begun to see the differences between them. And the difference between what they were like and what^ she had thought they were like. Mother Margeaux's strength and focus began to seem bossy to her, her once admirable iron will autocratic and dictatorial. Mother Janine's free spiritedness seemed for a while flighty and irresponsible, then self-destructive, then just plain crazy. Mother Margaret's dispassionate intellectualism became cold, Mother Sheila's single-minded study of the science of the grape annoying and nerdily fanatic.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe this was something all children went through. Teenage rebellion and all that crap.
Maybe.
But she didn't think so.
The one thing which had not changed was that they all had equal power over her. If there were divisions of labor within the business, a hierarchical order with Mother Margeaux at the top, there was no such structure in their family life. At least not in regard to her. They were all her mothers, and if there were ever conflicting orders or requests or restrictions, it was up to her to resolve them. She had learned early on that it was impossible to pit one mother against another. They always took one another's side.
Which was why she could not ask Mother Felice.
It was Dion's influence too, she thought She had become much more assertive since she'd met him, more willing to stand up for herself and to openly disagree with or disobey her mothers. She saw her life now as he would see it, looked at it as an outsider would, and although she had always done that to a certain extent, it seemed as though now she was able to see, to know, to understand how truly strange her lifestyle was.
She didn't fit into her own life.
That was the truth of it. She had been raised this way, but it hadn't taken. She often felt like an outsider amongst her peers, but now she felt just as much an outsider around her mothers.
What would things be like if her father had lived?
She wondered about that more and more often lately. How would her life be different? How would she be different?
She wished she remembered her father, but she'd been too young when he died and everything she knew of him had come from her mothers. Even his appearance would have been a mystery had it not been for the photograph.
If he had only lived a little longer ... She could remember nearly everything, almost all the way back to her birth, and if her father had lived a few months longer, she would probably have retained a memory of him as well. She clearly remembered lying in the crib, in the nursery when she was only a few months old, although, to be fair, her memory was probably not as accurate as she believed it to be, comprised as it probably was of not only real events but events imagined during childhood, the visualization of extrapolations from her mothers'
stories, a recollection of things she had thought about rather than seen. But the images, all of them, were so vivid, so real, that they seemed like things that had happened, not things that she had imagined later or heard about secondhand.
Only many of the things she remembered did not correspond to what her mothers told her.
That scared her.
In one clearly remembered dream image or flash of recollection, she saw Mother Janine, laughing, naked, covered with catsup, dancing in the moonlight in front of the nursery window. But that couldn't be right, could it? That couldn't have happened.
Maybe it could have.
That's what frightened her.
She thought of those dreams of her father. Had that happened too? She could see in her mind a particularly vivid image that had recurred in several nightmares: her father, naked, screaming, held down by the rest of her mothers while Mother Margeaux licked the blood from a gaping wound in his chest.
She sat up in bed. Her mouth was dry. She reached next to her, felt around on the top of the nightstand for her glass of water, but she'd forgotten to bring it into the bedroom with her.
She kicked off the blanket and got out of bed. She could get a drink of water from the bathroom--the cup she used when she brushed her teeth was in there--but she did not like drinking bathroom water. She'd rinse her mouth out with it, but she would not swallow it. She knew that the sink water came from the same pipe as the water in the kitchen, but somehow the fact that it was in the same room as the toilet tainted it for her.
She'd go down to the kitchen.
Penelope opened her bedroom door as quietly as she could and stepped into the hall. The house was dark, and she noticed for the first time that it was completely silent. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, someone was always doing something, and there was activity, movement, sound, noise. But now her mothers were all asleep, all of the lights were off, and the dark silence seemed eerily oppressive.
She didn't want to wake her mothers, so she didn't turn on any lights but felt her way along the wall to the staircase. From somewhere below, from one of the shadeless windows in the kitchen perhaps, came a diffuse blue illumination that served to make the surrounding blackness darker.
There were chills on her arms, and she almost turned around and went back into her bedroom. There was something spooky about the house tonight, and though she'd lived in it all her life, though she'd gone up and down these stairs thousands of times, it felt different to her now.
She forced herself to start down the stairs. She was just being a baby, afraid of the dark. There was nothing here that wasn't here in the daytime. And their security system made the house probably the safest structure west of the Pentagon. No one could be hiding in here. No one could have broken in.
She was not afraid of someone breaking in.
No, she had to admit, she wasn't. She was trying to look at the situation logically, but her uneasiness was anything but logical. There was no sound basis for it, no reason why it should be there.
But it was.
She reached the bottom step and hurried to her right, through the doorway into the kitchen. Here, finally, she turned on a light. The small one above the stove. As she'd hoped, illumination drove away the fear. The objects around her were recognizable now--counter, sink, refrig erator, stove--and that air of threatening unreality which had existed only seconds before was effectively dispelled.
Nothing fought off monsters like light.
She opened the dishwasher, took out a glass, and turned on the faucet.
A figure passed in front of the window above the sink.
She jumped, almost dropped the glass, catching it only at the last second. Her first thought was: ghost. The figure had been pale, a blur of movement undistinguishable as a specific form.
Then she heard the familiar sound of the alarm being deactivated as a password was keyed into the panel outside the door, and in the dim circle of light on the other side of the window she saw Mother Margeaux.
What was she doing out this late? Where had she been?
The door opened, and Penelope stood there, glass in hand, as Mother Margeaux walked into the kitchen. She saw Penelope but said nothing, moving quickly and silently past her as though she wasn't there.
Penelope said nothing either, simply watched her mother's pale form fade into the darkness of the hall, her chill returning, wondering why her mother's blouse was torn.
Wondering why it was stained with blood.
Horton stared at the empty wine bottle on the table before him. He'd been staring at it now for nearly twenty minutes, trying to figure out why it was empty.
He could not remember drinking the wine.
He knew he had done so. He was drunk and acutely conscious of the fact.
But he could not for the life of him recall the specifics of the event:
how long it had taken to finish off the bottle, where he had gotten the wine in the first place, when he had started drinking.
Blackout.
That's what scared him. He'd known enough alkies in-J| his time to be familiar with the symptoms, and though he had been hitting the sauce a little heavier than usual ,| lately, it did not seem to him that he was having any difficulty controlling his drinking.
That was the problem--it never seemed that way to the person involved.
