“Mila, Mila!” Peggy Lee screamed at her daughter, “what do you think you are doing?”

She ran down the sloping front lawn, making a beeline for her twenty-five year old daughter standing so brazenly in the morning sun.

“Mila!” she admonished breathlessly when she reached the fence. “What are you trying to do, kill me? Is that it, do you want to kill your mother? Making a woman my age run all this way in the blazing heat!”

Mila Thorne turned to give her mother a quizzical look; the day wasn’t yet warm, and this side of the lawn was still covered in morning shade. Her mother wasn’t even that old, and her sluggish progress was more likely due more to an abundant waist line than to age. Mila, of course, knew better than to argue with her mother. Peggy grabbed Mila’s elbow and towed her roughly toward the manor, lecturing her all the way.

“I can’t imagine what you’re thinking, standing out there like that! In the front yard, so close to the fence. Someone could have seen you, someone could have run you over with a car!” Peggy gasped, pinching Mila’s arm hard enough to leave a red mark. “Then what would I have? Hm? What would be left for me? My son is dead, and if my daughter goes, too, then what will be left for this old widow?”

In younger days, Mila might have tried to comfort her mother, to insist she wasn’t old, that nothing was going to happen to her, but after twenty-five years alone with this woman and the housekeeper who refused to learn English, largely to avoid talking to Peggy, or so Mila suspected, Mila knew it would be fruitless to open her mouth.

Peggy paused for breath when they reached the porch. “Where did you find that disgusting ensemble?”

Mila looked down at her clean white tank top and blue jeans. “Mei bought them for me.”

“That filthy housekeeper? I should fire her at once!” Peggy tossed her head, but they both knew they could never afford another housekeeper willing to work for the slave wages set aside for Mei. Instead, Peggy took her rage out on her daughter. “You should have known better than to put on this slutty outfit and parade around the yard! I won’t have the neighbors thinking my daughter is a common prostitute. Prostitutes are the worst, lowest forms of life, and you should be ashamed, ashamed do you hear me? To even dare to dress like that!”

Mila kept her eyes cast to the floor and whispered, “Yes, mother.”

Peggy slapped her daughter. “Get inside before someone sees you.”

Mila hurried to obey and ran upstairs to change clothes despite the fact that she didn’t see anything wrong with her outfit. She took off the clothes and stashed them in the back of the closet. She took a pink dress from its hanger and slid it over her slender body. She stared at herself in the mirror, trying to figure out what was wrong. The dress hung improperly, as though it were made to fit a different body type entirely. The chest was all balloony where Mila knew her breasts were supposed to be. But she had never developed breasts; her mother said she took after her father. Mila frowned at her reflection as she brushed her hair. She wished so much that she could meet another person. A nice girl that would be her friend, the way Nancy Drew’s friends were in the books.

Mila put down the hairbrush and went to her window. The property left behind by her father after his death was exceedingly vast and stretched out over the county’s edge. The fences kept any neighbors or visitors well away, and the gardener came weekly to make sure every inch of the property could be viewed from the upstairs windows. Mila was never allowed outside in the front yard, especially during the day, but sometimes, when her mother dozed off, Mila would sneak outside and hope to see someone—anyone. She was terrified, but desperate at the same time. She dreamed of the day she would be free of her mother’s constant criticism and abuse. She tried to remember her brother, but he had left home at sixteen, right after their father’s death. He had promised Mila that he would come back for her as soon as he had a job.

She could still remember standing in the hallway, hugging her stuffed pony tight around its neck. She wanted him to come back. She was only four when he left, and she still ached when she thought about him. He never came for her; he was killed in an accident at his work on the docks. Mila couldn’t remember much about that, either, just that he wasn’t coming back.

She tried to push it from her thoughts.

She tried to make plans, but she couldn’t figure out how to get away from her mother. Her mother had such a keen eye; she seemed to see everything. Mila desperately wanted to leave the property. In twenty five years, Mila had only left the property twice. The first time was to have her tonsils out when she was seven. The nurses in the hospital were so nice that she never wanted to leave and she cried for weeks when she had to return home. Her mother beat her with a wire whisk and locked her in a closet until she stopped crying. Then, when she was ten, she fell out of the apple tree in the back yard and broke her leg.

She had to fall out of the tree six times in a row before she did.

The second hospital visit was shorter, and the nurses were all different. The Cherry Hills Hospital was being renovated to become the Cherry Hills Medical Center. Her mother brought her home again and punished her by locking her in the same closet. It had seemed even smaller the second time, and she became ghostly pale after a summer without any sunlight.

It had been fifteen years since Mila had left the property, and she was so lonesome she wanted to burst inside. Her only friends were in her books, whatever she had salvaged from her father’s library after he died. Upon his death, her mother had turned the library into a sewing room, and one night had burned every book in the great fireplace therein. Mila had rescued a handful of Nancy Drew books, a tattered copy of Siddartha, and a few other random things, all of which she hid under the windowseat bench, beneath the old quilts her grandmother had made.

Mila sighed. She wondered if her legs had the strength to carry her far away from her mother. She wondered if her heart had the strength to try.

Ready to read the rest? Subscribe now for only $3.50 per month!

Back to Chapter Listings

Novels!