Page 45 of The Formation of Us
She woke at dawn the next morning, still dressed and aching in every muscle. Cora and Adam were burrowed in their blankets, but they had laid a blanket over her. They took care of her that way. But they shouldn’t have to. Knowing she’d fallen asleep on them made her eyes flood with tears.
The cavernous building was silent as Faith pulled the blanket off and laid it over Adam, who’d sacrificed it to keep her warm. Her aunts slept a few feet away on their own pallets, looking as exhausted as she felt.
Faith quietly left the pallet she shared with Cora, then gathered clean clothes and slipped out to the greenhouse. In the bathhouse she lit a lantern, lowered the wick, and shed her dress and petticoats. Shivering in the predawn coolness, she laid a towel on the edge of the steaming tub, then lowered her body into the soothing hot water with a long sigh. How could the sheriff not like the water this warm? It felt divine to her, and it was her only comfort.
Tugging the metal stool beneath her, she leaned back and rested her head on the rolled-up towel. No matter what happened, she wasn’t budging from this tub for at least an hour.
The soft airy hiss of the gas burner beneath the tub was her only company. An occasional drop of condensation fell from the cold iron faucet into the water with a quiet blip. The light scent of lavender, chamomile, and almond oil wafted from the bath. She soaked for several minutes, then stood to lather her long, dripping hair. The feathery caress of soap bubbles trailed down her body like stroking fingertips. Goosebumps speckled her flesh, and her nipples puckered in the steamy air. She shivered with a soul-deep loneliness she’d felt since childhood.
From the age of five, she’d spent most of her time alone with her books in a one-room shack behind the brothel. As she grew older, she’d played in the greenhouse surrounded by plants that became her only friends.
At two o’clock each day, Faith and her mother and aunts had shared their main meal in the brothel kitchen—the only room Faith was allowed to enter in the big house until she started giving massages. Faith loved that hour of laughter and attention, and the two hours afterward when she and her mother would go to the greenhouse to tend her mother’s roses.
But when the clock struck five, Faith’s happiness changed to dread. Her mother would fix a sandwich for Faith’s supper and see her safely back inside their shack. Before going to work, she would remind Faith about the bell hanging from a string in the corner of the room that she was to ring only in an emergency. The rope ran between the brothel and the shack with a bell at each end, and her mother used it to check on her. She would tug her end, making the bell at Faith’s end ring. Faith would tug back to ring that she was fine. But if Faith rang the bell without her mother’s prompting, it meant she had an emergency.
She was five years old the first time her mother left her alone during the evening. Faith rang the bell because she was lonely and frightened. Her mother raced into the shack with two of her aunts, fearing that one of the male customers had strayed out back. When her mother realized there was no emergency, she grew furious and slapped Faith. Then she broke into tears and sank to her knees, rocking her child in her arms and promising they would have a real home someday with a big porch and lots of roses.
It was winter, and her mother tucked a blanket around Faith, then stoked the stove before going back to the brothel to continue an endless night of work. Faith huddled alone on her pallet in the silent room, nibbling her sandwich, her hand clinging to the bellrope, desperate to pull it, knowing she didn’t dare.
She’d been twelve when Adam was born, and learned how to care for an infant. Her mother made frequent visits to the shack to feed him, but seemed unable to give him anything more than her mother’s milk. So Faith had been the one to give Adam the love he needed. The two of them clung to each other, spending years alone in that shack, day after day, night after night, waiting like prisoners for their mother to come and dole our their daily sustenance.
Her mother had wanted to protect them from the ugliness of her life, but in doing so she’d kept herself away from them, depriving them of her mothering and love, and imprisoning them in a world they didn’t understand.
And that’s why Faith hated her. She could bear her mother’s neglect. But Adam and Faith had needed the woman in their lives more than three hours a day. Was it too much to ask for a mother’s love? For a little of her attention and time?
That would have been enough for Faith. That’s all she herself had wanted from her mother.
And that’s what Adam and Cora needed from Faith. But her debts and expenses were pulling her away, stealing her time and forcing her to make choices as destructive as her mother’s had been. And God help her, Faith couldn’t bear another day of seeing Adam and Cora’s desperate faces as she dragged herself inside and fell asleep without tucking them in.
Sheneeded help.
Sheneeded love.
She buried her face in her hands, lost and alone as she’d been all her life. Her anguished sob echoed off the stones, and she couldn’t hold back the deep sorrow wrenching her heart. She wept for her mother and her aunts who’d been stripped of their innocence and driven into a soulless life of prostitution; and for Adam and Cora, two beautiful children who were deserving of a better life than they’d been given; and for herself, because she was paying for the sins of her mother. And because she was repeating them.
o0o
Duke rushed to the bathhouse with his revolver gripped in his hand and his heart pounding. Faith stood in the huge tub, her face in her hands, her glistening body convulsing with hard, wrenching sobs.
He looked around the small stone room and saw nothing wrong, no fire, no man lurking in the shadows, just Faith alone and weeping. The greenhouse was empty and silent. The only sound was her broken sobs, which he’d heard on his approach.
“Faith?”
She sucked in a breath and whirled toward the door, her face soaked with tears and misery, her breasts peeping through her wet hair.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She blinked in shock. A second later, she shrieked and sank into the water. “What are you doing here?”
He holstered his gun. “I thought you had a fire in here.”
“What?”
“I just got into town and saw a glow through one of your windows while I was heading home. I thought the gas burner had started a fire, or that somebody was snooping around in your greenhouse.”
“It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“Which is exactly why I was suspicious.”
