The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 2

Andrea Ward moved nervously through the house she had grown up in and wondered how so many years could have passed with so little evidence of change.
The same drab furniture stood in the living room with antimacassars to protect the arms and backs of the horsehair upholstery still in place, though Andrea estimated that there hadn’t been a guest in the house in at least twenty years.
Heavy curtains, the same ones that had hung at the windows when she was a child, still cut out all but the faintest rays of daylight, plunging the room into a deep gloom that obscured the fact that the wallpaper was faded and buckling, and the paint on the ceiling was peeling badly. It was dingier even than she remembered, in an even shabbier state of neglect, but otherwise exactly as depressing—and that was no surprise. Her mother never changed and nothing in her mother’s house ever changed. All was exactly as it had been on the day she left. Even the chapel, with its dense, incense-laden air and garish statuary. Once, Andrea recalled, it had been her father’s den, a cozy room with a thick shag rug, redolent with the inviting aroma of her father’s cherry-flavored pipe tobacco.
But no more. Though she had been only five, Andrea could still remember as clearly as if it had been yesterday the morning Mr. Corelli, who ran the junk store, had arrived with his truck. At first she’d thought he must be looking for his daughter, Angela, who was her best friend back then. But she was wrong. Instead, Mr. Corelli carried all the furniture out of her father’s den and loaded it into his truck. Andrea had pleaded with her mother, begged her to make Mr. Corelli put the furniture back: her daddy would be angry when he came home and found his den empty. That was when her mother told her that her father wasn’t ever coming back.
“Even if he wants to, I won’t have him,” Martha had finished. “Your father is a tool of Satan, and I won’t have him in my house again!”
Within a week, Fred Ward’s snug sanctuary had been transformed into a retreat of another sort—her mother’s chapel, where the little girl prayed just as hard as Martha did, begging God and the saints for her father to come home. For a long time she daydreamed while pretending to be rapt in prayer—pastel fantasies of her father taking her away from her mother’s house, this cold, dark place that seemed to get darker and colder with every passing year. He would take her to live with him, in Paris, maybe, or in an orange grove in California, or on a sunny Caribbean beach.
But Fred Ward never did come back.
After Andrea ran away from Blackstone, she made an attempt to find him, searching the telephone directories in Boston and Manchester and even as far away as New York. But her resources were limited, and he seemed to have completely disappeared. Over the years, she had drifted from place to place, from one unsatisfying job to another, and into a succession of dead-end romances. Somehow, something always went wrong. Until, three years ago, she had met Gary Fletcher, who gave her a job as a waitress in the restaurant he managed. He was ten years older than she was. Handsome. Sexy. And in love with her.
Or so he said.
Until a month ago, when she’d told him she was pregnant. She’d been sure that they’d finally get married, and move out of their apartment and into a house, and for the first time she’d have a real family.
That was when he told her he couldn’t marry her because of the simple fact that he’d never divorced his wife.
Andrea hadn’t even known he’d been married.
The next day, instead of filing for a divorce from his wife, he kicked her out of their apartment.
The day after that, he fired her from the only job she’d ever managed to hang on to.
And the day after that, he withdrew all her savings from their joint checking account.
Panicked, Andrea tried to get another job, but was turned down at every interview she pursued. She tried to find a place to live, but she had no money. There were no friends to turn to: Gary had been her whole life.
With nowhere to turn, there was nothing to do but to swallow what little pride she had left and go home to Blackstone to try to start her life all over again.
First she would find a job—any job.
Then she would go back to school—and this time not quit until she’d finished.
And the next man she got involved with was going to have to be a lot more honest than Gary Fletcher had been.
Not rich.
Not even handsome.
Just honest, and decent, and willing to be a father to their kids. With these, the first hopeful thoughts she’d had in weeks, lightening her despair, Andrea had pulled her battered Toyota into the familiar driveway on Harvard Street, and breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that no one was home. She would not have to face her mother—yet.
The old key she had never quite had the courage to toss out still fit the lock. Inside, it was oppressive and dark—even darker and more oppressive than she remembered it. Now, wandering through the downstairs rooms, noting their unchanged appearance, she clung to her newly found resolve: Somehow, she would make it work out.
Retrieving one of the three worn suitcases that contained everything she owned, Andrea carried it upstairs, and discovered that one thing had changed. Her room—the room that had been her only retreat after her father left and her mother sank deeper and deeper into her own strange version of religion; the room that she simply assumed would be waiting for her, welcoming her even if her mother did not—was no longer hers. Her cousin Rebecca was living in it—Rebecca’s clothes in the closet; Rebecca’s slippers by the side of the bed; her raggedy teddy bear perched on the pillow. The knowledge stung her sharply. Her mother had cut her out of the house as thoroughly as she’d cut her father out twenty-five years before. The wound was almost as painful as Gary’s betrayal had been, and for a moment a blinding jealousy seized her. Then reason returned. None of her problems, after all, were Rebecca’s fault. She certainly couldn’t ask Rebecca to disrupt her life just because she had messed up her own.
With renewed determination, Andrea went back downstairs and into the room next to the dining room. Small, little more than an alcove, really, it could be closed off with a pair of pocket doors, and still contained the daybed Andrea remembered her mother had always used for naps whenever she felt too tired to climb the stairs to her own room. At least she wouldn’t be in anyone’s way, she thought, and she didn’t need much room anyway. Opening one of her suitcases, Andrea began hanging her clothes in the room’s single, tiny closet.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Her mother’s voice, even harsher than she remembered it, cut through her reverie. Andrea froze, the blouse she’d been about to hang up clutched to her chest.
She wanted to say, Aren’t you glad to see me? Don’t you want to know why I’ve come home? Don’t you want to give me a hug and ask me why I look so sad? But all she could manage was, “I—I was just putting my clothes away, Mother.”
“Down here?” Martha asked, her face hardening and her lips compressing into a tight line of disapproval.
Andrea glanced nervously around the room as if the walls might offer some clue to the reason for her mother’s objection.
“If you think I’m going to allow you to live down here where you can come and go at any hour of the day or night with anyone you choose, you are very wrong. Do you think I’m going to tolerate your sins right here in my house?”
“Mother, I’m not going to—”
“You will sleep in your old room, next to mine,” Martha decreed. She glanced around the little room. “There’s no reason why Rebecca can’t use this one.”
“But Mother, that’s not fair! Rebecca’s been using my old room for years. She shouldn’t have to move now!”
Martha glared at her daughter. “Keep a respectful tongue in your head, child. ‘Honor thy mother,’ ” she quoted. “I know the Commandments mean nothing to you, but as long as you are under my roof, you will live by them. Do you understand?”
Andrea hesitated, then nodded. But as she began removing clothing from the closet, she wondered how she was going to tell her mother about her pregnancy. Well, there wasn’t really any reason to tell her right now. After all, it wasn’t as if she was showing yet. Maybe she’d just wait and—
No!
That was how she’d lived her life for way too many years already, letting herself drift along, thinking that everything would work itself out. But that was over. From now on she was going to face things squarely, and deal with them. Otherwise, she’d never have a life at all.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Mother,” she said. Martha’s eyes narrowed to suspicious slits, and though Andrea wanted to run from the accusing glare, she made herself keep her gaze firmly on her mother’s face. “Gary … the man I’ve been living with, the one I thought would marry me … He left me. And—he fired me from my job.” She hesitated, willing herself not to burst into tears. Taking a deep breath and deciding that if her mother was going to throw her out, she might as well get it over with now, she said in a rush, “I’m pregnant too.”
For what seemed an eternity, Martha Ward said nothing. As the seconds ticked interminably by, Andrea wondered if her mother was, indeed, going to banish her from the house.
Finally, Martha spoke. “You will pray for forgiveness. When the child is born, we’ll find a family that will take care of it. Then I shall decide what you will do next.”
Andrea took another deep breath. “I already told you what I’m going to do next, Mother. I’m going to get a job, and I’m going to go back to school.”
“While you’re pregnant?” Martha demanded. “I don’t see how—”
Andrea decided to finish what she’d begun before she lost her nerve. “I’m not sure if I’m going to stay pregnant, Mother,” she said. “But whatever I decide, it’s going to be my decision, not yours.”
Martha Ward could barely contain her fury. How dare Andrea speak to her this way? How dare she live in sin with a man who was married to another woman, then bring the fruits of her transgressions into Martha’s own home?
Martha knew what she should do: she should cast Andrea out now, cast her out of her home lest her own immortal soul be put at risk.
But then she hesitated, remembering something she’d read recently.
It was the sin she was commanded to hate, not the sinner.
In a flash of insight, she understood.
She was being tested!
Andrea had been sent back to her as a test of her faith.
Her cross to bear.
She must not cast Andrea out. Instead, no matter how deeply her wayward child offended her, she must turn the other cheek and lead her prodigal daughter back onto the path of righteousness.
Reading her mother’s silence as assent for her to stay in the house, Andrea Ward picked up her suitcases and started up the stairs to the room in which she’d grown up.
Martha Ward entered her chapel and fell to her knees. Her lips moving silently, she prayed for guidance on how best to cleanse her daughter’s soul.