A Seahorse in the Thames Read Online Free Page A

dress would look like. I still shudder at how his departure from my life surprised me. It was what I least expected would happen.
    Wounded, angry and feeling very foolish, I crept into the biggest downtown church I could find on the day he left me; one where I could just melt into an empty pew and stay anonymous. Easy to do on a Thursday. The sanctuary of the Presbyterian church I happened upon was open and empty. I went in because I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t know whom to turn to but God.
    I appealed to the heavens.
    I let Rick have everything! Every part of me, God! My very soul!
    I don’t know if I whispered this or cried it aloud or screamed it within my head. But I did hear something back. It is the only time I can ever recall feeling like God had specifically spoken to me, perhaps that is because it was one of the few times I had specifically spoken to him .
    Not every part , the holy voice said. Not your very soul. That is still yours to give to whom you will.
    Stunned into silence, I said nothing else. And neither did the Voice.
    But I left the church that day feeling I had been given something back. It got me through the rest of the school year.
    I didn’t date for a long time after that. When I graduated a couple years later, I was still unattached and I felt strangely unnecessary. The same month I graduated, Priscilla abruptly moved to London without so much as a phone call to let me know. Then my father’s new wife had a baby. To top off the month, my mother took her inheritance from her parents, sold my childhood home, bought a condo on Coronado Island and started raising pugs.
    And there I was with a college degree but no job. And no significant other. I desperately needed to feel useful.
    The only person who I knew who really needed me was Rebecca. She was living in a group home—and still does, actually—near Balboa Park. Her material and physical needs were being met, and she had been given a job of sorts to help her feel like she has a purpose for her life, but I knew my mother’s visits to her were usually stress-filled—for both of them. When I graduated from college, it had been ten years since Rebecca’s accident but I think my mother still expected her to “get better.” Mom was still in the mode of impatient expectation. Rebecca had relearned how to walk, how to write, how to do math, how to understand a joke; it seemed reasonable to think she would relearn who she had been before the accident changed her: a promising scholar, a driven perfectionist, an independent thinker. But that’s not what happened. My sister’s injuries left her with low to average intelligence, frequent bouts of short-term memory loss and a childlike wonder that I confess I found enchanting. Mom was visiting Rebecca once or twice a month back then. It is even less now. My father didn’t visit Rebecca much back then either, even though after the divorce he moved only an hour and a half away. I’m sure he thought—and still thinks—“Well, how often do parents need to visit their adult children?” After all, when I graduated from college at twenty-two Rebecca was twenty-nine. She had been living at the group home for nine years. She had a life of her own, right? And Priscilla? Priscilla never came back to San Diego after she left for Berkeley. Not once. She fled to Europe with her college degree. She boarded a plane to London, landed, and then just stayed there. She has a flat overlooking the Thames and she works as a translator for an import company. That’s her life. It doesn’t really include the remnants of her family. Rebecca has seen her once in the last eight years.
    Rebecca and I, on the other hand, get a long great. I have never told anyone this, but I like who she became after her accident. I would never have wished it on her, but it wasn’t the worst possible thing that could have happened to her. The worst possible thing would have been to end up like Leanne.
    So I was pretty sure