When Rose Wakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a nearby forest, but things lurked there as well, beautiful, magical sprites who ran and laughed with her, and sinister creatures who stalked her through the woods or fell upon her from the branches overheard, forcing her to wake up screaming, bathed in sweat. Her aunts would come in and soothe her.
    Sometimes she could not be soothed, but she let them believe that their kindness helped, loving them too much to do otherwise.
    In those nightmares she feared for herself, and she feared for her father, and she woke up missing him painfully, which was only made worse when the dream faded and her thoughts cleared enough to realize that the man in her dreams was someone she only imagined and that she could not even remember her real father’s face, or his laugh,or his voice. That haunted her most of all, missing someone without any real understanding of what she missed.
    With such sad and often frightening nights, Rose truly relished mornings. When the night had ended and the sun rose with the promise of so many more sunrises to come and the bad dreams were banished along with her fears, she always wanted to languish in the comfort of those moments. The nights were chilly but she kept the windows halfway open, warm beneath the thick autumn-hued bedspread.
    The physical therapist had given her a regimen of stretching exercises to continue her recovery at home. In the morning, especially, Rose found her muscles very tight and she had to be careful not to pull or tear anything. And though she enjoyed her mornings, she tried not to spend too much time in bed so that her bedsores could fully heal. They were almost completely gone now, and the topical cream she had been given, with its liberal dose of vitamin E, was doing an excellent job of fading the traces of the old sores. Beyond that, she felt good, and the doctors were still impressed by the speed of her recovery.
    Even so, Rose did not feel ready to venture out into the world. On the small, hand-painted desk in her room sat a laptop computer that she had used only three times since her aunts had brought her to their Beacon Hill apartment and announced to her that she was home. Her room hada nine-foot tin ceiling, lovingly restored, and a narrow cherrywood sleigh bed that was obviously an expensive antique. But the old-fashioned room and furniture did not seem to make the laptop out of place. It was Rose herself who felt out of place. Aunt Fay had shown her how to get on to the Internet and some of the news sites and search engines that would give her information about the world. They wanted her to get acclimated, to try to get back her memories of her life, but if not that, at least to adjust to the world even if she never remembered the life she had once led.
    At first the things she read seemed foreign to her, and not just because she had been born in France. The names of some countries rolled off of her tongue, but others felt awkward. The celebrities made her cringe and she felt like a prude because of her reaction, but it was all so new to her. And she had accidentally happened upon a sex site that had made bile rise in her throat. Aunt Suzette had happily explained social networking websites where she could stay in constant contact with her new friends, when she managed to make any, but for now the laptop seemed a hopeful indulgence, a mere decoration. Rose didn’t see the wisdom in constant contact with anyone, even her aunts. And since her aunts couldn’t remember more than the first names of any of her friends from France, she couldn’t search for them… if anyone would even remember her well after she’d been gone for two years.
    Her aunts had bought her a cell phone, too. It sat idle on her bedside table, not even turned on. The phone had the home telephone number and both of her aunts’ cell numbers programmed into it, but so far Rose had never been alone in the apartment, never mind out in the city by herself.
    Today all of that would begin to change, and she