House Arrest Read Online Free PDF

Marshall said. “Electronics are in next year’s curriculum.”
    Francie shrugged her shoulders, extending the opening of her robe. She looked at Pippa. “It’s your turn this year. Don’t let us down.”
    Francie was right. This was Pippa’s year, her turn to dance in the center of the circle. Since the moment she joined the Family of Isis four years ago, she had been waiting for this. Except everything was different now. Now, there was a hunk of plastic strapped to her ankle. Now, Abby and Terrence were dead.
    The morning after last year’s solstice, the family had searched for the toddlers in the blowing, drifting snow. All day they hunted and the next and the next, taking turns staying with the twins. Timothy wanted to help in the search, but Jeremy couldn’t stop crying, and Tian decided they should both stay home. On the third day, the wind got fiercer and everything froze. The snow grew a crust that gave way with each step, hacking bruises on Pippa’s legs above the top of her hiking shoes. That evening, Tian called them together at the goddess stone and announced that Isis had called Abby and Terrence home to her.
    “No.” Pippa shook her head back and forth, back and forth. Tian pulled her close and held her head tight against his chest to stop the shaking.
    In bed that night, Pippa couldn’t stop weeping. “If Isis has the power to bring back the sun and resurrect the dead,” she asked Tian over and over, “why didn’t she save our babies?” Pippa would never understand, no matter how many times Tian tried to explain that just because Isis could, didn’t mean she would. Finally he gave up, and turned away. Leaning her wet cheek against his back, Pippa felt his solitary shudders slow into sleep.
    Pippa took another spoonful of lentil soup, but she wasn’t hungry. Recently Francie had been so mean. Maybe she wished she and Tian were still together. Marshall was a nice enough guy, and he was great with the twins, but his belly was gross. He sure wasn’t Tian.
    The telephone in the hallway rang. Pippa ignored it and looked at Francie. “I know it’s my turn and I don’t want to let everyone down. What can I do?”
    “Don’t ask me.” Francie got up from the table. “You’re the wise Mother this year.”
    Pippa stared at Francie’s white terrycloth back leaving the kitchen. How could the woman who had rescued her have changed so drastically? Never mind Francie, Pippa told herself. Tian is counting on you to keep the family together until he comes home. But in the meantime they didn’t feel much like a family at all. More like a few people stuck together, with nothing much in common except being different from the folks outside. A lot like her family back home, the one she’d left.
    •
    Pippa knew early that there was something wrong with her family. People treated her father as if he might bite, like the German Shepherd they had when she was little, who growled and snapped and finally took a chunk out of Stanley’s leg, so Father put him down behind the barn with one rifle shot. When she and Stanley were late with their chores, or left the basket of eggs on the grass to play with a garter snake or a barn kitty, their father would clench his eyebrows and aim his searchlight stare at them. They would drop the snake wiggling into the grass and run to the house, careful not to drop the eggs.
    Mostly, her father ignored her, and when he noticed at all, he treated her like a small farmhand. She couldn’t do heavy work, but she fed the chickens and gathered eggs, weeded the vegetable patch, milked the goats and finally, when she was five, she started mucking out the stinky stalls with Stanley.
    One afternoon her father was haying the front field when the yellow bus spat the four of them out at the mouth of their dirt driveway. Charley and Martha headed home and Stanley ran straight to the barn, but Pippa walked slowly toward the milk and cookies set out on the kitchen table. Her father leaned on