Transience Read Online Free PDF Page B

conversation already.   She'd tried before to explain the complications created when two parents separate, translating it into Rebecca's nine year old language.   Laura didn't have a trade or a real profession.   In order to make ends meet, they had no other choice but to move back to Lansing, into the old home she'd grown up in.   Laura's father had recently passed, leaving the house to her.   By default — not decree, she was his only offspring.   The house harbored some tough memories for Laura, many she had worked hard to forget.   But it was a roof over their heads for now.   And the way things were going, probably for a long time.
    Rebecca had visited the house once before, when her grandfather was very ill.   She remembered it smelled "yucky" and she was afraid to enter the room where her grandfather spent most of his day staring at the ceiling, writhing in pain.   But curiosity won out and she eventually ventured inside.   He broke the ice with a joke she didn't get, but he laughed, and the odd sound made her laugh too.   Laura had stood outside the door with her hand on her mouth, trying to hide her own sobbing.
    Rebecca was very confused and asked her mother why she'd never met him before.   Some things are just too complicated to explain was all Laura could come up with.   A few weeks later he was dead.   They hadn't returned since.
    Even though Rebecca was upset about leaving her friends in Livonia, she was actually quite excited to return to the house.   She danced around when she realized her new bedroom was much larger than her old one.   Her exuberance drowned out a lot of Laura's trepidation about being in "that place" again, and for a while Rebecca gave her the strength she needed to deal with the anguish of the last few months.   Maybe they could make it, maybe they could be happy.
    But the joy was brief.   It wasn't long before the night terrors started.   Laura had expected Rebecca to have a strong negative reaction to the divorce and the subsequent domestic upheaval — but this wasn't normal.
    Then the school called, asking her to come down to discuss Rebecca's behavior in class.   Laura was shocked when she heard some of the stories of what she'd done.   The final straw happened during one outburst when Rebecca lashed out at a boy who'd approached her desk to ask to borrow a pencil.   Rebecca screamed obscenities and smacked him hard across the cheek.   The teacher described Rebecca's eyes at that moment as if she was a demon, possessed.
    Laura agreed to let that incompetent school psychologist sit with her daughter twice a week.   He very quickly threw his hands up in frustration.   Those sessions escalated to the hasty recommendation of Dr. Leonard Hellerman, Child Psychiatrist.   At Laura's expense, of course.
    Not only was Dr. Hellerman also a failure, Laura blamed him for exacerbating the situation.   Laura had heard enough these last few months, endured too many bullshit theories on Rebecca's "condition".   Rebecca never knew a bad day in her life, as far as Laura was concerned.   And Laura was all too familiar with what a bad day of childhood was like.   She considered herself an authority on the subject, a purple heart veteran of domestic abuse.   Sure, Rebecca's father had left them, but statistically speaking, these days that was more the norm than the exception.   Nothing accounted for Rebecca's sudden, frightening metamorphosis from normal, well adjusted — even happy child, to the jittery, terrified, profanity spewing insomniac she had become.   And while Rebecca mostly couldn't recall details from her nightmares, what she did describe was suffocating in its horribleness.
    Laura decided they needed to solve the problem in-house.   Rebecca was her daughter; if she couldn't help her, perhaps no one could.
    Laura stood up from the bed and moved to Rebecca's side.   She caressed Rebecca's red cheek with the back of her fingers.   Rebecca let her.
    "Warm