Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1) by R.L. Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

chest and my muscles turn stiff and unyielding. Panting, I struggle to catch my breath ...
    I awaken to the noise of someone inside the house. I open my eyes and sit up quickly.
    Or have I been dreaming?
    Cool beads of sweat emerge on my forehead, settling like drops of Jello, suspended. I’m out of breath, expelling puffs of air as I draw deeply and rapidly.
    I’d heard a voice, perhaps, a girl’s cry for help, remote, enigmatic. The sound must have come, I decide, from my dream, the second of two dark dreams this morning. I remember the first, in which my mother’s coffin had suddenly opened as it was being lowered into the earth, and I beheld my mother’s twisted face, turning toward me and gazing at me through eyes filled with indescribable terror.
    Typically, before awakening, at that death-like moment of forgetting, my dreams dissolve into particles of nothingness. For some months I’ve been unable to find the mental key that will bring the images of one seemingly recurring nightmare into consciousness.
    I lie back and listen to Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor,” playing softly on my stereo.
    Over my bedroom’s only window, the curtains blow in the breeze, and the light dances on the walls. I reckon that it’s late morning or early afternoon. I couldn’t care less about time, which seems to pass all too slowly.
    I know my father has left the house, gone to work. My brother Mike has taken Julie, his wife, to buy a dress for her birthday party, to be held on Thursday evening. I’m alone in my father’s house, which sits well out of view and earshot from other homes scattered along the base of Rattlesnake Mountain. The Gables is situated on two acres dotted with orange, lemon and grapefruit trees on the south side. Wild grapevines grow on the north side. A large pepper tree oversees the backyard, on the east side, and beyond that stands the majestic mountain, elevation one thousand feet.
    I’ve asked myself why I came back to this house, although I know the answer well. It’s my nature to search unendingly for truth, and I am wondering, with stabs of anguish, if my mother took her own life because of me. I had let her down by leaving Liz’s unbridled letters where she could find them. Since then, nothing was ever the same between my mother and I, or between the Rosen and Santini families. The ineffaceable guilt of my error has pursued me like a demon.
    Everywhere in my old room vistas of adolescent experiences, imaginary and real, open before my eyes. It’s strange, I think, how a person can lose his innocence all at once, without knowing, until it’s too late, that he’s passed into another existence.
    In the wee hours of a moonlit morning, I recall, I would wake in the shadowy darkness of my bedroom and lean out of bed quietly to look for the ethereal bar of light in the thin space beneath my parents’ closed bedroom door. If the light shone, penetrating the darkness to join our worlds, my heart would race fiercely, and with the covers pulled up I would lie ever so still, not making a sound—I was good at that. I would listen carefully, tensed and alert, my eyes open into the pillow.
    Sometimes I would hear nothing. At other times I would hear my mother’s moans, not at all suggestive of pleasure, but more like the muffled distress of a child. Then, heavy breathing, my father’s, gasps of developing passion, and the steady, rhythmic thumping of their king-sized bed.
    More often than not I would hear my mother pleading quietly, whispering, “Frank, no, not tonight. You’re hurting me. Stop, Frank, please ... stop ... it hurts ...”
    “Shut up, bitch, you’ll wake Dan,” my father would hiss threateningly. The congressman, used to having his way, has always believed in the principle of might is right. I would hear my mother’s soft cries of unclothed pain, her broken sobs, as my father took his hatred of life out on her.
    I didn’t know whether I should keep very still, or rush into their