Storms 01 - Family Storms

mothers.”
    “She’s not yours.”
    “No, but she knows where to stand, when to smile, when to laugh and comfort me.”
    “You’re giving me a headache.”
    “Okay.” I turned and started out.
    “Hey.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t like you yet, but I don’t hate you anymore. Don’t ask me why not. And don’t say I hate myself more or anything stupid like that.”
    “Okay.”
    “They moved you back next door?”
    “Yes.”
    “Come back later, maybe eat in here. If you can stand it.”
    “I think I can. I lived in the streets once, remember?”
    Now she laughed.
    I would eat with her, but before I did anything else, I asked Mrs. March for a favor, and she called Grover to bring the car around.
    He drove me out to the cemetery where Mama was buried. It was one of those wonderful California late afternoons when the shadows from some scattered clouds were refreshing and the air cleaned out by the sea wind was sharp and fresh. When I entered the cemetery, the aroma of freshly cut grass surrounded me. It was a scent that spoke of life and renewal, even in a cemetery.
    All week, I had felt guilty about being happy again. It was the old fear that by accepting the Marches’ generosity and affection, I was betraying Mama. I was at the cemetery to ask for her forgiveness again, but I thought I would do it a different sort of way. When I reached her grave, I set down the case and took out the clarinet. Then I sat close to her tombstone and began to play.
    And before I was finished, I was certain in my heart that wherever she was, she was smiling.

 
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    CLOUDBURST
    V.C. Andrews ®
    Available in paperback
November 2011
from Pocket Star Books
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Cloudburst
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Prologue
    J ust like there are all kinds of noise in our lives, there are all kinds of silence as well.
    Mrs. Caro, my foster parents’ cook, is from Ballyvaughan, a small coastal village in County Clare, Ireland, and she says, “When the sea is calm, it’s like the world is holdin’ its breath, darlin’. It’s so peaceful, your heart seems to go into a slumber and you feel so content. To me, that’s the sweetest silence.”
    I knew that silence, too. When my mother and I had slept on the beach or when we had sat quietly and just stared out at the ocean, I had heard the same silence, and Mrs. Caro is right—it is sweet, because it brings a feeling of peace and even hope to your heart.
    Another silence is the silence just before sleep, when you put the lights out. Even in my foster parents’, the Marches, home, this enormous mansion in Pacific Palisades, California, with all the servants moving about and the army of workers on the property, it can get quietenough at night to hear your own thoughts or hear the door in your mind begin to open to permit your dreams and nightmares to tiptoe into your head.
    In this deep silence before I do fall asleep, my memories of my mother and me living homeless in Santa Monica often come rushing back into my mind. They are very unpleasant memories, but try as hard as I can, I cannot forget them or keep them out. It’s like trying to stop the rain from soaking you with a single umbrella.
    Years after my father deserted us and depression and defeat had driven my mother to alcoholism, we literally slept in a very large carton on the beach and sold my mother’s calligraphy and my handmade lanyards to tourists on the boardwalk. That little money barely kept us alive, until the fateful rainy night when the girl who is my foster parents’ daughter, Kiera March, high on Ecstasy, drove through a red light and struck my mother and me as we were crossing the Pacific Coast highway. Mama was killed instantly, and I was injured seriously enough to spend weeks in the hospital recuperating from a serious femur fracture.
    Oh, how silent the world was for me then.
    There was the silence of tragedy, but also the silence that comes with great anger and rage, when you hate the sound of your own voice and especially the sound of other voices, none of which can really make you feel any better, and many of which were empty, mechanical voices without sincere compassion, voices with no particular interest in you or your welfare. You become just part of their routine, another daily statistic to be included in some report.
    There is probably no deeper silence than the silencethat follows the loss of someone you love. I had suffered this silence, so I understood Jordan