The Shadow Wife. Diane Chamberlain

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СКАЧАТЬ a nursery, buying beautiful furniture and pasting up wallpaper that was both pink and blue, ready for any eventuality. But Delora had not counted on the possibility of two babies. Before she and Franklin got married, they’d talked about having a family, and she’d made it very clear she wanted only one child. “I barely have what it takes to be a mother at all,” she’d said in an honest assessment of her abilities, as well as of the amount of love she had to give. “So, promise me you’ll be happy with only one.”

      He had promised. He’d loved Delora, loved the spark in her when she was happy, and she had been happy most of the time back then, when he was first falling in love with her. It had been easy for him to dismiss her infrequent dour moods as aberrations. But her parents, with whom they’d first lived in the mansion, were killed in a car accident shortly after he and Delora were married, and since that time, she’d been depressed more often than not.

      Delora’s delivery of Carlynn had been remarkably smooth, given that the baby was her first, and she’d even refused the twilight sleep her doctor had offered her. She and Franklin had already selected a name for the child if it turned out to be a girl. Delora wanted to name her after her beloved parents by combining their names: Carl and Lena. Franklin had said little in the matter; he was an easygoing man and he hoped that, through this child, Delora might finally be able to lay her grief over her parents’ deaths to rest. It didn’t occur to him until later that she was trying to re-create her own family—a father, mother and one doted-on child, all living together in the family mansion on the Circle of Enchantment.

      Franklin had paced dutifully in the waiting room while Delora was delivering, and he’d been overjoyed when a nurse came out to tell him about the birth of his daughter.

      “But we’re not done, yet.” The nurse had smiled at him. “There’s another one.”

      “Another one?” He had not understood.

      “You are going to have twins.”

      He’d sat down at that, amazed, grinning, and forgetting Delora’s staunch opposition to having more than one child. What was taking place in the delivery room, though, would forever color his wife’s feelings toward her children. Carlynn had slipped easily into the world, causing her mother the least pain necessary. But the second baby had struggled. She was breech, “backward from the start,” Delora would say later—and often. Delora writhed in pain, finally begging for the twilight sleep which promised her relief. When she awakened, she discovered she had been cut open to deliver this second daughter. Every tiny movement, every flick of a finger or blink of an eye, made her cringe with pain. For days the unexpected baby went nameless, and while Carlynn took quickly to the breast, Lisbeth could not get the knack of it, as if she was somehow able to discern, to feel, her mother’s disdain for her. Sometimes, Franklin watched her struggle with the nipple, and it seemed to him that the tiny infant was so afraid of doing anything to upset Delora that, in her anxiety, she simply could not get the sucking right. Franklin understood his daughter’s anxiety all too well. He experienced it much of the time around Delora himself.

      In those first few days in the hospital, when he bottle-fed the nameless infant while Delora nursed Carlynn, Franklin decided he would like to name the baby Lisbeth after his own mother, who was still living at the time. Delora did not get along well with his mother, and he doubted she would agree to the name. When he broached the subject with her, though, Delora said, “I don’t care what we name it,” and he’d recoiled in horror.

      “Name her,” he said, thinking protectively of the little white-haired angel he held in his arms.

      The nurses told him Delora’s antipathy toward the second twin would pass in time. She would love both her babies equally, they said. Right now she was in too much pain to think about anyone other than herself. They did not know, and neither did he at the time, what Delora had known all along: she truly had room enough in her heart for only one child.

      Lisbeth didn’t help matters. She was a difficult baby, colicky and forever waking her sister with her howling and fussing. But Franklin often blamed himself for Delora’s attitude toward the little girl. He never should have named her Lisbeth, because it set up yet another negative association between the infant and something Delora loathed: his mother. He should have let Delora pick a name. Make that baby hers. “Mr. Kling?”

      Franklin turned now to see Rosa at the door to the terrace.

      “Supper,” Rosa said, her voice still tinged with a Mexican accent, although she had been in this country three decades. “Come inside, girls, and get washed up.”

      Dinner was served in the grand dining room, which looked out over the sea. Rosa served them, as she had served Delora’s family before Franklin had moved in. She was not the best housekeeper in the world, but she had a warmth about her that had charmed Franklin from the start. He liked that she treated the twins equally, and she had even complained to him once, with apologies for overstepping her role, that she thought it unfair that only Carlynn went to the Douglass School while Lisbeth did not.

      Over dinner, Delora questioned Carlynn about her day at school, while Lisbeth nibbled her food, a small shadow in the room. When Delora stopped for breath, Franklin broke in.

      “Who wants to go sailing with me tomorrow?” he asked and saw the instant sparkle in Lisbeth’s eyes. He’d asked the question just to bring that joy into her face.

      “I do!” she said.

      “How about you, Carlynn?” he asked his other daughter.

      Carlynn shook her head. “No, thank you,” she responded, as he knew she would. Carlynn had hated the water ever since their sailboat capsized in Monterey Bay a couple of years earlier. The girls had been wearing life jackets, but the water was freezing and the whole experience had been frightening, particularly for Carlynn. Lisbeth still loved to sail, but Carlynn decided she would never go on the water again. That was fine with Franklin. Carlynn had many opportunities for adventure at school, and he wanted Lisbeth to have one for herself. A pastime she could love, at which she could learn to excel.

      At the end of the meal, Delora looked across the table at Franklin, and he knew she was asking him if they should remain in the dining room to tell the girls about Presto. He mouthed the word library, and Delora stood up.

      “Let’s go into the library, girls,” she said. “Your father and I want to talk with you.”

      Franklin led his family across the foyer into the library, dreading the conversation he knew was coming.

      Delora and Carlynn sat on the love seat near the window, while Franklin and Lisbeth opted for the wing chairs. The girls looked apprehensive. They were rarely invited to participate in family discussions such as this.

      “You tell them, Franklin,” Delora said.

      Franklin looked from one daughter to the other. “Presto is very sick,” he said.

      Both girls glanced in the general direction of the kitchen, where they knew Presto slept by the stove. Neither of them spoke.

      Clearing his voice, Franklin continued. “I’m afraid he’s going to die.”

      “No!” Carlynn cried, instantly in tears, and Delora pulled her close, trying to smooth her unsmoothable hair.

      “Hush, darling,” she said. “It will be all right.”

      Lisbeth’s hands were locked on her lap and she sat motionless, quiet. But her eyes glistened.

      “Tomorrow,” СКАЧАТЬ