Read Online The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners by Luanne Rice - Free Book Online Page A

to work at the library, even knowing Gracie was being well looked after by Mrs. Shaw, or Beck and Lucy, or Travis.
    Carrie herself had run away, the day her father died. She had left her family—brother, sister, mother who loved her. She had left a hole in their lives, made them worry about her. Lucy understood that. See, when a parent died or left, all bets were off. Carrie had gone daughter-crazy. There’s a sort of madness all children who’ve lost a parent understand. Their lives are divided into before and after; the “after” part is not pretty.
    “Are you okay?” Carrie asked, still standing in the near-dark hall.
    Lucy kept staring at her. She knew her late nights, the times she sleepwalked, caused people to worry. She wanted to tell Carrie not to, that this was different. The reality was hitting her: she was about to hear her mother’s voice. Knowing she was about to speak to her mother after so many years made Lucy’s stomach flip.
    “I’m fine,” Lucy said, and she started to beam. “Good night.”
    “Good night,” Carrie said.
    Lucy walked into her room, closed the door behind her. One a.m. Newport time was close, and then it was here, and then, her fingers trembling, Lucy picked up her cell phone and dialed.
    “Hello?” came Pell’s voice.
    “Hi,” Lucy said. “Am I on time?”
    “Yes, perfectly.”
    “Oh, good,” Lucy said, her heart kicking like mad. “Is she there? With you now?”
    “I’m giving the phone to her,” Pell said.
    Silence for three seconds. Then, “Lucy?”
    Yikes. Tears in Lucy’s eyes. Her mother’s voice, for real, right now in the middle of the night.
    “Yep, it’s me,” Lucy said.
    “Oh, my gosh,” her mother said. “Oh, my gosh.”
    Lucy held the phone.
    “It’s so late in Newport,” her mother said.
    “That’s okay,” Lucy said.
    “I wish you were here,” her mother said. “With us.”
    “You do? You wish I were there?”
    “Oh, Lucy, I do. There’s so much to say.”
    “There is,” Lucy said, and she beamed even harder as the words tumbled out. “Pell said she’s so happy to be with you, you live by the sea, you like to garden!”

Five

    T alking to Lucy with my mother, how to begin? It was like the best, weirdest, most troubling yet wonderful reunion. I wished Lucy were there to see what her voice did to our mother: her eyes shone, her mouth trembled, and then she smiled and cried.
    The combination of all three of us on the phone was like Miracle-Gro on my emotions. When we hung up from Lucy, I walked through a portal into the past and went straight to the brass telescope set up on my mother’s terrace.
    “That was amazing,” my mother said. “She sounds so grown up.”
    “She’s fourteen now,” I said.
    “She didn’t want to come with you?”
    “I wouldn’t say that,” I said. “I just thought …”
    “You weren’t sure what you’d find here?”
    I pressed my eye to the telescope lens, suddenly knowing that I’d done it before. The sun was blindingly bright, the scope trained straight into the sky.
    “What are you looking at?” my mother asked.
    “I’m not sure,” I said. I’d expected the line of sight to be directed toward the water, yachts and fishing boats.
    “You can adjust it if you’d like,” she said.
    But the thing was, I didn’t want to. I can’t explain why, but it felt right, gazing up at the sky. I stood there for a few minutes, looking into the cloudless blue. Something sparkled—a plane, a satellite, a planet, I wasn’t sure.
    “Do you remember the telescope?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Should I?” She didn’t reply. I moved my face away from the eyepiece, noticed engraving on the telescope’s brass tube. It said Vega-Capella-Pollux . “What’s that?” I asked.
    “An imaginary constellation,” she said. “Made up of stars that are nowhere near one another.”
    “Who thought of it?” I asked.
    “I did,” she said.
    “You like stars?”
    She nodded. “When