Sapphire and Shadow (A Woman's Life) Read Online Free

what?”
    She shut her eyes. “Never mind. I’m going to my room.”
    Harold watched her go and wondered what had happened to the cocaine he had put out for himself. Paul. Paul must have taken it. Dirty rotten bastard, helped himself to everything around here, helped himself to Johanna too, more than likely.
    Johanna heard Harold’s voice go up as he hurled a stream of curses through the locked door. She squeezed her eyes tight. How much more she could put up with before she broke down completely?

Chapter Three

    Johanna didn’t know how long she sat on her bed, wadding a section of the bedspread beneath her hand, trying to pull herself together. She needed something to take her mind off Harry, off her life. Forcing herself up off the bed she found a tape that Denise, Paul’s wife had given her. She had put it away in her bureau and forgotten about it. It was a tape of the sound of rain falling. Denise found it invaluable when she was feeling tense. She said it always worked for her.
    But it didn’t work for Johanna. She was too keyed up for it to penetrate to her inner soul. With a defeated sigh, Johanna shut off the tape. It was no use. She felt as if she was coming apart. This couldn’t be happening to her. This couldn’t be her life. And yet it was.
    Finally, to block out the sound of Harry’s voice in the other room, the sound of the words of past arguments that echoed in her head, she decided to take a shower.
    She stripped and left her clothes lying in a heap on the bedroom floor. Walking into the bathroom, she reached into the shower stall and adjusted the temperature until it was just hot enough for her to bear. She stepped in and let the water hit her full force. Johanna closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind, hoping that the steady, pulsating beat of the water coming from the shower head would somehow wipe out the residue of the last scene with Harry.
    She stood there a long time, just letting the water wash over her, waiting to be cleansed. There was nowhere for her to go today and nothing to do, nothing that she felt like doing. Once she had grabbed every nuance that life had to offer with both hands, savoring everything. Now there was only a deepening malaise that reached out, attempting to take away her soul.
    Johanna knew she should be doing something, anything, to shake the grip of this awful depression that threatened to engulf her permanently. Perhaps irreversibly.
    A shudder passed over her body. Imagine how awful it would be to feel this way all the time. Even her first love, art, the thing that had been the sole most powerful driving force in her life before she had married Harold, no longer held an allure for her. At one time she had dreamed of holding her own shows, of sharing herself with the world through her paintings. Now she couldn’t even work up the enthusiasm to visit the nearby Tate Gallery. It was as if everything she held dear had died or was in the stages of dying around her. Within her.
    She felt so alien, so unlike herself. She hardly recognized the person she had become. With a pang she remembered how she had always greeted each day with such enthusiasm, such zest. How she had felt so wonderful just being alive, anticipating the incredible things that were waiting for her around the next corner. But that had been when she was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, a hundred years ago and in another life.
    Life held nothing for her now.
    With a jerk of her hand, she turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, heedlessly dripping on the pearl gray mat on the tiled floor. Naked, she leaned over the sink and wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror. The reflection that stared back at her looked almost gaunt.
    No, damn it, she wasn’t down yet. She was going to find a solution to this mess that her life had become. Somehow, somewhere, there had to be a way to get them back to where they once had been. Life was worth living. She wouldn’t let go of that. She couldn’t let go