Life Sentences Read Online Free PDF

such a frail-looking person.
    "Mom? Are you okay?"
    She waved away the worry.
"Right as rain." Her mother wasn't always dependable about injecting
her insulin three times a day. Her diabetes was a self-managing condition
that got worse with stress or illness, and death was always a risk. At Daisy's
insistence, Lily now carried her insulin around with her wherever she
went.
    "Okay, so what instigated
it this time?" Daisy asked. "Did you two have a fight?"
    "No, that's what's so puzzling.
She's been calling home for months now-once a week, like clockwork.
Then poof, no more phone calls. I must've left a dozen messages on her
machine."
    "She'll show up eventually.
She always does."
    Lily shook her head. "It's
different this time."
    "How do you know?"
    "It just feels different."
     
    Daisy twisted her fingers together
in her lap, more worried than she cared to admit. "Remember when
she joined that stupid cult?"
    "You're right." Lily patted
her arm. "I'm getting worked up over nothing."
    Sometimes Anna would disappear
for weeks at a time just to punish them. She'd camp out at a friend's house
or else take the bus to Rutland and hole up in some battered women's
shelter, pretending to be somebody else, two sisters were so different,
and yet all their lives, Daisy and Anna had been told how similar they
were. Daisy couldn't see it. The main facial feature they shared was a
mouth whose thick, curvaceous lips wrapped articulately around big
words. Daisy had her mother to that for the rest of her-same aristocratic
nose and light blond hair, same startling blue eyes and well-rounded figure
that skinny Anna was so jealous of. The girls' father had died when Daisy
was three, right before Anna was born, and as far as Daisy could tell, the
only trait she'd inherited from Gregory Hubbard was a permanently worried
look on her otherwise symmetrical face. Anna, on the other hand, had
inherited their father's towering stature and ail-American good looks,
same coppery red hair and dark blue eyes and those wide-open features,
which she accented to ghoulish effect with brushstrokes of Gothic eye
shadow and black lipstick.
    "Did you call Dr. Slinglander ?" Daisy asked. "Maybe he's heard
from her."
    Lily shook her head. "They haven't
spoken since August."
    "That long?"
    Dr. Slinglander was Anna's psychiatrist in Edgewater.
     
    Pushing seventy, he resembled a
white-haired Mr. Rogers with his comfy clothes and serene gaze. Over the
years, he'd managed to keep Anna pretty well stabilized and medicated,
but he kept encouraging her independence from Lily, often with disastrous
consequences. "What about Maranda ?"
Daisy asked. " Maranda , Sylvia… nobody's heard
from her." She warmed her hands on the chipped brown mug they seemed to
have had forever, purchased from some craft shop that no longer existed.
"So nothing triggered it?"
    "Back in January, I noticed…
oh, I don't know, something strange about her speech. But she kept assuring
me that everything was fine. Everything was 'cool.' She was seeing
Dr. Averill and taking her meds. So I figured, well, if anything happens,
Dr. Averill will catch it. But then one day she stopped returning my phone
calls. I tried not to panic. So I waited. And now I've waited long enough.
Maybe too long."
    The house was homey rather than
elegant and smelled pervasively of gingerbread. The windowpanes were
frosted over with ice, each one its own crystallized continent. Since
when had this become an old lady's house, Daisy wondered, full of delicate
things artfully arranged? Hints of bargain hunting were everywhere,
and cobwebs gathered in places high on the ceiling where Lily could no
longer reach them.
    "I mean, what's so great about
Los Angeles?" Lily asked rhetorically. 'The traffic is terrible.
They have drive-by shootings. They have earthquakes." "It's
not your fault, Mom. It's nobody's fault."
     
    Lily sagged in her seat. "I
shouldn't have let her go off on her own like that. It was stupid of
me."
    "Mom. Please.