Free Gathering Clouds by V. C. Andrews

PROLOGUE
     
    From the age of five until now, I’ve often had the same dream. Sometimes I would have the dream repeatedly over a short period of time, and sometimes it wouldn’t return for months, even almost a year, but it always returned, and in it I was always the same age and always in the same place.
    I’m a ballerina in my dream. Most people would say that came from the beautiful music box my father had bought me on my fourth birthday. A ballerina danced on top of it to The Nutcracker Suite . I kept it on my bedside table, and when my father was home and came in to kiss me good night, he would always turn it on and sit with me awhile, watching the little figurine move to the music.
    Daddy told me he bought it for me because the tiny dancer reminded him of me, “Dainty, with two jewels for eyes, moving with the grace of angels.”
    As a child it was most interesting to see and understand something or someone that reminded my father of me. My father’s image of me surprised me because I didn’t see myself that way. I never thought of myself as someone particularly graceful and certainly not as graceful as a ballerina. In fact, my mother thought I was clumsy and awkward because “You have your mind on nonsense half the time and don’t watch where you’re going or what you’re doing.”
    If she had given me a music box with a figurine on top, it would probably have been of a little girl covered in bandages and surrounded by shattered glass from the plates and glasses she had dropped.
    If I did bump into something or did drop something, I’d quickly look around to see if my mother was watching. The times I saw that she was, she nodded her head to clearly tell me she had expected it. She never seemed to miss an opportunity to reinforce her accusations. She wasn’t especially mean about it. I never felt she was happy about being right about me. To her credit, she was always trying to get me to improve. And she was never overly dramatic about it, either, unlike some of my girlfriends’ mothers, who would throw up their hands and cry, “I give up! You’re impossible!”
    In fact, I don’t remember my mother ever giving up on anything, not even me after I had nearly sunk the boat of their successful lives and happiness. While other people, especially women I knew, wrung their hands and moaned after something tragic or disappointing occurred, my mother gritted her teeth, stiffened her resolve, and went immediately to how we solve or deal with the problem. There was no time for worrying about making excuses and certainly no time or point in rationalizing. A mistake was a mistake. Period. Fix it and stop whining. It was so difficult for me to be like that, to be like she was.
    My father never went so far as to tell me to ignore her, but he did once tell me that my mother expected too much perfection and because of that, she never could enjoy herself or her children or even him. I didn’t fully understand what he meant at the time because I was only seven, but the next time I did something my mother thought was clumsy, I smugly told her that no one was perfect. I thought I would impress her by parroting my father.
    “That’s a failure’s excuse, Megan, and besides, that’s not the point,” she said. “It’s what you aspire to be that matters and if you don’t aspire to be perfect, you will be insubstantial. You won’t even be average.”
    According to my mother, not being average should have been added to the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not be average.
    In Daddy’s eyes I could never be average and certainly never insubstantial, less than adequate. In Daddy’s eyes I was perfect always, even when I nearly broke his heart.
    But isn’t that when love is really most tested and when love matters the most, when that someone you love has disappointed you deeply, terribly, and yet, somehow, you still cling to the feeling, the dream? That’s what it means to smile through the rain.
    And so, I’m dancing in my