Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon by Sandra Parshall Page B

him.”
    “Rages?” I said in confusion.
    “One day I left you alone for just a few minutes, I thought you were reading and I went out in the yard for a few minutes, and you tore all the pictures of your father out of the scrapbooks and burned them in the fireplace. But this one—” She glanced at the silver-framed photo. “It was in a desk drawer and you overlooked it.”
    My hands formed tight fists in my lap. My nails dug into my palms, but I noted the pain abstractly and did nothing to lessen it. I could imagine the auburn-haired little girl feeding photos to the flames. I could almost feel the heat on my hands. But something in me resisted, wouldn’t allow me to put myself in that child’s skin, to make her me. 
    “Don’t dwell on it,” Mother said. “Please. You’re a grown woman now, you’ve made a wonderful success of your life, there’s no reason to relive old heartaches.”
    I jumped up, stumbled a few steps on stiff legs, jerked around to face her. “How could I do something like that and not remember? How could I be so grief-stricken it made me—sick, and not even remember him now?”
    She stood. I saw her composing herself, setting her pain aside to focus on mine. “Forgetting is a blessing sometimes, Rachel. Maybe you should be grateful for it.”
    “How can you say that?” I cried. “You spend your life helping people remember, and you’re telling me to be grateful I’ve got this big hole in my memory—”
    “Rachel.” She stepped over to me, her shoes whispering on the carpet. She held me by the shoulders. “Calm down. Listen to me. If you want to remember, if you’re absolutely sure it’s what you really want, then I’ll hypnotize you. I’ll help you remember.”
    She studied my face for a moment, and I felt her analyzing me, assessing my state of mind. I met her gaze, determined to show the confident strength I knew she was looking for.
    But I couldn’t summon that strength. I didn’t know what I wanted.
    Sick and dizzy, I spun away from her. I had to get out of this room, this house, into the fresh air. “I’m going outside,” I said. “You still have work to do on your paper—”
    “Rachel. You know you’re more important to me than any paper.”
    I was already out the door.
    ***
    I walked down the back lawn, away from the circle of light on the patio, and turned my eyes to the northwest sky. It was the spring of the comet with the funny name, Hale-Bopp. This apparition in the heavens fascinated me, and on most clear nights I went out to look at it. A glowing ball with a fuzzy plume of a tail, the comet seemed to hang motionless, yet it was hurtling through space, moving, changing, shedding its essence behind it.
    I shivered, already chilled. I’d come out without a sweater.
    How could I forget a cataclysmic event in my life, however young I’d been? Could I trust my own mind, if it was capable of blotting out my father and my grief for him?
    Thank God I hadn’t told Mother about my vision of Michelle crying in the rain. Surely it wasn’t a memory. Mother would never have allowed her children to be out alone and terrified in a storm. It made no sense, and I didn’t want Mother to find out about it.
    What would she make of the other dark images in my head? All through my teens they’d haunted me, hovering on the edge of my consciousness, inhabiting my dreams. I’d fought them, not knowing why they scared me. I’d wondered, when I dared to wonder, if something was wrong with my mind. I couldn’t talk about them with anyone, least of all my mother. During those turbulent years when I was trying to pull free of her calm understanding, when I wanted to be somebody she couldn’t understand, I’d hugged my secret terrors close and never allowed her to suspect them.
    When they faded, I’d been enormously relieved to have them safely locked into a back room of my memory. Little Kristin Coleman, an innocent child, had somehow opened the door, and now my phantoms