Nicolai's Daughters Read Online Free PDF

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    As a child Alexia had been envious of her friends who had summer vacations with cousins, aunts and uncles. She had vacations with her father or was sent to summer camps. She’d wondered what it would be like to have a big family and asked her father why they didn’t visit his. He never gave her an answer that made any sense. More lies.
    Alexia had met her aunt Christina only once, when she came to visit in Vancouver a few years before Sara died. She found a picture in her father’s desk when she finally got around to clearing it out. A phone number was scratched on the back. As she dialled, she thought, it’s the right thing to do: tell a woman her brother is dead.
    â€œYou need family now,” Christina said. “What is for you in Vancouver?”
    If only Christina had brought up the subject of Theodora, Alexia would have sent her the shoebox. Then she could get on with her life. It sat, an undone responsibility, a task she couldn’t check off. I don’t want to know this half-sister, she thought, or play nice like Dad always told me to do. He’d brag about my honour roll marks, the fact that I was the captain of my undefeated high school basketball team, puffing up my small successes until I didn’t know if they were real. When I performed, he loved me. Like some trained seal, I got used to that stupid smirk I could get out of him whenever he liked what I was doing.
    After that first call, Christina phoned Alexia every Sunday. At the end of each conversation she said the same thing: “Come home to us, your family.”
    â€œYour mother, poor girl, is gone too early, your father too. No husband. You are young. You need to relax, take a break from everything.”
    â€œI don’t take breaks.”
    â€œTime to start, no?”
    She ignored her aunt. Work and more of it was the only thing that could keep her mind off what her father had asked her to do. Keep her mind off him. She walked to work and avoided the place on Cordova Street where her father used to meet his sea-wall-strolling buddies every morning for a walk and breakfast. She didn’t let herself think about how he’d wave as she went by. She stayed at the office until close to nine. Sometimes when she got home earlier, she’d even forget to anticipate his eight o’clock phone calls, his nightly check-in to see how her day had been. Eventually, she unplugged the phone as soon as she came in the door. She stopped expecting his Saturday morning drop-ins too, warm galaktoboureko or some other pastry in a box in one hand, two small bottles of apricot juice from the Greek deli in the other. Instead, she’d go for a run, poke her head in a few shops, pick up a paper, sit on a park bench and read for half an hour, her drying sweat making her cold.
    The stack of files lay on the kitchen table. She’d planned to review them, make notes and get ready for the following week’s negotiations. Instead, she was sitting on the living room floor and watching one floatplane after another taxi into and out of Coal Harbour. Preoccupied with the sea bus on its treadmill run to the north shore, she blamed the claustrophobic sky for her apathy. Raindrops splattered against her window. She told herself she’d sit for another few minutes and then get on with work.
    Damn that shoebox. Why can’t I get someone else to take it off my hands? She’d moved it into the front closet because she was sick of tripping over it. What had her father given Theodora? Money? Some old family papers she wasn’t allowed to see? Why her and not me? Her stomach ached.
    She sat in front of the window until the sky changed from murky to black. She couldn’t figure out how to make herself move. The lights from a plane in the harbour disappeared into the sky. Her muscles throbbed. She saw her father’s downcast eyes, spotted the quiver in his jaw. He was disappointed in her.
    â€œDon’t live like me.