Moondance Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrist.
    The simple beauty of it made Lena smile.

Chapter Three
     
    Twenty-four years ago . . .
     
    L ena Silva was seven years old the night she arrived at the Safe Haven, and her brain hurt just trying to piece together all the sudden changes that had taken place in her life. The most dramatic difference was in her own mother.
    Back home in Rhode Island, Mama had never said much and had mumbled when spoken to. She’d let Daddy’s mother and his sisters be in charge. Lena had heard her mother’s real voice and real laugh only when the two of them were alone. She would sing Lena to sleep with her Portuguese songs, or she’d try to read aloud from the storybooks Lena brought home from school. More often than not, Lena ended up reading to her mother, who would fall asleep next to her in the small bed.
    Sometimes, when it was just the two of them like that, her mother would talk about maps and little towns Lena had never heard of, and weather, and the ocean. Or she’d tell fairy tales. Some of Lena’s favorites were about howher family had always made a living from the sea, respected it, and understood its magic and mystery.
    “Grandmother doesn’t believe in things like that,” Lena had pointed out.
    Her mother nodded. “If a person’s spirit is too small to believe in the magic of the ocean, they will never be comfortable with its power.”
    How suddenly things turned upside down! When Lena’s daddy left, her mother instantly seemed taller. Her voice was steadier than it used to be, even at home with Daddy’s family. Her mother now looked straight ahead instead of down, and she looked people in the eye. Her mother sang for no reason and whenever she felt like it. She smiled almost all the time.
    It made no sense to Lena. Her grandmother and aunties were so sad Daddy left that they yelled and cried. They even told her mother that she was the reason he left. They called her a witch.
    “He would never have abandoned us if you hadn’t put a spell on him. You drove him out, you evil harpy!” Grandmother then pointed at Lena with a shaking finger. “And you—you are nothing but the spawn of a witch!”
    Lena had been so frightened by the words that she’d cried. Her mother had later explained that people sometimes said cruel and untrue things when they were overwhelmed with sadness and anger. Her mother said to stay as far away from her grandmother as possible.
    A few weeks after all the crying and yelling and mean talk started, Lena’s grandmother pulled her aside and told her that her daddy went to a place called Brazil and was never coming back.
    “Is Brazil the same as heaven?” Lena had asked.
    Her grandmother assured her it was not. Then she told her to pay attention because she had something important to tell her. “Your mother is from a family of sorceresses in the Azores, and they shipped her to America to marry the kind of decent, upstanding man she could never get at home.”
    The story confused Lena. It hurt her heart.
    Maybe it was Lena’s fault Daddy left. Maybe, as Grandmother said, there was something wrong with her.
    Just days later, Lena’s mother came to school early to get her. She had their suitcases waiting in a taxi. They got on a bus and then a ferry. While they were out on the water, it began to rain very hard and Lena got sick. But soon they landed and walked in the dark and the rain down a road until they reached something called the Safe Haven.
    Lena’s first morning there was difficult. First she met the father, who patted her head at breakfast. He was a tall man with red cheeks who smiled a lot and got very loud when he laughed. Then she met a girl close to her own age named Rowan and a boy named Clancy. And now the mother of this new family was walking them up two flights of stairs, and Lena clutched at her mother’s leg the whole way. Who else would she be forced to meet today? How many people lived in this big old place, anyway? The mother led them down a hallway,