IN ROOM 33 by Sheedy EC

Author:Sheedy, EC [Sheedy, EC]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Joy watched her mother in amazement, the rapid play of emotions on her normally sanguine features. She looked angry, frustrated, pained, and terrified. All of it at odds with her languid posture on the chaise lounge.

"Then tell me, Mother, tell me what I don't know," she pleaded softly.

Lana's glance shifted sideways. "You're not going to let it go, are you?"

"No."

A long silence fell between them.

"I watched my mother die," Lana said, and Joy could see her muscles tense, the lines in her face straighten. It was as if she were staring barefaced into a winter wind. "It took her three years." Her gaze was opaque, her tone board flat. "Do you know how many bedpans that is? How much vomit and bile? How many changes of sheets? Bed sores?" She closed her eyes. "How many screams of pain."

Joy's eyes widened. "You never told me."

"My father didn't believe in doctors and my mother only believed in my father—the original iron hand. Minus the velvet glove, of course. I'm like him in more ways than I care to admit. As are you, I think. When Mother got sick, he told her to go to bed. When she got sicker, he told her to stay there. I was told to 'see to her.'" Lana breathed slowly, as if to regain her equilibrium. "There was no one else, so I did." She stopped and her gaze turned cool and distant. "I quit school to watch my mother die, daughter dear. And it's a graduation I wouldn't recommend."

"How old were you? When you quit school?"

"Thirteen. I was sixteen when she died. My father said it was too late for school, so he got me a job cleaning house for a woman—a woman who became his new wife within a month of my mother's death. When they married, I walked to the nearest highway, I-5, I think, and put out my thumb." She looked at Joy, her expression defiant. "Your father picked me up. I guess you didn't know that, either. He was decent enough, so I stayed. From then on, I never looked back."

Lana glanced around, and her eyes, more expressive than Joy had ever seen them, lingered on the stately home, the swimming pool, the blur of brilliant red geraniums bordering her fence. "And I'm not going to ever again." She lay back in her luxurious lounge, settled in as comfortably as a freshly fed cat, as if she hadn't spoken of such terrible things. Closing her eyes, she looked calm, comfortable in her silky, pampered skin, the daring bikini most twenty-year-olds would shy away from.

"Did you love her? Your mother?" Joy had to ask, drawn to peer deeper into the fissure Lana had opened.

Silence.

After a deep breath, Lana opened her beautiful eyes. Her voice was distant, achingly soft, when she said, "I adored her. She was long-suffering, patient, giving, uncomplaining, and utterly unselfish. She accepted her death, her long, painful good-bye to this life—under my father's orders—totally alone and with the dewy-eyed innocence of a saint.

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