Read Web of Angels for Free Online

they really want to. Don’t you think there but for the grace of God? To be honest it made me grateful that my son just has Down’s. I couldn’t deal with mental health issues
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    “You didn’t tell me that people were coming over,” Sharon said. She didn’t do well in crowds. She avoided the breakfast club at Magee’s and she wouldn’t be dragged to Moms’ Night Out, which rotated through the neighbourhood.
    “It was a last-minute thing,” Eleanor said. “Since everyone was coming anyway.”
    “Where’s Bram?” Sharon scanned the living room for Eleanor’s husband, who disliked parties too.
    “He took Judy to a hockey game. You need to get out more. Be around people. Hang up your coat.”
    “I shouldn’t stay.” But she unzipped her coat and hung it in the hall closet while Eleanor took the containers to thekitchen. She couldn’t explain to Eleanor what being around so many people did to her. She barely understood it herself though her therapist had explained it, more than once.
    When she was pregnant for the third time, the house several doors down was demolished and rebuilt. The construction noise had driven her completely crazy, and she believed it was this noise that had pushed her back into therapy. That and having a child born with red hair.
    She was a milk machine with an infant, a toddler who wanted to nurse again, and a son who complained that she was always too tired to do anything with him. Friends advised her to sleep while the little ones napped, but while they napped, Sharon would sit at the kitchen table, comparing photographs of her new baby to pictures of herself at the same age. Just about identical. Like twins. Her mouth would get dry, all the moisture used up by her eyes, which ran, wetting tissue after tissue, which she left crumpled on the table. She’d look at the photographs and feel like she was disappearing until one day Eleanor found her sitting like that, and slapped the Yellow Pages down in front of her. She told Sharon to pick a psychologist, any one of them, and call. Sharon made an appointment with someone who worked out of a basement office on Hope Street, a block from the public school. While her sister-in-law babysat, Sharon spent an hour talking to a total stranger for no reason she could fathom. And for no reason other than it was the only time she’d had to herself in the whole week, she decided to go back.
    One Thursday led to another and when Emmie was about a year old, after one of those sessions, Sharon was taking the girls to the library, pushing the baby in a stroller. Nina was walking and whining about it. She scuffed her new shoes on the sidewalk, rubbing them into the blue and slimy mulberries that had fallen unpicked, looking up at Sharon to make sure she knew it was deliberate. “I want to ride,” Nina said. “It’s no fair.” Again and again. Sharon tried distraction, “Do you see the robin going to her nest?” Threats, “Do you want a time out?” And bribery, “I’ll get you an ice cream cone but only if you behave.”
    It was summer, it was hot, and Sharon still nursed at night to get Emmie to sleep. Her right nipple was sore where she’d been bitten. The sky had the smoky look of a heat wave that would never lift. In the playground at Christie Pits, moms and nannies slumped on benches while their children ate sand, threw sand, and stuck twigs into sand birthday cakes. Toddlers chased pigeons, old ladies practised tai chi. Someone, heading into the park with a double stroller, smiled at her sympathetically. Sharon’s back was wet, her T-shirt sticking to her. By the time she got to the convenience store on Hope Street, Nina was stamping her feet and wailing. Sharon pushed down the foot brakes on the stroller and sat on the picnic table at the side of the store, staring at baskets of berries, pots of geraniums, and the blue Christmas lights that decorated the store year-round. She didn’t dare open her mouth, afraid of what would come out.