Patchwork: It's the kid. He's coming. To kill Mommy. by Carolyn Banks

Author:Carolyn Banks [Banks, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: River Road Studio
Published: 2019-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

NO MATTER HOW WARM the night air, no matter how warm the water, there was something shivery, always, about slipping into a pool. Rachel slid as slowly as she could, barely stirring the surface, hoping that this time she wouldn’t be cold, wouldn’t feel the goosebumps racing over her body, but of course she did. She huddled against the pool’s edge until the feeling passed, and then edged her way to the side at the deepest end.

She pushed off and crossed the pool with her face beneath the water. Then she treaded her way to the center of the water and rolled over floating, as Peyton had suggested.

The movement of the water was slight, and rhythmic. She thought of amniotic fluid and then wished she hadn’t. Drew, Drew, she cursed softly at the starless sky.

It was a good thing that she made her living as she did, at home, at the sewing machine, or tucked in a chair, hand- stitching. A good thing because she would never have been able to get dressed each day and go into an office like a normal person. She would never have been able to concentrate on anything that engaged her mind as well as her hands.

The needlework was instinctive to Rachel; her hands just went and did it while her mind was free to brood.

And brood was all she did, all she was doing now.

Drew accused her of partaking in a belief that family life should be as pat, as problem-free, as life on the set of a sitcom. “Television magic,” he called it. She remembered him opening the fridge, opening the fruit bin, tossing oranges one after another around the room. “This shit!” he was yelling. “You believe this shit is going to make some kind of difference.”

And in a way he was right.

The first time she’d gone to Rob’s apartment, way before they were married, she remembered being utterly appalled. There was nothing in the fridge, nothing in the kitchen cabinets, nothing on the walls. As though Rob had been waiting just for her, and she believed that yes, her arrival could make a difference, rescue him, put fresh-squeezed orange juice on the breakfast table and cheery curtains on the kitchen windows, prints framed on the wall, wildflowers in a Mason jar on the windowsill.

She’d never lost her belief in that, even when Drew did all he could to stomp on it, all he could to take it away from her, make it seem superficial.

She’d run around the kitchen picking up the oranges, putting them back. “You don’t want anything nice,” she’d screamed. “Nice things are wasted on you.”

Once she’d run away, she’d made her theory work. She’d surrounded herself with the little things that mattered to her, things she’d once hoped would matter to Rob and to Drew. She was sure it was those things—picking flowers, squeezing oranges in the morning, and straightening things up at night—those things that had drawn Zachary to her, for instance, and Peyton, too. More examples rushed in upon her, small, yes, but not trivial.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.