Crossroads Read Online Free PDF Page A

grass, she had pulled on an old pair of boots. She sat at the vanity table she seldom used, and briefly contemplated, then rejected, the idea of putting on some lipstick. She looked at herself in the mirror.
    Obviously, she was as capable of jealousy today as she had been when she was five. And she didn’t want to be. She agreed with Cassandra: It was a particularly ugly emotion when you had been given as much as she had. And she’d gotten better over the years. It had taken a truly beautiful girl like Jewel to bring on an attack of the devil voices that whispered that she was inadequate. Well, at least this time she hadn’t reached out and yanked a handful of the shining blue-black hair that fell in waves around Jewel’s face. But she had been unforgivably rude. She sighed. The sad part was, even though she couldn’t control the devil voices, she knew why she was so vulnerable to them.

Chapter Five

    G wen had read once that the first five years of one’s life were the formative ones and she knew this to be true. In that time, scars could be made on the soul that never faded. Or one could develop a belief in oneself that would last a lifetime. Gwen had collected . . . well, scars might be too strong a word; a better one might be insecurities. She wished she could say it had been no one’s fault, but that wasn’t true.
    It had started when she was an infant. She couldn’t remember that time, of course, but she knew that was when she’d gotten the message that she was “not enough.” That her mother, the most important figure in her life, had found her lacking in some way. How she had gotten that feeling Gwen couldn’t have said, although she had pondered the question at great length.
    Was it the fact that her mother did not do the daily chores of caring for her as other mothers did? But Cassandra Wright was not like other women; it was impossible to imagine her changing a diaper, or patiently feeding spoonful after spoonful of sloppy baby food into a tiny resisting mouth. Servants did such things for her and had since she herself was a child. Besides, Cassandra worked long hours at the glassworks, where her responsibilities were overwhelming. No one could have expected her to involve herself with the minutiae of child-rearing. From the beginning Gwen had understood that. Gwen had always been an understanding child.
    She understood that her mother was not one for overt gestures of affection; she did not expect Cassandra to throw her arms around her in a bear hug, to shower her with kisses, or to coo endlessly over her. Reserve had been bred into Cassandra’s bones, and somehow Gwen had known that. So why did she feel that in some profound way she was a disappointment? Why did she feel that there was a barrier—thin as a silken veil but strong as steel—that sometimes descended when her mother was with her? It wasn’t there all the time, but when it came she could feel her mother withdraw in a subtle way. Then Cassandra would hand Gwen over to Sarah—the nanny who had replaced Gwen’s nursemaid, Mavis. Sarah would whisk Gwen away, and Gwen would know that once again she’d been banished.
    Not that her mother was ever cruel to her. Cassandra rarely lost her temper; she was kind, and fair, and always generous. Still, children know when they are a source of joy. And Gwen knew there were times when she was not. And she wondered what was wrong with her.
    *                           *                           *         
    She’d always known she was adopted. Cassandra had told her when she was very young. “You probably weren’t old enough to understand what it meant,” Cassandra said later—Gwen was seven at the time, and they were talking about it. “It probably would have been better if I had waited until you were more mature. But too many people around here knew about it, and you know the way they all like to gossip about us . . . the Wright