Come Lie With Me - Linda Howard [25]
“I’m illegitimate,” she grounded out, her teeth chattering. She was panting with the effort it took her to speak at all, and she felt a film of perspiration break out on her body. She sucked in her breath on a sob that shuddered through her; then with a grinding force of will she held her body still. “I don’t know who my father was; my mother didn’t even know his name. She was drunk, he was there, and presto! She had a baby. Me. She didn’t want me. Oh, she fed me, I suppose, since I’m alive to tell about it. But she never hugged me, never kissed me, never told me that she loved me. In fact, she went out of her way to tell me that she hated me, hated having to take care of me, hated even seeing me. Except for the welfare check she got for me, she would probably have dumped me in a trash can and left me.”
“You don’t know that!” he snapped, heaving himself up on one elbow. She could tell that he was taken aback by the harsh bitterness in her voice, but now that she had started, she couldn’t stop. If it killed her, the poison had to spew out now.
“She told me,” she insisted flatly. “You know how kids are. I tried every way I knew how to make her love me. I couldn’t have been more than three years old, but I can remember climbing up on chairs, then onto the cabinets so I could reach the whiskey bottle for her. Nothing worked, of course. I learned not to cry, because she slapped me if I cried. If she wasn’t there, or if she was passed out drunk, I learned to eat whatever I could. Dry bread, a piece of cheese, it didn’t matter. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to eat, because she’d spent all the check on whiskey. If I waited long enough she’d go off with some man and come back with a little money, enough to get by until the next check, or the next man.”
“Dee, stop it!” he ordered harshly, putting his hand on her arm and shaking her. Wildly she jerked away from him.
“You wanted to know!” she breathed, her lungs aching with the effort they were making to draw air into her constricted chest. “So you can hear it!…Whenever I made the mistake of bothering her, which didn’t take much, she slapped me. Once she threw a whiskey bottle at me. I was lucky that time, because all I got was a little cut on my temple, though she was so angry at the wasted whiskey that she beat me with her shoe. Do you know what she told me, over and over? ‘You’re just a bastard, and nobody loves a bastard!’ Over and over, until finally I had to believe it. I know the exact day when I learned to believe it. My seventh birthday. I’d started to go to school, you see, and I knew then that birthdays were supposed to be something special. Birthdays were when your parents gave you presents to show you how much they loved you. I woke up and went running into her room, sure that today was the day that she would finally love me. She slapped me for waking her up and shoved me into the closet. She kept me locked in the closet all day long. That’s what she thought of my birthday, you see. She hated the sight of me.”
She was bent over, her body tight with pain, but her eyes were dry and burning. “I was living in the streets by the time I was ten,” she whispered, her strength beginning to leave her. “It was safer than home. I don’t know what happened to her. I went back one day, and the place was empty.”
Her rasping breath was the only sound in the room. He lay as if he had been turned to stone, his eyes burning on her. Dione could have collapsed, she was suddenly so tired. With an effort she drew herself upright. “Any more questions?” she asked dully.
“Just one,” he said, and her body clenched painfully, but she didn’t protest. She waited, wondering in exhaustion what he would ask of her next.
“Were you eventually adopted?”
“No,” she breathed, closing her eyes, swaying a little. “I eventually wound up in an orphanage, and it was as good a place as any. I had food, and a place to sleep, and I was able to go to school regularly. I was too old for adoption, and no one wanted me as a