Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

Michelle, but seldom saw it happening to me until it was too late and I already hated myself for being a thoughtless daughter.
    ***
    I hoped she’d forget about our talk, so I could go to bed and wipe out this day. After helping Michelle load the dishwasher, I retreated to my room. This space, with deep coral walls and white woodwork, with paintings of outdoor scenes, and a wide bookcase crammed full, was completely mine, and when I was in it alone I felt free. I could stack books and magazines on the floor beside the bed. I could play the music I liked, as long as it wasn’t loud enough to disturb Mother across the hall.
    I called the clinic to ask Tony about Maude—she’d stabilized and he would go ahead with surgery in the morning—then got ready for bed. I was turning down the covers and listening to a new Mary Chapin Carpenter album when Mother’s soft knock sounded on the door. I sighed and switched off the CD player. Mother never forgot anything.
    She waited until I responded before she entered.
    “Let’s sit down,” she said, crossing to the love seat that sat against a wall. She wore a long robe of a fleecy white material, which she smoothed over her knees. Her shining hair fell loose around her face.
    I sat beside her, hands clenched in my lap. 
    “You’ve been so quiet all evening,” Mother said. Her fingertips brushed my wrist. “Is something wrong?”
    Without warning my mind was flooded with the Coleman girl’s inconsolable cries, and I felt an answering wrench in my heart.
    “Something happened at the clin—” I stopped, literally, in the middle of a word, but I couldn’t have said why I stopped.
    “What, Rachel?” she coaxed. “What happened?”
    I hesitated. What would she make of my actions that afternoon, the sensation I’d had of being transported to another place, my inability to get the crying girl out of my mind, my panicky flight home to make sure Michelle was all right?
    Part of me wanted to tell her. Maybe she could reach into her psychologist’s bag of explanations and pull out a neat, reassuring label for my experience, tell me how it all tied together. But for some reason I didn’t understand, I was reluctant—no, afraid—to tell her about it. I knew with absolute certainty it was something I could never discuss with Mother.
    I shrugged, at the same time looking away, avoiding those dark eyes that always seemed to see and understand everything. I gave her part of the truth. “A dog, a patient of mine, was hit by a car. It really got to me.”
    “Oh, sweetheart.”
    She slipped an arm around my shoulders, and like a child seeking comfort I leaned into her gratefully, let myself be hugged by my mother.
    “You know,” she said, “I worry sometimes that your work might be too stressful for you. You love animals so much, and you have to see all that illness and pain and death. It must take a toll.”
    A prick of irritation made me sit straight, pulling away from her. “Most days all I do is give vaccines and examine perfectly healthy animals. But illness and death are part of the job. If I couldn’t handle it, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
    She removed her arm from my shoulders. “Of course you can handle it.”
    The image of little Kristin in her mother’s arms swam up before my eyes, and a deep sadness washed through me. My mind lurched away from the remembered scene, toward a patch of equally treacherous ground. Before I could check myself I blurted, “Mother, don’t we have any pictures of Daddy? Kevin started me wondering.”
    I couldn’t look her in the face. Now I’d mentioned my dead father twice in one evening, and I couldn’t claim Kevin’s ignorance of the unspoken rules. My pulse tapped in my temples as I waited for her answer.
    She sat perfectly still, staring down at her loosely folded hands in her lap.
    Unable to bear the silence, I jumped to my feet and said, “I just wondered. I can’t remember ever seeing any pictures of him except the one in your room.”
    “I—” She stopped, cleared her throat. “It’s still so hard to talk about him, even after all these years.”
    She paused, pressed a hand to her mouth, and I saw the glimmer of tears before she squeezed her eyes shut. The hook of guilt caught at my heart. I sat beside her, slipped an arm through hers. “I don’t mean to bring up bad memories—”
    She squeezed my hand. “It’s only natural you’d want to know about your father. And I feel like such a fraud