Custody Read Online Free Page A

seep out of her into the warm silence of the air around her, until she was calm. She talked then, quietly, to her mother. Sometimes she stayed there for as long as an hour.
    She’d lost so much time. For years she hadn’t spoken to her mother. Hadn’t seen her mother. For years . She had meant to punish her mother, but now she knew she had punished herself, as well.
    She hated feeling grateful to her mother’s husband, but she had to be. If René hadn’t phoned her, she’d never have known they’d moved back to Boston. Fifteen years of silence stood between Kelly and her mother, a stone wall of silence, thick with hours and days. When Kelly finally reunited with her mother, there had not been enough time left in Ingrid’s life for Kelly to lift away, word by word, stone by stone, that barricade. And Kelly had always been aware that her mother was dying. She did not, could not, burden her mother with her own sorrows or ask her mother for what she no longer had the strength to give.
    While Ingrid was dying, Kelly had been at her bedside as often as possible, but her mother usually slept, and in the latter days Kelly had no idea how much her mother understood of what she told her. There had been a moment, in the middle of one April afternoon, after the doctors and nurses had done what they could for Ingrid MacLeod Lambrousco’s suffering body, and before Kelly’s stepfather came in from work to spend the evening with his wife, when Ingrid had suddenly opened her eyes and spoken.
    “Kelly.” Her voice was a low rasp.
    Kelly had been proofing an article she’d written for the Massachusetts Law Journal . Sun filled the room, glancing off the chrome on all the machines and the bars of the bed, and the air-conditioning hummed, so it seemed they were in the private cabin of a small, steadily traveling boat.
    Kelly dropped her papers. “I’m here, Mom.”
    Ingrid’s pale blue eyes shone with a light that had been missing over the past weeks. For a moment she seemed free of pain and also of the drug-induced fog that had dimmed her gaze.
    Kelly took her mother’s hand in both of hers. Ingrid’s skin was dry, papery, hollow-feeling, like a petal past its prime—weightless.
    “I love you, Kelly,” her mother said.
    Kelly’s eyes, as pale a blue as her mother’s, had filled with tears. “I love you, too, Mommy,” she whispered.
    Ingrid had smiled. “I know, darling. I’ve always known. Every single day.”
    How Kelly had longed then to let it all pour out, to tell her mother everything—about all the decisions she’d made and the sacrifices she’d undertaken during those confusing, amazing, mysterious years when by law she became an adult, yet in her heart was little more than a child, when more than ever she had needed her mother’s guidance, but had been prevented from seeking it by her own anger and pride. Kelly wanted her mother to know her as she was now, tempered and forged by the kiln of experience. She wanted her mother to laugh and cry with her, to praise her, to mourn for her—she wanted her mother to say, “I understand. And what you did was right.”
    But her mother’s eyelids had fluttered, and she’d made a tiny coughing noise deep in her throat that alarmed Kelly, who’d risen from her chair, wondering whether she should ring for a nurse. But Ingrid had taken a shuddering breath and said, “Darling, I must sleep.”
    That was the last real exchange between the two women. Ingrid had not known that Kelly had applied for a judicial position. She had not been alive when the grand news came to Kelly that she had won the appointment. She had not been alive when Kelly took her oath of office. She had not been alive to rejoice or advise.
    Kelly still had much to say. She still needed to be with her mother. Somehow she felt she really was with her mother in this cemetery where only life and death and love mattered, far away from the laws of man. So she came here every Sunday.
    And every Sunday the