Free Camilla by Madeleine L'Engle

all alone with Mother when we pretended to talk together like two grown-up ladies having tea; sitting very quietly in Father’s study while he read his paper and had his cocktail— it was things like these that were beginning to lose their glory before I had even heard of Jacques. And there was the miserable dull aching in my limbs that Mother called growing pains as she gently massaged my legs—but that was also an ache in my heart. Does the heart grow as well as the limbs? Nobody can rub your heart for you to ease the discomfort. That pain had nothing to do with Jacques. It was just easy to blame Jacques, to hate him, for everything.
    I wished Frank had not left me at the top of the subway stairs to go see David—though I knew that was selfish and bad of me. Somehow, now, I could not think of the lovely time I had had with Frank but only of the fact that I did not want to be on my way home.

3
    T HE MOMENT I PUT MY KEY in the latch and opened the door of our apartment I knew that something terrible had happened. All the lamps were on and the place seemed full of a light as sharp and cruel as the light in an operating room. I heard feet running back and forth and then I heard my mother scream and I thought, Father is murdering her, oh God, Father is murdering her; and I went running through the apartment to my mother’s room. It was full of people: Father and Dr. Wallace and Carter and the cook, and Mother was flinging herself about on the bed and screaming and Father and Carter were trying to hold her down and there was blood all over the bed.
    The cook saw me and cried, “Here’s Miss Camilla.”
    My father said, “Get her out of here.”
    Dr. Wallace said to the cook, “Get me some boiling water.”
    The cook pushed out into the hall, taking me with her, and we went into the kitchen and she splashed hot water intothe kettle, spilling half of it on the floor, and slopped it onto the stove, turning on the gas, high.
    And I thought, Somebody came in time. Somebody came in time to stop Father. And I thought of the newspapers Carter reads, with pictures of women with battered heads on bloody kitchen floors and women lying in satin-quilted beds with bullets through their hearts; and I remembered Carter’s eager expression as she reads the headlines—SEX MURDER ON PARK AVENUE or MAN KILLS WIFE AND LOVER IN PENTHOUSE RENDEZVOUS, or whatever it might be—and then I saw her face as she tried to hold my mother down, and it looked exactly the same way, only now it was a little frightened too.
    â€œMiss Camilla,” the cook said, turning from the stove, and she looked at me with her round face wrinkled up in puzzlement. I thought that all this must be very frightening for poor Mrs. Wilson when she’d only been with us such a short time and didn’t know us very well. Now I saw that she did not know what to say to me, and that she was unhappy because I had come home and run into Mother’s room when I did; I knew it would make her more unhappy if I asked her what had happened, so I just stood there in the kitchen doorway and stared hard at the knob on the stove that turns on the oven. I stood there until the water began to boil and she lifted it off the stove, and then I moved out of the doorway and stood just inside the dining room.
    â€œPoor lady,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Poor Mrs. Dickinson.” She went by me with the steaming kettle, saying, “You’d better wait here, Miss Camilla, and I’ll come right back to you.”
    I waited and listened. Now there was hardly any soundfrom the direction of Mother’s room. She had stopped screaming and I wondered quite calmly if she had died. I could be calm about it because it was such an impossible thought that it didn’t really seem to have anything to do with me, Camilla Dickinson, personally.
    Now the apartment was terribly quiet; then through the quietness came the telephone ringing with