Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon
whispering on the carpet. She held me by the shoulders. “Calm down. Listen to me. If you want to remember, if you’re absolutely sure it’s what you really want, then I’ll hypnotize you. I’ll help you remember.”
She studied my face for a moment, and I felt her analyzing me, assessing my state of mind. I met her gaze, determined to show the confident strength I knew she was looking for.
But I couldn’t summon that strength. I didn’t know what I wanted.
Sick and dizzy, I spun away from her. I had to get out of this room, this house, into the fresh air. “I’m going outside,” I said. “You still have work to do on your paper—”
“Rachel. You know you’re more important to me than any paper.”
I was already out the door.
***
I walked down the back lawn, away from the circle of light on the patio, and turned my eyes to the northwest sky. It was the spring of the comet with the funny name, Hale-Bopp. This apparition in the heavens fascinated me, and on most clear nights I went out to look at it. A glowing ball with a fuzzy plume of a tail, the comet seemed to hang motionless, yet it was hurtling through space, moving, changing, shedding its essence behind it.
I shivered, already chilled. I’d come out without a sweater.
How could I forget a cataclysmic event in my life, however young I’d been? Could I trust my own mind, if it was capable of blotting out my father and my grief for him?
Thank God I hadn’t told Mother about my vision of Michelle crying in the rain. Surely it wasn’t a memory. Mother would never have allowed her children to be out alone and terrified in a storm. It made no sense, and I didn’t want Mother to find out about it.
What would she make of the other dark images in my head? All through my teens they’d haunted me, hovering on the edge of my consciousness, inhabiting my dreams. I’d fought them, not knowing why they scared me. I’d wondered, when I dared to wonder, if something was wrong with my mind. I couldn’t talk about them with anyone, least of all my mother. During those turbulent years when I was trying to pull free of her calm understanding, when I wanted to be somebody she couldn’t understand, I’d hugged my secret terrors close and never allowed her to suspect them.
When they faded, I’d been enormously relieved to have them safely locked into a back room of my memory. Little Kristin Coleman, an innocent child, had somehow opened the door, and now my phantoms were roaming free again. Staring into the dark woods that loomed beyond the lawn, listening to the spring frogs along Dead Run, alternately shrill and throaty, I sensed the shadowy presence of the sad-faced woman, the angry man. And I had a clear vision of my little sister crying in the rain, wet strands of blond hair clinging to her cheeks, her blue flowered dress soaked through.
Blue flowered dress? Oh, dear God. Now my imagination was filling in details.
I forced myself to make the connection between what Mother had told me and what I alone knew. Grief had unbalanced me at a critical point in my childhood. It left a wound that had never healed. It made me do things I couldn’t remember, and remember things that had never happened.
I turned toward the house and saw Mother in the rear window of her study, the room bright behind her as she peered into the dark. She couldn’t see me, I knew. After a moment she moved out of sight.
I wasn’t surprised that she’d wanted to protect me from memories of a ravaging grief. She’d always tried to shelter Michelle and me from the worst in life.
But I sensed that something more, something far worse, that she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about, still lurked behind her words. What was she holding back? What else was she protecting me from?
Chapter Five
With a tin plate of raw rabbit meat in one hand, I walked down the driveway to the front of the house, wondering what had happened to Luke after I heard his Range Rover pull in. He was in the front yard, contemplating the blossom-heavy weeping cherry.
I watched him from the driveway. He looked different, dressed in gray slacks and a navy sports jacket over a white tieless shirt, with polished loafers on his feet. All this, no doubt, because he expected to meet my mother and sister. Today I was the one in jeans.
He turned with a smile. “That tree’s a knockout,” he said.
And so are you, I thought. “My mother had it planted on my thirteenth birthday. I got it in my head that I
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