Read Online Space by Emily Sue Harvey - Free Book Online

us.
    I wondered, where would she go from here?
    Where was my daughter gone off to for all those years? Where and what had been her space? Now, years later, I realize that I don’t know her. Haven’t for a long time.
    I want to. With all my heart, I yearn for that reconnection.
    Faith is at once my miracle embryo, my sweet-smelling infant, my toddler and my little girl … my adolescent
who adored me and emulated even my mannerisms at times … the teen who wanted to be her own person, yet still lingered, at times – if not clutching – fingering the apron strings … the young married woman held spellbound by motherhood.
    The deadlock that is ours is agonizing. I detest it. The three of us seem wrapped — no, chained — together in a nether region of no return. Together, yet apart. Dan, Faith and I are in a horrific limbo with no idea how to escape. We — Dan and I — have prayed, but the how-to and the what are not yet revealed.
    Something must happen to break the hex that ensnares us.
    I pray with all the faith that is mine that it will happen.
    Soon.

Chapter Four
    â€œRecovery is a journey between two stations. One station represents total chaos, and the other represents total serenity. What is important is not where you are but what direction you are facing.”
    Â 
    â€” A recovering drug addict
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    Five years later
    Â 
    Â 
    â€œI’ll pick her up in about thirty minutes,” Priss said over the phone. “You two definitely need a break from each other.”
    I rocked vigorously in the white rocking chair on our shaded front porch, one of four Dan and I had purchased years ago from a local Cracker Barrel. “Understatement if I ever heard one.” I snorted, venting frustration. “Thanks, Sis.” I clicked off my phone, feeling my insides slowly begin to unfurl, to un-knot and allow my chest to take in deeper drags of air.
    Then I arose, marched inside to my downstairs study and planted myself solidly at my computer to resume working toward my newspaper column deadline.
    My current homeland stress-register had, in recent weeks, shot right out the top of my head. My older sibling,
Priscilla, “Priss,” was, like the ever-lovin’ Cavalry, rushing to our rescue during another hard time. Those times were growing more and more difficult for me to handle.
    â€œMom?” from upstairs yelled my divorced, live-in twenty-nine-year-old daughter Faith, who had in the past year completed a round of drug rehab. “Can you help me get my things together?”
    I closed my eyes tightly, gritted my teeth and yelled back, “Why can’t you get your own things together?” I was not , by any stretch of ambition, her maid. Nor was I doing her any favors by allowing her to dump her responsibilities on me. Despite my suspicions that she was classic ADD, I knew she was functional enough to get it all together on her own. If she chose to.
    That big IF.
    The daily battle raged.
    She breezed past me on her way to my bathroom to collect some of her infinite hair paraphernalia strewn helter-skelter, cluttering my space. The over-the-shoulder glimpse I caught of her reminded me of the downward physical transformation of my formerly modelbeautiful offspring.
    Her five-feet-nine inch frame carried an extra thirty pounds and her auburn hair, once lush and groomed, sprouted haphazardly from atop her head, tethered by a pony-tail holder. Her former vibrant olive-complected face now sported blotches and uneven skin tone, while the finely chiseled features remained set in a morphing shift of expressions ranging from apathy to disdain to umbrage to rage.
    Faith’s choice of clothing was any garment nearby, whether on the floor or stuffed in a drawer or sometimes,
when desperate, perhaps snatched from the used laundry basket.
    Even the smell of her was different. Rather than Ralph Lauren or Armani, she now reeked of stale nicotine. My