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Prologue

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On my sixteenth birthday, there wasn't a single

cloud in the sky. An uninterrupted sea of baby blue was spread from one horizon to the other, and the warm breeze scented with hyacinths, lilacs and daffodils was as gentle as the flutter of air from a passing sparrow.

It was magic.

Twilight the day before. I had pushed Mommy in her wheelchair down the ramp and turned her toward the lake.

"There's one!" Mommy cried as soon as she caught sight of the first blackbird lifting from a tree branch in the surrounding forest and gliding over the water.

Then, as we often did, we held hands and closed our eves and made our wishes. It was our special little secret ceremony, something we had begun doing together since I was four because it was something she said she had always done. She believed in the power of the lake and its surroundings.

"I started doing it almost as soon as I had arrived to live with your great-grandmother Hudson," she told me. "Before that the only body of water I had really spent any time near was what was in my bathtub. A place like this was perfect for my dreams and still is. I know it will be perfect for yours as well. Summer."

We both had wished for a wonderful tomorrow. I imagined a day when smiles would float down from Heaven itself, settling so deeply in the faces of all my relatives and friends that they would all forget every sad or troubling thought, every unhappy moment. Then we would all ring in my new year in harmony. Mommy believed we needed a dose of magic here and there to protect us, especially us.

I didn't disagree, for now I was well past the age when I wouldn't be permitted to hear about and learn about the tragedies and the mistakes that marked our family history. Mommy confessed that

sometimes-- perhaps even more often than

sometimes-- she truly believed there was a curse haunting her every step, her every breath. Even her every thought.

"Anyone else would probably have come to a point where she was unable to make another decision. Summer. My hands used to tremble on the steering wheel of my specially equipped van even when I approached an ordinary intersection and merely had to decide whether to go right or left. Surely something terrible would occur if I made the wrong choice. I thought. The only reason why I didn't freeze up was because I kept hearing my adopted mother's voice urging me on and chiding me for being afraid," Mommy said. "That woman could face down Armageddon."

I could certainly understand Mommy's fear and often wondered if such a curse could be passed on to me. That was Mommy's worst worry, too.

"What if the strongest, biggest thing I gave you was my own bad luck?" Mommy suddenly said, as if she had read my mind.

"That's silly, Mommy," I told her, even though I wasn't sure. "There's no such thing as being destined to have bad luck. It's all just chance and no one's to blame. You couldn't be the cause of anyone's trouble." I insisted and did so with such vehemence she had to laugh and promise not to speak such dark thoughts to me again.

But, she would. She couldn't help it. She was carrying a sack full of guilt.

She was especially pursued by the memories of her stepsister. Bentatha, being murdered by gang members in Washington. D.C.-- where Mommy first lived-- and also troubling her was the car accident that had killed her half brother, my uncle Brody, who I never met. I saw his photograph and was well aware of how handsome he had been and how much promise his future had held for him. He died rushing home after visiting Mommy when she lived here all alone. Grandmother Megan. Mommy's real mother, suffered a terrible nervous breakdown after Uncle Brody's accident. She almost committed suicide.

Aunt Alison, Uncle Brody's sister, still harbored ill feeling toward Mommy, although lately she disguised it well and was at least civil when she was here, not that she was that often. Recently, she had gone through a nasty divorce, her husband accusing her of being an adulteress and not only with one other lover either! That, I wasn't told however. That I overheard.

In our house the walls don't keep secrets behind them too well.

Anyone would think Aunt Alison should feel sorry for Mommy. Not long after Brody's death, she had become a paraplegic when she was thrown from her horse. Then she had suffered horribly under the hands of her bizarre and mad Aunt Victoria, Grandmother Megan's sister. For a while Mommy was basically a prisoner in this house. She hated talking about it. She said it revived nightmares. but Mommy believed that she had been punished for bringing all this bad luck. She actually thought she deserved it. and if it wasn't for my father. Austin. who had become her physical therapist, she might have succeeded in doing away with herself in this very lake we now serenely gazed upon.

We had filled this lake with tears enough, it seemed to me,. It was time for smiles and laughter and sunshine, and if it took my birth and my birthdays to make that strong and stronger. I was happy to do it.

From where we looked out over the lake to make our wishes, we could see Uncle Roy. Mommy's stepbrother, repairing a window shutter on his house. After he had left the army. Mommy had asked him to work for her and Grandmother Megan's real estate and construction development company. He became a job foreman and soon began dating my nanny. Glenda Robinson, who was an unwed mother with a child only a year older than I was at the time, a boy named Harley. When Uncle Roy proposed to Glenda and she agreed to marry him. Mommy decided they should build their home on our property.