Life Sentences Read Online Free PDF Page B

She's a grown woman."
    "She's been out there an awful
long time, don't you think?"
    "Ten months is a record,"
Daisy agreed.
    "Ten months." She stood
up. "I've almost forgotten what she looks like."
    "Mom? Where are you going?"
    "Upstairs. I need to see her
face."

5.
    Lily's bedroom was a shrine to
her ordinariness, her sense of comfort and thrift. Nothing had been altered
in years-same lumpy mahogany four-poster bed, same painted bureau
with its mismatched knobs, same worn Persian rug that the girls used to
pretend was a flying carpet. And making up for all the drabness was the view.
Through the French slider doors, you could see the changing seasons and
catch spectacular leaf transformations and outrageous neon sunsets.
Today the fields were blanketed in a whiteness so bright you'd have thought
you were in Death Valley.
    Lily sat on the edge of the bed and
patted the mattress. "Come sit," she said, then reached into
the top drawer of her bedside table and took out an old photo album.
    Daisy sat next to her mother and
ran her hands over the nubby white bedspread. She liked the marbled mirror
with its cherry frame, the old Windsor chair that Mr. Barsum had painted
apple green, the floor lamp with its fringed pink lampshade. It comforted
her to know that everything would always remain the same. That everything
inside this house was forever.
    "Look," Lily said, opening
the photo album and showing Daisy a succession of color snapshots-Daisy
and Anna as babies, Daisy and Anna as little girls, Daisy and Anna as
snotty teenagers. She could see the gradual transformation in her sister's
demeanor over the years-that caged look in her eyes at thirteen, the
growing pessimism of her high school years, the creeping mania of her
early twenties. These pictures also captured the chronology of their
little brother's illness-Louis in his stroller, Louis in his hospital
bed, Louis in his wheelchair. In a typical shot, Louis's parenthetical
sisters, Daisy and Anna, would be seated on either side of him, angling
their heads sharply to fit inside the frame. It struck Daisy that in almost
every picture, Louis had his head shaved. He'd died of Stier-Zellar's disease at the age of six, and the girls
had no idea who his father was. To this day, Lily had kept it a deep, dark
secret. In the final photograph they had of him, Louis's eyes were wide
with awe and tension, as if he could see death hurtling toward him like
a tidal wave.
    Stier-Zellar's was inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern,
which meant that two copies of the gene had to be altered in order for a
child to be born with the disease. That meant that both of his parents had
to be carriers. Lily was a carrier, and because of that, Anna and Daisy
were potential carriers. Genetic testing was available, but Daisy
had yet to determine whether or not she was at risk for passing the disease
on to her children. She figured there was still plenty of time to get the
bad news.
    The girls had spent half their childhoods
trying to figure out who Louis's biological father was. Whenever they
asked their mother, Lily would put up barriers around herself, thick
and impenetrable. Eventually, they stopped asking and instead resorted
to hushed speculation and marathon conjecture sessions late at
night in their shared bedroom. It couldn't be Mr. Barsum, since he'd come
into the picture a whole year after Louis was born. They had a list of
suspects, including the mailman and their mother's boss, Mr. Grady down
at the CPA's office. The only certainty about Louis's father was that
he carried the other recessive gene that had sealed their brother's
fate at the moment of conception.
    Now Lily turned the page, and Daisy
smiled down at the faded images of her father, an aesthetically pleasing
stranger. She couldn't remember anything about him, except for his
hands. She remembered how strong and clean they were, the nails pared
down to the quick. That was the main memory she had of her biological father-of a bright