What's Yours Is Mine by Tess Stimson

Author:Tess Stimson [Stimson, Tess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-440-42340-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

{ CHAPTER FIFTEEN }

Catherine

I can’t put my finger on what tips me off. Call it a mother’s intuition, but when Tom comes home just a little too early three times in the same week, I know instinctively something’s wrong.

Grace is too wrapped up in her baby obsession to spare a thought for the child’s father. No doubt her single-mindedness is what’s helped her achieve such success in life. But when applied to family and relationships, the reverse is true. She always was a selfish child.

I tell her as much, when the worm turns and Tom finally dares to stand up to her one night. Obviously I don’t make a habit of invading the privacy of their marital bedroom—it goes without saying I absent myself when they have relations—but I’m her mother. I have a right to know what’s happening in her life. Lord knows, if I waited for Grace to confide in me, Hell would freeze over.

I don’t mean to intervene, but Tom is absolutely right when he calls Grace high maintenance, and I’m sorry, but I just can’t keep quiet. Grace is a difficult person to love, as I make no bones about telling her. She gives nothing back. It makes it so hard for anyone to know her.

I watch her pull the shutters down on Tom, just as she always has on me. Even as a small child, Grace was a closed book. If you chastised or rebuked her, she wouldn’t cry or throw a tantrum the way Susannah did. Instead, her eyes would go blank and opaque, and I’d know she was simply shutting me out. Trying to reach her was like hitting a sponge for all the lasting impact I made. There were times when her self-control and composure almost made me fearful. I told David: it wasn’t natural.

The summer Grace was sixteen, when she was right in the middle of her O levels, I nearly died. It started with a bad headache that simply wouldn’t go away, and when I awoke with my temples pounding for the third morning running, I took rather more aspirin than usual on an empty stomach, and suddenly started vomiting. The spasms were so violent they tore a hole in my esophagus, and I began to hemorrhage, passing out on the bathroom floor before I could even call for help. I was literally choking on my own blood. If David hadn’t come home from work to collect a forgotten briefcase, I would have died. The doctors said later that another fifteen minutes, and it would have been too late.

Naturally David kept the details from the girls, fobbing them off with stories of tummy bugs and flu, but the mere fact that I was in the hospital was enough to shock Susannah to the core. There were tears, angry outbursts at school, and nightmares that persisted long after I came home.

Grace got straight A’s in all thirteen of her exams.

No child should be that detached. Her mother was hovering between life and death, and all she could think of were ox-bow lakes and French verbs.

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