Still Life by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page A

mother’s expanded, round belly as she climbed out of bed.
    “Don’t be a smart-ass.”
    Casey took her mother’s hand and led her toward the en suite pink marble bathroom. “What’s a smart-ass?”
    “It’s little girls who say stupid things.”
    Casey wasn’t sure what she’d said that was so stupid, but she felt stung by her mother’s rebuke, so she said nothing further.
    Alana proceeded to throw up in the toilet, then she returned to her bed. “Send Maya up with another drink,” she said, before pulling the rose-pink blankets up over her head.
    “Your mother’s going to have a baby,” Maya explained later. “I don’t think she’s too happy about it.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t think motherhood’s exactly her thing.”
    “What’s her thing?” Casey asked, not sure what they were talking about, as was often the case when she talked to Maya. Still, Maya was the only adult in the house who regularly paid her any attention at all, so Casey hoped the question wasn’t too stupid. She didn’t want Maya to think she was a smart-ass.
    “Your mother is a very complicated woman,” Maya said, refusing to elaborate.
    “I wish you were my mother,” Casey told her.
    And then suddenly, Maya was gone, replaced soon after by the not-so-dynamic duo of Shauna and Leslie, the former a dark-haired teenager from Ireland, whose job it was to tend to Casey, and the latter a bosomy ex-barmaid from London who was supposed to be looking after the new baby, but who spent more time looking after Casey’s father. Leslie was quickly replaced by Rosie, the daughter of their Portuguese gardener. She, too, spent more time ministering to Casey’s father than she did to Casey’s baby sister, and she, too, soon disappeared, to be replaced by Kelly, then Misha, and finally Daniela.
    “Your father’s a lot older than your mother,” Shauna remarked one day as she was walking Casey to her pricey private preschool three blocks away.
    “Seventeen years,” Casey elaborated. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did. Probably she’d overheard grown-ups whispering none-too-quietly above her head, as if she weren’t there. That was how she learned most of the things she knew. For example, that was how she knew her father had been disappointed his second child had turned out to be “another stinking girl,” to quote the short-lived Leslie, and how she knew her mother had undergone an operation to make sure she didn’t have any more. It was from Kelly she’d found out her father was a “scoundrel” who “screwed anything that moved,” and from Misha that her mother was something called a “trophy wife,” and that they were “filthy rich,” despite the fact they bathed every day.
    “You wouldn’t think someone in a coma could get so dirty,” Casey heard someone say now, the remark jolting her out of her reveries. How long had she been asleep?
    “It’s just dead skin,” another voice said, and Casey recognized the voices as belonging to Donna and Patsy. Hadn’t they just bathed her? How long ago was that? Hadn’t they just left?
    “Where’s your handsome husband today?” Donna asked her, almost as if she expected an answer.
    “I haven’t seen him in two days,” Patsy said, answering for her.
    Two days? Casey repeated silently. Two days? She’d lost two days?
    Better than lying here day after endless day, she acknowledged. Although her days were better than her nights, she thought. At least the days were filled with activity—people coming in and out, fussing over her, discussing her condition, adjusting her tubing, gossiping about assorted friends and celebrities. Nights, on the other hand, were mostly silent, punctuated only by the occasional laugh from the nurses’ station or a cry from a nearby room.
    Dead air mostly, she thought, a wave of depression washing over her as the hopelessness of her condition reasserted itself, and her panic returned. “This can’t be happening,” she screamed