The Venus Fix Read Online Free Page A

park and headed west toward the rink. Since my daughter had been appearing in The Secret Garden all of our old routines had changed.
    “I’d imagine with six performances a week on Broadway, she’s overwhelmed.”
    “Do you really think it’s a good idea that a thirteen-year-old works so hard? She’s missing out on so much.”
    “Is she happy, Morgan?” She sighed.
    “She seems happy,” I said, and heard the wistfulness in my own voice.
    “You’d know if she wasn’t.”
    Since she was a baby, I’d sensed Dulcie’s emotional and psychic temperature even if we both weren’t in the same room, or the same building as each other. Miles away, I’d get a sudden pain in my stomach or hand or back, only to find out when I arrived home that she’d been sick, cut herself or fallen. When something wonderful happened, I’d feel a sudden lightness for no reason. It had been going on so long that none of us found it odd.
    Nina glanced over at me. She had it too—that sense when something was wrong with me—but in her case, it was exceptional insight as a therapist.
    “Are things back to normal?”
    Weeks earlier, my daughter and I had an argument abouther being offered a three-week part in a television series. She’d wanted to do it and I’d been adamant that appearing in a play six times a week was more than enough work for her. We fought. And then, of course, she brought her father into it. I’d already talked to Mitch, and he had backed me up on the decision. Nevertheless, when I’d gone to pick her up from his apartment that weekend, she’d refused to come home with me. She said she knew that if I’d said yes, her father would have said yes, too. That he was more fair. That he wanted her to have a career. That I wanted to hold her back. And finally—the coup de grace—that she wanted to live with him.
    Legally, at the age of thirteen, she had the right to make that decision, and there was nothing I could do.
    She’d stayed at her father’s for almost four weeks, until we worked out a cease-fire.
    “The drama queen seems to have forgiven me. But I’m still furious at her emotional-blackmail techniques. She’s too damn intuitive.”
    “What’s holding on to the anger about?”
    “You know that?”
    “Probably. Do you?”
    We laughed. “There’s nothing worse than two therapists having a conversation. Especially two who have known each other forever. Yes, oh master, I know. As long as I focus on the anger I don’t have to focus on how scared I was that she wasn’t coming back. I know it’s not about her. It’s some crazy thing where I’ve confused her and my mother in my head. But the loneliness was real. And it stung.”
    “And—”
    I interrupted Nina. We’d had this conversation before and I knew where she was headed. “I know she’s not going to follow in my mother’s footsteps: a star at sixteen, lost by twenty, dead at twenty-nine. I know Dulcie isn’t my mother. Shemight have her talent, but she’s had a secure and healthy childhood. She’s had Mitch and me as parents.”
    “I love it when you do all my work for me.” Nina smiled.
    We’d arrived at the Wollman Rink. Inside, we got a locker and put on our skates. Then side by side, we glided across the ice in time to a Schubert waltz. Probably due to the light snow, Nina and I had the whole rink to ourselves for the first twenty minutes, until an explosion of laughter and shouting preceded a group of twenty or thirty kids. All the private schools in the area used the park as an escape from indoor gymnasiums.
    A flash of a shocking-pink parka crossed my path. A turquoise scarf fell on the ice. A boy in a heavy black sweater, one cherry-red glove and one forest-green glove sped by and scooped up the scarf without stopping.
    Along with Nina, I watched them with delight, and then I noticed two of the boys smirking as one of the girls spilled onto the ice, her legs spreading wide as she spun out.
    Four boys took off from one end of