Soul Catcher by Katia Lief Read Free Book Online Page B

hate Mom. I couldn’t. I was so confused.
    I knelt down next to her. ‘Mom?’ I whispered. ‘Are you okay?’ Her head moved but I couldn’t tell whether it was a nod or a shake.
    I looked into the trunk. When I was younger, this was my treasure chest, full of intriguing mysteries. I would come up here and study the articles of my parents’ pasts. Now, to my surprise, I saw some of my own things. Someone must have put them there — Mom, probably — since I’d gone away to Grove. It was eerie seeing traces of myself mixed with the things of their histories. A converging of our lives, a time capsule. The trunk struck me now as too much a thing of memory, something static, dead.
    ‘What are you looking for?’
    Finally, she raised her face. Her expression was hard, detached from the past. Or maybe it wasn’t her face that looked that way, maybe it was her eyes. I stared into a darkness and depth, a hollowness that echoed pain. She tried to smile but all she could manage was a vague shifting of the muscles around her mouth.
    The trunk was lined with white paper printed with tinyblue flowers. Orange stains, probably from rain and rusty hinges, formed scalloped patterns around the edges and in the corners. All the things in the trunk were neatly folded and stacked. A small-waisted red dress with white stripes. A pair of red shoes with pointed toes and thin high heels. Dad’s fraternity pennant. A book they’d shared in college. Their letters of acceptance into the same law school. The lease of their first apartment. A tiny silver cup with my name engraved on both sides. A bundle of my report cards. Photographs of the family. Pieces of ribbon and string. The brochure of a ski lodge in Vermont where we’d spent a long weekend nine years ago. My eyes stopped at an envelope with my handwriting, addressed to Mom and Dad. It was a letter I’d written only recently from Grove.
    How many hours had Mom spent hunched over this trunk? And why?
    I put my arm around her, and she jerked away. Her head swung down toward the trunk, and her back moved in waves that alternated with a choking sound. She vomited. It didn’t stop until she was empty, spent. I was repulsed by the sour smell, by the sight of Mom sick and helpless, by the vomit covering the remembrances in the trunk. But I couldn’t leave her there alone, I just couldn’t. The more she vomited the more I loved her. I felt that I loved her more deeply than ever before, as a woman, and as a woman who was my mother. My knees hurt from kneeling on the hard wood floor, but I didn’t move. I held her forehead with my hand, hoping that in some way I was helping her, if not as a friend then at least as her child.
    There is an underlying truth to every story. When Dad left Mom, I felt that my whole childhood had been a lie. Or, at least my interpretation of it. But that’s the thing about childhood: the adults in your life present a smooth, easy picture, and then when you reach a certain age (depending on the family) they sock it to you. The truth. What their life together had really been like all along. The lies, the deceptions, the gaps in trust. How they held together for you, ordidn’t — they would say couldn’t — despite their better judgement. The bottom line, they say, is that they still and will always love you, which had been an understanding and now becomes a dubious, often repeated statement to bolster your troubled spirit. Because suddenly, starting on the day they are sucked off in different directions, their truth turns inside out into your truth. Their ending is your beginning.

FIVE
    I t was late when we arrived back at school on Sunday night. I was tired and depressed and could have sat in that bus all night long, gone all the way to China, buried myself in the ocean, for all I cared. I hated the thought of being back at Grove, without Patrick, and without a home to look forward to anymore. How had Gwen known so fast — the day she met me — that this