Breaking the Silence by Diane Chamberlain Read Free Book Online Page B

him to kill himself.”
    “What was he like when he was depressed?”
    Laura did not have to think hard to remember. “Sometimes he’d simply sink into a black hole and withdraw from the rest of the world. Other times, he’d be impatient and irritable. He could be short with Emma when he felt that way.” She didn’t like acknowledging that fact. “He’d yell at her. She could get on his nerves. But that wasn’t too often.” It had been more often in the period before his death, though. She couldn’t deny that.
    “How do you think you’re doing as a mom?” Heather asked, and Laura was surprised by the sudden change in her focus.
    “To be honest,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve handled motherhood very well. Or marriage, for that matter.” A professor had once told her that as women moved into male-dominated fields, such as the sciences, they tended to lose their “people skills,” their innate ability to nurture, to intuit and meet the needs of others. She was afraid that’s what had happened to her. “Can I be brilliant in one realm of my life and a complete idiot in another?” she asked.
    Heather laughed. “Most of us are, I think.”
    “I had one parent most of my life. I knew he loved me, and he was always very attentive to me, but he taught me moreabout the planets than he did about people. So what do I do? I get pregnant by some guy I barely know. I marry someone more for security and companionship than for love. I turn out just as nerdy and head-in-the-clouds as my father was. And that’s what Emma’s stuck with. She has no one else. No brothers or sisters or grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins. And now no father. Just me. And I don’t quite know how to do it. I’m worried I’m ruining her.”
    Heather smiled. “She’s not ruined, Laura. You’ve described her as happy, inquisitive, strong-willed, outgoing and personable. You obviously have done something very right with her. Now she’s experienced a trauma. We have to help her get through that, and then you should have your happy daughter back. The daughter you’ve raised better than you think.”
    Laura let out a sigh.
    “You’re carrying a lot around with you, aren’t you?” Heather said. “I mean guilt. A sense of responsibility. Fear.”
    “I’m feeling overwhelmed these days, yes. So much going on in my life this past year. Losing Ray, and before that, my dad was sick, and…” She thought back to the news segment she’d seen on TV the week before. Loneliness in the elderly. It had been troubling her for days.
    “And…?” Heather prompted.
    “It doesn’t have anything to do with Emma.”
    “That’s all right.”
    “My father made me promise I’d take care of an elderly woman.” She explained the situation to Heather, and how her visit to Sarah Tolley had triggered Ray’s suicide.
    “It was unfair of Ray to ask you not to go,” Heather said sternly.
    “Well, maybe, but he—”
    “Are you going to make a hobby out of defending him?”Heather asked. “It was unfair of him to put you in that position. Period. So, do you want to see her again?”
    Laura was unsettled by Heather’s bluntness. Still, she remembered the pleading, desperate look in her father’s eyes when he’d asked her to take care of Sarah. That memory had tortured her for the past six months.
    “Yes,” she admitted.
    “Then go,” Heather said. “That’s your assignment for next week.”

7
    T HE PATH CIRCLING THE LAKE WAS SO HEAVILY FORESTED THAT walking on it was like walking through a tunnel, and Laura slowed her pace to enjoy the effect. Emma, though, did not seem to notice. She trotted ahead of Laura, carrying her blue plastic case filled with her Barbie dolls and their requisite paraphernalia, eager to get to the Beckers’ house.
    Five-year-old Cory was in the Beckers’ front yard, and she ran to meet Emma, her wild red curls bouncing around her face.
    “I got a Dentist Barbie!” Cory shrieked. She grabbed Emma’s