Read Blind Lake for Free Online Page B

contrasting angles against plump pillows. Marguerite felt immediately and obscurely sorry for Edie Jerundt, one of those girls designed by nature to be picked on and ostracized, arms and legs awkward as stilts, her grasp approximate, her words halting, her embarrassment perpetual and profound.
    It was nice, Marguerite reflected, that Tess had befriended a girl like Edie Jerundt.
    Unless—
    Unless it was Edie who had befriended Tess.
    After the downloads the girls played with the dolls Tess had liberated from the garage. The dolls were a motley bunch, most collected by Tess at outdoor flea markets back when Ray used to make weekend drives from Crossbank into the New Hampshire countryside. Sun-paled fashion dolls with strangely twisted joints and mismatched clothes; oversized baby dolls, a majority of them naked; a scattering of action figures from forgotten movies, arms and legs frozen akimbo. Tess tried to enlist Edie in a scenario (
this is the mother, this is the father; the baby is hungry but they have to go to work so this is the baby-sitter
), but Edie quickly grew bored and was reduced to parading the dolls across the coffee table and giving them nonsense monologues (
I’m a girl, I have a dog, I’m pretty, I hate you
). Tess, as if gently nudged aside, retired to the sofa and watched. She began to bump her head rhythmically against the sofa cushion. About one beat per second, until Marguerite, passing, steadied her head with her hand.
    This ryhthmic bumping, plus a worrisome speech-delay, had been Marguerite’s first clue that there was something different about Tessa. Not something
wrong
—Marguerite would not accede to that judgmental word. But, yes, Tess was different; Tess had some problems. Problems none of the well-intentioned therapists Marguerite had consulted were ever quite able to define. Most often they talked about idiosyncratic threshold-level autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Which meant: we have a labelled bin in which to toss your daughter’s symptoms, but no real treatment.
    Marguerite had taken Tess for physiotherapy aimed at correcting her clumsiness and “poor proprioception,” had tried her on courses of drugs designed to modify her supply of serotonin or dopamine or Factor Q, none of which had made any perceptible change in Tess’s condition. Which implied, perhaps, only that Tess had an unusual personality; that her skewed aloofness, her social isolation, were problems she would have to carry indefinitely or overcome as an act of personal will. Fooling with her neurochemical architecture was counterproductive, Marguerite had come to believe. Tess was a child; her personality was still a work-in-progress; she should not be drugged or bullied into someone else’s notion of maturity.
    And that had seemed like a plausible compromise, at least until Marguerite left Ray, until the trouble back at Crossbank.
    There had not even been a newspaper this weekend. Usually it was possible to e-print sections of the
New York Times
(or most any other urban paper), but even that meager connection to the outside world had been clipped. And if Marguerite missed the papers, how the news junkies must be suffering! Cut off from the great global soap opera, left to simmer in ignorance about the Belgian Accords or the latest Continental Court appointment. The silence of the video panel and the periodic sputtering of the rain gave the afternoon a yawning lassitude, made Marguerite content to sit in the kitchen and leaf through old issues of
Astrobiology and Exozoology
, her attention fluttering mothlike over the dense text, until Connie Jerundt returned for Edie.
    Marguerite rooted the girls out of Tess’s room. Edie was sprawled on the bed, her feet against the wall, picking through Tess’s shoebox of faux jewelery, ornamental combs, and tortoiseshell barrettes. Tess sat at her dresser, in front of the mirror.
    “Your mom’s here, Edie,” Marguerite said.
    Edie blinked her froggishly large eyes, then