Limbo's Child Read Online Free PDF

even hugged her once, so when she passed away when Lucy was seven, it was no loss. Her father had passed away three years before that. She was only four when he had died. He was shorter than her mother, stocky and sandy haired like Lucy. He was very fun, gave her helicopter rides, and always made her mother laugh, but he was often moody and distant himself. There had been no suicide note, no indication it was anything but an accident, but everyone in town gossiped about it. She had always thought he had been happy, but looking back now it was almost impossible to tell. She had been very young. She didn’t know what she thought was more tragic, that her dad’s death was a random accident, or that he had killed himself intentionally and no one knew the reason why. Her mom didn’t even let Lucy see her dad’s body, but had had him cremated almost immediately. Her mom was a bit weird like that. She never let Lucy get near any dead animals or even touch raw meat when they made dinner. She may not have believed in God, but she was practically phobic about dead things, even her husband’s body. So one day her dad was there, and then he was gone. Maybe her mom thought she was protecting Lucy somehow, but it always made Lucy sad that she never got to see him one last time. In a way, it was like he hadn’t died at all. It was more like he had left on a long trip and never come back.
    Grandma Holveda had never approved of her mother’s choice to marry him and even after his death never quite accepted the marriage. Because she had thought her daughter’s choice was a mistake, Lucy guessed Grandma Holveda thought anything that came from that choice was also mistake. That meant that Lucy was a mistake too.
    Lucy screwed up her concentration and stared at the water stain some more. It did look like something. Maybe a face, she thought. The voices kept talking.
    “Social services will be here to interview her in the morning. We’re hoping that she can tell us something; maybe there’s some distant relative we don’t know.”
    “The social worker is going to be disappointed then,” thought Lucy. Both her father and mother had been only children, just like her, and all the grandparents were dead. She didn’t even have a cousin, let alone a sibling or an aunt or an uncle.
    “And the mother left no will? No instructions about who would be the guardian?”
    “The state police went into the home but didn’t find anything.”
    “What happens if they can’t find a relation or a legal guardian?”
    “Then she becomes a ward of the state. She’ll stay here for the next couple of days for observation, but then she’ll be released to Child Welfare Services.”
    “Child Welfare Services.” The term was as cold as a dead fish to Lucy. This was no surprise to her either. She had known kids from foster homes. Some had great, loving foster parents, some, to put it bluntly, did not. It was a crapshoot, and there was no way to know which way it was going to turn out, like life itself. It was all so random. Some had grandmothers that were all smiles and high-pitched voices of delight, who bought them Happy Meals and cute, patterned dresses; others had grandmothers with stern and disapproving cold looks and ugly old houses. Some had fathers to give them helicopter rides until they were six or even seven, and some had their helicopter rides cut short. And some had mothers…fun, loving, pretty mothers that looked good in jeans and liked pancakes at eleven at night and now…she just didn’t anymore. That was all there was to it she told herself. It was unfair and cruel and capricious, but that was just the way it was and you couldn’t think about it too much because if you did it would drive you crazy. You just had to suck it up and take it the way it was and try not to be a mess for the rest of your life – however long it lasted before death came for you and finally ended it. That was what her mother had always said at