Haunting Olivia Read Online Free PDF Page A

how she tried to hold their faces in her mind, she could never fully remember them. She’d been having the dream for years, since she’d been pregnant. The boy and girl, around three or four in this dream, never spoke. The girl wore a bathing suit, pink with yellow flowers on the straps. The boy was holding a stuffed cow.
    In the dream, Amanda always gently asked them if she could help them, if they wanted something, but they just continued to stare. The boy held out the cow, but just as Olivia reached for it, the dream ended, as it always did.
    When she was pregnant, she thought the boy and girl represented her unborn child, since she didn’t know the sex. She’d asked, of course, but the nurse had told her she’d be better off not knowing.
    Mostly Olivia agreed with that one. Knowing would have been too painful.

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    Janelle Taylor
    I wanted you, she always said to the dream children. I wanted to keep you, I really did.
    But I signed your life away to another family, a family that could take much better care of you than I could at sixteen. A family my mother and father both promised would love you as though you were their own. Olivia remembered how much that comforted her during her pregnancy and the birth.
    But then the baby had been stillborn.
    A skinny pigeon settled onto the snow-dusted windowsill of Olivia’s bedroom, and she forced herself to pay attention to its darting head, its tiny feet.
    Anything to put her thoughts out of reach. The bird flew away, and she glanced at the clock. It was just after six in the morning. Which left three hours to wonder what she’d find in the envelope she’d pick up today from her father’s lawyer.
    What would her father bequeath to her? To the daughter who “disappointed” him? Perhaps he wanted to continue punishing her for “running around like a slut with a loser kid.”
    Her mother had asked her a hundred times what she thought might be in the envelope, as if Olivia could possibly know. “You might have ruined your chances with him because of getting pregnant as a teenager,” her mother had ruminated earlier that week. “But the stillbirth probably fixed everything for him. He wouldn’t have to think of some grand-kid out there who’d one day try to lay claim to his money.”
    Olivia shook her head. She had some set of parents. As self-serving as two people got. You’re so much nicer than we thought you’d be, was a refrain she’d HAUNTING OLIV IA
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    heard her entire life upon meeting people who knew her mother and father.
    Olivia pulled the covers over her head with a sigh. Whenever she had the dream, usually every few weeks, she had a really crappy day. The last time she’d had the dream, she’d returned home from work to find a message on her answering machine from her father’s lawyer, which was how she’d been notified of her father’s death. The lawyer had assumed she knew, of course. She hadn’t known.
    She’d come home that evening, pressed Play, heard the words, and the air had gone out of her lungs.
    And then she’d cried.
    Which meant she did care about William Sedgwick. Was affected by him. Despite how hard she’d tried over the years to pretend it didn’t matter that her father didn’t want to be a father, didn’t want to know her or her sisters.
    Interestingly, before she’d gotten pregnant, he seemed to favor her over her sisters. She was the golden girl, “the beauty,” as he called her, the daughter who had preppy assholes with roman numerals after their names lined up to date her in New York and Maine. The daughter who won the Inner-Beauty Pageant as well as “belonged on the cover of a magazine.” But favoring her meant only smiling at her when they passed in the house during the two-week summer vacations she spent in Maine with her sisters. Amanda and Ivy seemed to get nods or absolutely nothing. Olivia didn’t even know why he bothered inviting them every summer from the time they were toilet trained. But he did.
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