The Unwelcomed Child by V. C. Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

I didn’t even wonder why I wasn’t eventually moved into it. That certainly wasn’t because it had been turned into a shrine. It was simply forbidden territory, a place where something immoral or evil once dwelt and encouraged my mother’s bad behavior. I didn’t know too many incidences illustrating what my grandmother considered her bad behavior. She would mention something in general occasionally, as if she was slowly building a case for why my mother’s fate was her own fault.
    “Evil goes first where it’s well received,” she would say, and then tell me about my mother violating curfews, drinking alcohol with her friends, or getting in trouble at school. I imagined it was something like smoking in the bathroom or talking back to her teachers, but I was afraid to ask. It could show an innate interest in evil things.
    The truth was, my grandparents had removed all traces of her, so it didn’t surprise me at all that they would ignore the existence of her room. I wondered if my grandmother went into it at least to keep it clean, since cleanliness was so sacred. If she did, she did it without my knowing. Maybe she did it very late at night when I was fast asleep and when my grandfather was also asleep. I easily could imagine her mumbling in there, cursing at dust webs.
    Whenever I was in their bedroom alone, I would timidly search for any sign of anything that had to do with my mother. Just like downstairs, there were no pictures of her displayed, but I always wondered if I might come across something in a dresser drawer, maybe under some clothing, or in one of their closets. There were cartons all taped up on the floor of Grandmother Myra’s closet. I felt certain that any and all of my mother’s things that were once very visible in this bedroom and downstairs were in them, but I was afraid to pull away any of the tape to look. My grandmother would surely discover it and punish me for it.
    My grandparents’ bedroom wasn’t much to look at. They had the same queen-size bed that they had when they had first moved into the house. The only thing I knew that they changed regularly were the mattresses, thanks to Grandfather Prescott’s business. Stacked in their garage were four new mattresses in boxes that he had taken for them when he had sold his business. Based on their own calculations from when they operated their manufacturing plant, they changed their own mattress once every five years. But the cherry-wood headboard with posts and embossed vines and leaves was never replaced. That and the footboard were polished and kept so well that anyone who didn’t know their vintage might think that they were relatively recent acquisitions.
    Listening hard on the stairway, I didn’t hear my grandmother react to my grandfather’s comment, but this time, it appeared he wasn’t going to settle for her silence.
    “I mean, what has she done seriously to disappoint you, Myra?” my grandfather persisted. I took another step up to hear her answer this question as clearly as I could. What would she say? She wasn’t coming after me these days because I asked or said something wrong. She was pleased with my schoolwork. She had even stopped criticizing my housework.
    “It’s not what she has done, it’s what will she do? You never expected Deborah to be as loose with her morals as she was, did you?”
    “Deborah was not as good a child as Elle is.”
    “Exactly. Because of the tight rein we’ve kept on her and keeping her away from bad influences.”
    They were both so quiet I thought that was that and was about to tiptoe back down the stairs. I turned, but my grandfather’s next comment froze me.
    “We should consider letting her attend a public school soon, Myra. She has to learn how to deal with other people, or she will be at a disadvantage, and that could lead to worse things.”
    “Public school,” she countered, making it sound like some den of iniquity, a place where eggs laid by Satan himself hatched