The Girl in the Window Read Online Free PDF Page B

with the detritus of her mother’s life, with the purplish lipstick she’d always worn that had been so unsuitable for her coloring, along with the pins for the hair her mother had worn in a bun or French twist all her life.
    Beth knew it was likely that her mother’s clothes still resided in the drawers, the closets, as did her father’s. Who, after all, would have gotten rid of them?
    Not her father.
    The bench where he’d put his shoes on in the morning and took them off at night still resided at the foot of the bed.
    She looked out the high window at the back yard.
    He’d died here in this room they told her.
    They said there’d been a bottle of vodka on the nightstand, empty, and another beneath him.
    She remembered that. He’d always liked clear alcohol to drink, gin or vodka over ice – on the rocks – it was easier to make people believe he was just having a glass of cold water. Or so he’d thought.
    He had a rule, he never drank before noon. The sun had to be over the yardarm.
    Her father been a man for rules. Lots of them. There had always been one for breaking, depending on his mood. As a child she’d broken lots of them.
    A summons to this room had been a cause for terror. It meant she’d done something wrong.
    She’d walked down that long hallway racking her brain for what she’d done this time, dreading the next moments.
    Tall, coldly handsome with his dark hair and dark eyes, her father had waited for her, sitting on that bench.
    In the early years, she’d wept and wailed.
    “Please Daddy no, I’ll be good,” she’d promised, desperately.
    It only angered him more.
    “You’ll get one more for each tear,” he’d shouted. And she had.
    He’d hated crying. It was a sign of weakness. So she’d learned to stop.
    “You know what you need to do,” he would say, and look out the window, away from her.
    Over time, she’d learned.
    In the early years, he’d gone with her to the back yard to make certain she picked the right switch, but as she’d gotten older she’d gone by herself. If she chose well, the process wouldn’t be repeated and she’d get an easier whipping. If she didn’t, they would both go down, usually with his hand in her hair or wrapped in the collar of her shirt or dress. Once he’d smacked her in the head on the way and she’d nearly fallen down the stairs.
    After a while, she’d gotten good at it and picked switches that would get the whipping done quickly.
    Forsythia made good switches, but so did any thin, whippy branch, even rose canes – although the thorns left marks.
    She looked out the window.
    Both the forsythia and the overgrown rosebush were gone, she’d ripped them out of the ground on her first day here. Now fountain grass grew where they’d once stood.
    There had been a time or two, though, when she just couldn’t face it and picked badly just to put off the inevitable as long as she could.
    He would still be sitting on the bench waiting when she returned, his knees set flat and square and she would obediently lift her skirt and bend over his legs. When she was in the correct position, he would give her the switching he said she’d earned.
    Each lash of the switch had been like fire. It made her stomach curl, but after a while the pain just ran together. Then it would stop.
    Still, it was better than the other. Although there had been days when she’d suffered both.
    It was the whippings, though, that had done it in the end.
    Her teacher had been furious with her, but there had been simply no way for Beth to sit still in class, the open welts on her bottom and legs had been just too painful. There was no position, in which to sit comfortably.
    So she’d been hauled out of class to the Principal’s office for her disobedience.
    Horrified, she hadn’t been able to tell them why she couldn’t sit still until the teacher had pushed her into a chair and she’d flinched as her legs touched it.
    One look at the back of her legs – hidden by her