Out of the Rain

by V. C. Andrews

“So what’s your favorite subject?” I asked, now thinking that if I talked about school, studying, reading, I might bore her into leaving me alone and going to sleep.

  “Sex,” she said.

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m not joking.” She spun around completely. “And don’t tell me it’s not your favorite subject, too. If you really want to be more than just a guest here, you have to follow Karen’s rule.”

  “Oh? What is that?”

  “It’s simple,” she said, rising. “I’ll tell you one of my most secret secrets, and then you tell me one of yours. We keep doing it almost every day until we have no more secrets from each other. Then we’ll be more like real cousins, and I’ll always stick up for you, and you’ll always stick up for me. Of course, if one of us reveals one of those secrets to someone else without the other person’s permission, everything ends. We don’t look out for each other, we don’t care about each other, and we’re permitted to do anything we want to hurt the other. Agreed?”

  “Sounds like a trap,” I said, and she pulled her head back.

  “What? What kind of trap? How’s that a trap?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think a lot about it when I’m fully awake.”

  She stared at me a moment and then stepped closer to the bed so she could loom over me.

  “It’s not funny, Saffron. There aren’t many people I’ve made that promise to. It’s the most special thing anyone can do. The only reason I’m doing it with you is you’re my father’s niece and you’re going to live here.”

  “I realize that, and I appreciate it.”

  “Appreciate it? Establish a relationship.” She smirked as if I had said the dumbest things. “You sound like a teacher, not a student. Maybe you’re weird.”

  I smiled. “We’re all weird.”

  “That’s a weird thing to say,” she said, and started out. I could see her mind was spinning like a satellite falling to earth. She turned, squinting at me suspiciously. “Why didn’t your mother ever tell my father anything about you? He claims he didn’t even know your name. It’s like you fell out of the sky or something and landed on our front steps. Why was that? What happened to make them hate each other so much?”

  “Ask your father,” I said. “I don’t know it all. My mother wouldn’t talk about it much, either,” I added quickly.

  She thought a moment, shrugged, and said, “Whatever. I’ll admit that’s weird. Get ready for tomorrow. My mother’s going to change your whole look. You won’t recognize yourself when you look in the mirror.”

  I don’t recognize myself now, I thought, and wished I could say it.

  She waited a moment as if she was anticipating what I wished I could say, and then she left, closing the door behind her.

  I lay there for a few moments thinking about Mazy’s last words to me: “I’m not going to tell you what to do. If you want to go back tomorrow, go back. If not, we’ll keep going and ignore them. You decide.”

  Deep in her heart, she knew I had accepted it. I would have to decide, and whatever I did with my life was really up to me. Soon she’d be unable to do much about it anyway. But when she said, “If you want to go back tomorrow, go back,” I realized now, she didn’t mean returning to the Hurley public school to try to become friends with the kids my age and live there normally. What she really meant was returning to my father.

  There was nothing obviously to connect me with him, forcing me to acknowledge him, as far as anyone at the school or in the town knew. After Mazy passed away, I could have gone along with the fiction she had created for the public about my parents being dead and turned myself over to some social service department, or I could have put my pack on my back, the way I had envisioned myself sitting on the train here, and become one of the invisible kids my age and around my age who disappeared into the shadows of American towns and cities. It wasn’t whether I had the smarts to survive; it was what I would survive to become.

  I thought that along with everything else she kept well hidden in her smiles and words was the assumption that eventually I would decide to become part of my father’s new life. It must have saddened her, because she knew that to do so, I would have to swallow back all the pain, and I would have to refuse to believe the most terrible of things about him. But who forgave their parents more than their children? More often than not, all children were like me at one time or another. Hardened and full of rationalizations. Otherwise, like me, they might not survive. Many times, just like I was doing tonight and had done when I first stepped off the train in Sandburg Creek, I would question whether that survival, clinging to the thin ties to family, was worth the cost. What would I think of myself years from now?

  I rose and went to the window to look out at the lights of neighboring houses. Every family in every other house was woven in their own secrets and sins. They did everything they could to avoid facing them. Life was filled with little lies. Ironically, too often the most deadly thing was honesty. It could crush you. Angels floated by in the darkness, pausing at this door or that, hoping there was a place pure enough for them to rest until morning. But there was none.

  Nevertheless, they were obligated to search. It was their mission. I was sure they didn’t even pause at this doorway. This house bled dishonesty into the night, all night. I really shouldn’t blame Karen for looking for someone to trust, I thought. Instinctively, she knew it was nearly an impossible task. Some time or another, we all realize that. She was hoping I understood.

  Could she be an ally for me, and could I be an ally for her? Wasn’t that what I longed for back in Hurley, a trusted friend? I had barely spoken to Karen, barely even looked at her, but somehow I sensed a desperation. Perhaps we shared far more than the same father. She wanted to reveal things, things she remembered from the darker past we had both lived through.

  In time, I would reach out to her. She would smile, placing her hand in mine, but I was certain that she then would realize what all that truth really meant and would quickly retreat to the safety of ignorance again.

  I don’t want to know. Thank you, but really and truly, I don’t want to know… We’d both reach for that same mantra.

  Ignorance allows us to sleep.

  I returned to bed. I had to build my strength. Most of my time here, I would be learning new secrets and experiencing new distrusts and pain, and not only Karen’s, either. The lies in the foundation of this family squirmed like snakes. These were snakes that could smile gleefully. When I finally fell asleep, I tossed and fretted and dreamed awful things. But I didn’t dare whimper and especially not scream. Who would come to comfort me anyway?

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Mazy had said. “If you want to go back tomorrow, go back. If not, we’ll keep going and ignore them. You decide.”

  Mazy’s words were the only words of comfort I possessed. Memories of her voice truly were what enabled me eventually to fall into a safe sleep. It was as if I was still with her, still in my robin’s-egg blue room, and all that had happened had just been a long night-mare.

  As Karen had predicted, I did sleep late into the morning. I had the image, maybe some wishful thinking, of my father looking in on me and then closing the door softly sometime during the night. I knew that he had taken Karen to school so he could make all the arrangements for my enrollment. Finally, because she had made the appointment for me at her salon, Ava came to the door of my bedroom and sharply told me to wake up.

  “This will be the only morning you oversleep in this house, Saffron. Get washed and dressed, and come down for some breakfast. We’re going to the salon in an hour,” she declared. She started to back up and close the door again but stopped. “How did you sleep?”

  “Pretty deeply,” I said.

  “Lucky you,” she told me. “Garson kept me up all night with that damn teething. Fortunately, he’s asleep now. Move along. In the closet, you’ll find a fresh blouse and a skirt that should fit you. I have a sweater for you to wear to school, too. Sat
urday we’ll do some shopping for a more complete wardrobe for you, including shoes and underthings.”

  She paused again, thoughtful, and looked at me. “You’ve had your period, haven’t you?”

  “I have.”

  “Well, I imagine you saw you have what you need.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “When are you due again?”

  “Next week,” I said.

  “Um… sometimes travel and other traumatic events play havoc with it. We’ll see.” She returned to her stiff posture as if she had just realized that she was being too nice. “Get moving,” she said.

  I stared at the closed door for a moment, wondering if all that talk about my period was motherly concern or concern that I might do something that would embarrass her. I rose to wash and dress. I found the blouse and skirt she had described all the way in the left corner of the closet, as if they had been put there secretly. Everything did fit, and I hurried down the stairs to the kitchen. She had a setting on the kitchenette table for me.

  “I’m scrambling some eggs,” she said. “I’ll put a little fruit with it and some toast. Do you want something else?”

  “No, that’s fine. Thank you.”

  “There’s orange juice poured. Do you drink coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  Apparently, my father had been careful not to tell her I did. She’d wonder how he would have known. Little blunders could explode it all instantly.

  “Well, I have a fresh pot for myself as well. You can just go sit.”

  I knew she was preparing to ask me dozens and dozens of personal questions. Why was Daddy so confident that I could get Ava to believe any and all of this? Or was he hoping I would fall on my face and then use that to tell her the truth, that somehow if he could then get her to feel so sorry for me, she might forgive him and the lies? Then again, perhaps he was thinking that my desperation would motivate me to be as perfect a liar as he was.

  As Ava put my breakfast on a dish, I really was favoring blurting it all out in one frantic breath: This is all a lie. I am not your husband’s niece; I am his daughter. I’ve been living with my grandmother for the last five years because he left me at a train station as part of a plan. My mother was not his biological sister; she was his wife. Yes, they did grow up as brother and sister… but…

  The madness of the explanation, the complications, choked the words. I turned and drank my juice. It was warmer than I liked. I smiled, thinking he could have messed up again by telling her to put an ice cube in it first. How many of those little mistakes hovered in the air around us? How keen was Ava? Was she a Miss Marple, too, the famous female detective Mazy always accused me of being because I was so pensive and so full of questions?

  She put the plate of eggs and fruit in front of me.

  “Thank you, Ava,” I said.

  “You can call me Aunt Ava,” she replied sternly. I had forgotten. I nodded and began to eat. Ironically, she had made my eggs the way I liked them, quite well done. “Are they all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “It’s the way I like them, too,” she said. “I hate runny eggs.”

  “So do I.”

  She didn’t smile, but she looked less tense.

  “I’d like to hear more about how things were for you, especially these last few years, and more about your mother. Derick refuses to talk about her. He gets visibly angry when I ask questions. Your arrival has been quite the surprise. I know it was for him. Why did you decide to come here?”

  I ate and listened, just as he had instructed. I repeated the instructions in my mind: only answer questions directly, and don’t volunteer more than the question asks. Were there any signs of suspicion?

  “My mother died,” I said.

  “Yes, but you had nothing to do with Derick your whole life, from what I understand. He said he didn’t even know your name or your age.”

  I had to swallow back the answer I wanted to give her and, again, stick to the obvious.

  “Uncle Derick is the only living relative I have now,” I said.

  “And your mother’s parents? Didn’t either of them have a sister? Weren’t there cousins?”

  “She never said. She wasn’t talking to her parents, either.”

  “Like your uncle,” she said. “Did they ever know about you?”

  “I don’t know. As far as I know, they didn’t try to contact us.”

  “And your paternal grandparents?”

  “I never knew my father, much less his family, so…”

  “How sad. Sounds like your family, my husband’s family, was a constantly erupting earthquake. Parents can be burdens. Well, hopefully things will change for you here. Karen is taking you to the party Saturday night, so you’ll begin to meet other girls and boys your age. I’ve already told her we’re going to do some shopping for you on Saturday, both for the party in the evening and for things you will need. She’ll probably come along so that if I buy you something so new that she doesn’t have it, I’ll have to buy it for her, too.

  “Yes,” she said before I could even change expression, “she’s spoiled, but not entirely by me. Your uncle and her grandfather are putty in her hands when she starts to whine, especially if I’m not there. Sometimes even if I am.”

  She drummed on the table with her fingers. Maybe she was hoping I’d say something, but I didn’t even breathe.

  “I’ve ordered the family limousine for nine forty-five. Stores open at ten, so Karen will have to get up earlier than she usually does on Saturdays if she wants to come along with us. The driver will assist us with the packages. He’s my father’s driver, Tyson Mathis, a very nice man who puts up with a lot, you’ll see. Not from me, from my father, who was born cranky. We’ll be going to dinner at his estate Sunday night. He knows about you, of course. I’ll prepare you for all of that.”

  “Prepare me?”

  “I wish someone had prepared me,” she added in a mutter.

  I drank some coffee and tried to look away, especially so she wouldn’t see the way I had reacted to hearing how my father catered to his younger daughter.

  “How did you know to come here, to this exact town?” she asked quickly, almost like a police detective trying to catch a suspect off guard. “I mean, if your mother refused to have anything to do with her brother, they didn’t exchange information, especially if your mother was moving so much. Had they had contact recently?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “So?

  I fumbled answers in my mind.

  “The police,” I said, hoping that would be enough. “Once I gave them his name, they located you, and just in time, too. Some social worker was talking about a foster family.”

  “I see. And then what happened?”

  “Everything was taking too long. I was scared they had called Uncle Derick and he had said they should put me in a foster home. I had some money and decided to come regardless.”

  “So you made your own arrangements,” she said, nodding.

  “I just got on a plane. The woman at the desk in the airport looked up the travel route for me, so I knew about the bus to Sandburg Creek.”

  She nodded. “The police in California must have contacted our chief of police,” she said, thinking aloud. “And he tracked your travel and told Derick.”

  “I don’t know those details. I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I thought that even if Uncle Derick didn’t want me to come, I’d pretend he did just to get away.”

  “So you came here without being sure?”

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking very well about anything after I found my mother.”

  “Yes, you said you found her. Tell me about that.”

  “It wasn’t like I just discovered her. We were supposed to go to eat. She didn’t come out of her room, so I went and… I couldn’t rouse her. Actually, I was more frightened at the sight of her like that than sad at the start.”

  “Of course. You poor child,” she said. “Forget about
how and why you came here. That was smart. Thinking well in a crisis is what distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful ones. You’re here, and you’re safe,” she said.

  We heard Garson’s cry, and she rose.

  I had finished eating. Maybe I had eaten too quickly out of nervousness, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Leave everything,” she said when I started to gather the dishes and silverware. It was almost a reflex now. “I have Celisse coming in to look after Garson and do some extra work today. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Do you want anything more to eat?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  She stared at me so hard I was afraid it was all over. She was thinking about the story I had just told her and had seen through the fiction I had created. My voice, the look in my eyes, had betrayed me. I simply wasn’t a good liar after all. But that wasn’t it; that wasn’t why she was considering me so hard.

  “I hope some of your good manners rub off on Karen. Her father and her grandfather have spoiled her to the point where she looks after herself before she looks after someone else. Maybe you’ll have a good influence on her. Just be careful it’s not the other way around. She may look and seem harmless, but…”

  I know I widened my eyes. She was talking about her own daughter as if she was some sort of poison.

  “I’ll go get Garson and start his feeding until Celisse comes. She’s always on time, so don’t dawdle. Oh, here,” she said, unfolding a light green cardigan sweater she had draped over one of the chairs. “Wear this for today.”

  “Thank you,” I said, taking it.

  “It’s actually one of mine.”

  I watched her leave and then released a deep breath threatening to burst out of my lungs.

  Was this what she was going to do—talk about simple things, daily life, and then insert a sharp question that would cause me to stumble and look guilty? Daddy said Ava didn’t like to talk about sad or unpleasant things. She was certainly pursuing them now. Was what he said about her another of his lies to distract me from worrying? And what was all this warning about her father? We were going to his house for dinner Sunday night, and she would prepare me? Why? What sort of a cross-examination would he conduct? Wasn’t this something Daddy should have warned me about? He barely talked about it.