An Inheritance

Chapter 25

Hurrying through breakfast, Lauren dreaded going back to her mother’s letters, but that’s what she knew she had to do.  Days earlier she had put them down when they started to hint that she had a part in why her parents’ marriage had fallen apart.  Up until her mother was pregnant with her, all of the letters indicated that they had a fairly good, strong family life; her father, mother and Danielle.

Putting the remainder of the letters in order was done quickly and Lauren grabbed a handful of the next to be read and brought them over to the cot.  This time she would read them all … read them all no matter what they would say.

The first letters were way darker than the previous ones.  Her mother was upset with how her fatherhad taken the information of the new pregnancy.  She wrote that his moods swung from sullen, withdrawn, and angry, to frightened and ashamed.  She stated she never knew which Conrad would wake up in the morning, or come home from work that day.

Then a month or so later her mother wrote: “ … Conrad told me today how badly he knows he’s been acting and is beside himself on how to make it up to me.  He told me we’re not always right, so maybe our new baby would be just like Danielle.  Ma mere, I don’t know if this frightens me more than his previous behavior.  He is putting his faith in my being wrong and I know that that is not the case here.  He won’t hear anything more about it.  What will I do when he finally realizes that our new little girl will be an Alma?  Conrad is disregarding his own senses, I can tell.  Even when I insisted that she will be named Alma, Conrad says he will never call her that … “

The letters following that one described him like any other expectant father.  He painted the nursery, he put up baby gates, he went shopping for baby clothes and paid special attention to Danielle so she wouldn’t feel neglected.  But also in the letters was her mother’s concern of what would happen once the baby was actually born.

There was a span of a couple weeks which Lauren realized was during the time right after she had been born.  She was reluctant to pick up the next letter, but was relieved to find it full of excited stories of her birth and how ‘perfect’ she was.  Of course I was perfect, whose child isn’t?  Alma Lauren Gerard was the new baby’s name, but she would be called Lauren.  Conrad was elated and Danielle was overjoyed to have a little sister she could take care of and ‘boss’ around.  Yes, that sounds like what Danielle would think of right off-the-bat.  Lauren smiled.

There were fewer letters during that first year.  Taking care of Lauren, being involved with Danielle and her pre-school along with working for the Judge left little time for letter writing.  But when Lauren’s mother did write, it mostly pertained to how the girls were getting along, Danielle’s activities and how Lauren was progressing through her infancy.  From first rolling over or sitting on her own to her first steps and words, it was all chronicled in those letters.

“Mamma, Lauren is just so funny … she’s only two but has such a fantastic vocabulary, I have to remind myself she is still so young.  She will listen intently to every adult around her … and then questions me on what they meant by one thing or another.  It’s almost scary, yet funny coming from such a little one.  But, things like this do make me wonder what is going on in her mind.”

With Lauren’s more awareness and mobility, her mother wrote that there was no more question as whether or not she was an Alma, as she was definitely showing some of her abilities.  “… she came running to me with tears in her eyes.  She said a bad kitty was going to hurt the birdies in the nest.  I picked her up and we went downstairs to the apartment’s parking lot and she showed me where this was going to happen.  I saw no cats, but she insisted we stay and within a few minutes a stray came from around the building and was headed toward the tree Lauren had pointed to.  We shooed it away, and Lauren was satisfied that the baby birds would be okay.  I asked her later how did she know and she looked at me strangely … ‘I saw it Mommy, didn’t you?’”