken it made me—sick, and not even remember him now?”
    She stood. I saw her composing herself, setting her pain aside to focus on mine. “Forgetting is a blessing sometimes, Rachel. Maybe you should be grateful for it.”
    “How can you say that?” I cried. “You spend your life helping people remember, and you’re telling me to be grateful I’ve got this big hole in my memory—”
    “Rachel.” She stepped over to me, her shoes