“I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” she said, looking out the window at them again. I didn’t think she had heard a word I said. Hopefully, she had not seen how much I had been trembling in expectation of her questions.
I quickly rose and went up to my room. Was all of this going to come to an abrupt end now? I went to my window and looked down to see the chief of police drive off. Then, feeling my insides still trembling, I sat on the bed and listened to every sound in the house, anticipating the roof falling in. Garson started to cry, and that was followed by footsteps on the stairs and in the hall. I waited, half expecting to hear Ava shouting. Another set of footsteps grew louder and closer. There was a knock on my door.
“Yes?”
Daddy slipped in, not opening the door fully.
“I know you’re worried,” he began, almost in a whisper. “He didn’t give anything away.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. His contract renewal is coming up. He played Ava well, looking out for me. He doesn’t know why or anything; he just thought it was a good idea to go along with what I had told her happened. We’re fine.”
“Ava’s not suspicious?”
“Not a bit,” he said.
“I’m worried about going to this party, the questions. And this Dr. Stewart. She wants to have a private get-to-know-you session. What did you tell her? What could she ask me?”
“I followed the notes I gave you to a T. You can elaborate on anything you want. Don’t be nervous about any of it. Just do as I told you to do. Your story is always that you don’t want to bring up troubling memories just yet. Just go with that and stick to the general facts in the notebook. Dr. Stewart will definitely not be a problem.”
“You’ve been married a long time, and you’re part of the family business, Daddy. Don’t you think the truth might be better now?”
He drew closer, a cold look in his eyes. “Try to avoid calling me Daddy, Saffron. And no, it would, as I told you, be a disaster for us both.”
He paused, waiting to see if I would say anything, and then he slipped out the way he had come in.
I let out a breath that seemed to have originated from the bowels of the earth and then began preparing for a shower and changing my clothes. As soon as I stepped into the shower and closed the curtain, I heard the bathroom door open and saw Karen come in wearing her bathrobe and sit on the closed toilet seat. She sat back and began filing her fingernails.
“What do you want?” I cried.
“Just take your shower,” she said. “I’m not rushing downstairs to look after Garson because Celisse is leaving or to help with dinner.”
I saw her stand up, turn, and undo her robe to look at herself in the mirror, running her palms over her developing breasts.
As soon as I stepped out, she turned to look at me. Not anyone but my mother and Daddy when I was little and Mazy ever saw me stark naked. I reached quickly for my towel, fearful that she would declare I wasn’t as old as I claimed. If anything, however, it was just the opposite.
“You’re so well developed already,” she moaned. “Look at me. And you have the ass of a grown woman, too.”
“Sometimes it all happens practically overnight,” I said, putting on my robe after drying myself. “Don’t obsess over it.”
“Every other girl in my class is more developed than I am.”
“Not Melina Forest.”
“She’s not in my class, and I don’t compare myself to her for anything. She’s from another planet.”
She thought a moment, staring hard at me.
“What?”
“Do you masturbate? Adele thinks that makes you develop faster. Is that what you did?”
“You share everything with your friends, even stuff like that?”
“With best friends. That’s what they’re for. I told you about sharing our secrets before we became best friends.” She paused and looked at me askance. “You sound like you never had even one?”
“I wasn’t as trusting as you are,” I said. “Even with the short time I was at school and the few girls I met, I wouldn’t be so eager to do it now, either, after meeting some of those girls.”
“Well, are you going to share secrets with me or not?” she asked, with her hands on her hips. She did look a lot like Ava, especially when her temper flared. In my heart of hearts, I wished she was practically a clone and my father just happened to be here.
“I have masturbated,” I admitted. “But that’s not why I’ve developed and continue to,” I said. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Probably some stupid thing on the internet. Some suckle on the internet like a baby on its mother’s breast.”
“What?”
She smiled. Her little rage calmed, and she followed me to my bedroom.
“Suckle on it?”
“That’s how it seems,” I said.
“You don’t have to put on your old clothes,” she said when I started to reach for the clothes I had brought with me. “Just wait. I’ll get you something nicer.”
“Thank you.”
I smiled to myself, remembering Mazy telling me you get more with honey than with vinegar. About a minute later, she returned with a long-sleeved dark-blue sweater dress with rib-knit cuffs. She handed it to me, and I held it up.
“It’s very nice. Thanks.”
“I think I wore it twice since my mother bought it for me. I have clothes that still have tags on them,” she confessed. “My mother forgets what she bought me.”
“Really?”
I slipped on the dress and looked at myself.
“It fits you better because you’re more filled out,” she said in the tone of a moan. “Your mother must have been pretty. Don’t you have any pictures of her?”
“I do,” I said, and took out the envelope of pictures Daddy had given me.
She seized them like a starving animal and plopped onto my bed as she sifted through them.
“There’s none recent?” she asked, looking up from the last one.
“We were both too busy to take pictures.”
“Even on your phone?”
I looked down, playing on the ashamed bit.
“Remember, I said I never had a phone.”
“I didn’t believe it. Why not?”
“We had to budget our expenses, especially this past year.”
She stared at me as if I had really just landed on earth.
“Oh,” she said, looking like she had swallowed sour milk. She didn’t even want to hear about people who were less fortunate. “Well, I’ll ask Daddy to get you one. You need it,” she said firmly, even angrily. “We have to stay in touch all the time.”
“I guess,” I said. “He did say he would.”
“Well, I don’t guess. We sneak texts in class. I’ll show you how to hide your phone and put it on vibrate so you can feel a message without the teacher knowing.”
She glanced at the pictures and then put them back in the envelope.
“Your mother was beautiful, just as I thought,” she said.
“Yes, she was.”
“How many boyfriends did she have after your father left?”
“I don’t know exactly. Too many.”
“You never liked any of them?”
“No.”
“Any you hated more?”
I looked down. I’m onstage, I thought.
“What?”
“One was a little too interested in me.”
Her eyes widened. “You’ll tell me all about that, right?”
“What I can. It makes me sick to remember.”
“I bet. Yes, when you can.”
She looked so happy that I nearly laughed.
“I’m getting dressed for dinner. Afterward, we’ll do homework together and talk. In my room,” she added, like someone driving nails into the wall.
“Okay.”
She marched out. I looked at myself in her dress again. I’m sure it looks better on me, I thought. But I’m sure I should never l
et her know I think so.
Almost as soon as I entered the dining room, Karen emphasized my need for a phone. “I know you said you were getting her one, Daddy, but make sure it’s just like mine. It makes texting and exchanging photos easier.”
He looked at her across the table, got up, and left the room.
“Derick, what the hell…” Ava called after him.
When she shouted, Garson moaned in his bassinet but didn’t wake up.
A minute later, Daddy returned with a new phone in its box.
“I forgot I got it today. It’s all set up, and it’s just like yours, Karen,” he said, and handed it to me.
“Let me see it,” Karen demanded.
I took it out, glanced at it like someone who’s never seen one, and handed it to her. She immediately began entering numbers.
“We’ll do all that after dinner,” Ava said. “You know how I feel about phones at the dinner table, here and especially at a restaurant.”
Karen ignored her, finished what she was doing, and handed it back to me.
“You have my number and the other girls who are important,” she said.
I looked at Ava, whose eyes were flaming, and put it quickly back in the box.
“Thank you, Uncle Derick,” I said pointedly. He nodded.
“I swear,” Ava said, shaking her head. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m all alone here.”
No, I wanted to say. That describes me, not you.
Later, Ava calmed enough to give Karen and me compliments on our cleaning up after dinner. Karen worked hard and fast, looking forward to our retreating to her room. I knew I had to become quite creative quite quickly. I only hoped that the stories I was about to invent would be ones I wouldn’t forget in a week and get caught having lied.
There was one clear realization that would never be a lie: the only truthful moments I’d spend in this house were the hours I slept.
Now I’d have to worry that I might talk in my sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“My mother chose my bedroom furniture two years ago with-out me even knowing anything about it,” Karen complained as soon as we entered her room. “She said she wanted to be sure it fit the house. I hate it. It’s a wonder I can fall asleep in that bed. I hate bringing my friends up here, too.”
I looked at it, amazed at what she was saying. It was a king-size cherry wood bed with a high headboard and plush, oversize pillows. The top of the mattress looked a good two and a half, three feet off the floor, with wide bedframe sides and a beautifully matching arched footboard. It looked like a bed for a queen. There were nightstands on both sides, the one on the right with a pinkish-white phone on it. The one on the left had a picture of Ava and my father and Karen when she was ten or eleven, standing between them and looking lost and uncomfortable. It looked like Ava had her hand on the back of Karen’s neck, making sure she stood straight. I could almost hear her in the picture saying, Posture, posture.
There was a cherry wood dresser with three drawers. The mirror above the dresser was shaped exactly like her bed’s headboard. To the right on entry, she had a large vanity table with drawers and a square mirror and a chair. On the left was her oversize computer desk, also in cherry wood. The door to her walk-in closet was to the right of that, and to the right on entry, directly across from the center of the bed, was the door to her en suite bath-room.
I would have to agree that the pictures of country scenes, lakes, and forests on the light-coffee walls and the artificial plants and other decorations were not what anyone would expect to find in a teenage girl’s bedroom. Only her pictures of rock stars, bands, and handsome actors or models crowdedly displayed on her computer table suggested that someone younger than thirty slept here. Her pink pajama gown was neatly spread on the bedspread. Slippers were on a small step stool at the left of the bed. The room was quite large, however, at least twice the size of the room I was in and probably four times the size of the room I had at Mazy’s house.
“My mother won’t let me put anything on the walls. Daddy promises that when we move to the estate someday, I can choose my own furniture and redecorate my own room. Of course, the way Grandpa Amos is, that might not be until I’m in my twenties and maybe married myself. Well?” she said when I didn’t confirm her complaints. “What do you think of my room or, I should say, my mother’s idea of a room for me?”
I walked to the bed and sat on it.
“This is very comfortable.”
“Oh, spare me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The room! It doesn’t look like me!”
I nodded. “Not what I expected, I admit.”
She looked more satisfied. “So what was your room like?”
I wasn’t going to describe my room at Mazy’s. That was really a girl’s room and had more warmth. But I did remember a room description in a novel I had read last year.
“The last one, you mean? A quarter of this size, a single bed, not even a double. The tables beside it didn’t match, and I didn’t have a dresser. I had an old armoire and a small closet hardly wider than me. Most of my stuff was in cartons on the floor. Which was worn gray wood with no rugs. I think it must have been flooded once. It had that musty, moldy smell no matter what I sprayed,” I added, thinking that was a good touch. “Oh, I had a mirror on the closet door, but it wasn’t full-length. There was no desk like that,” I said, nodding at her computer desk. “I did everything on my bed.”
“Really? Ugh,” she said. From the expression of disgust on her face, I might as well have told her I had just come from a bombed-out building. She quickly returned to herself. “Well, I still wish I could have picked out my own furniture, at least.”
She sighed and then brought another chair over to her desk.
“I hate homework,” she moaned, and sat. “Do you really like our school, or did you say that just to please my father?”
“The last school I was in had to be closed for a few days to kill rats.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Anyway, this school is beautiful to me, but I’m not sure how many friends I’ll make,” I said. She liked that. I sat on the other chair and put my books on the desk. “So what’s really your favorite subject?”
She stared down at her books. I thought she was giving real thought to my question, but it was more like she didn’t hear it.
“I really don’t have that many real friends,” she confessed. “What about you? I know you moved around, but I bet you made friends fast. It’s hard to believe you didn’t have a boyfriend, too. You’re not exactly Miss Piggy, and now, the way my mother had your hair done… you’ll need a fly swatter to keep their sticky little fingers off you. So?”
I could see that she wouldn’t open a book or start a homework assignment until I told her more about myself.
“I did have sort of a best friend at the last school,” I said.
This “almost a real revelation” brightened her eyes. It was almost real because I hadn’t had enough time to become close friends with Lucy Wiley, who lived a few houses down from Mazy and me. Lucy had leukemia. I had no doubt that if there was enough time, we would have become best friends, and none of what I could make up would have been an exaggeration. Mazy told me that Lucy’s death was the sort of thing that made her happy that she had become more of a hermit: “Once you get to know and care about someone, you add his or her suffering to your own, and your own is enough, in my opinion.”
“Are you going to ask your friend to visit? I’ll make sure my mother says it’s all right. You want to call her? You have a phone now. Might as well use it. Call her now,” Karen urged.
“I can’t call her,” I said.
“Why not? Oh, the time? But isn’t she in California? I think the time is earlier.”
“She’s not there anymore.”
“Well, where is she? Nearer?”
“She died,” I said. The stab of fear those words put into her eyes nearly stopped me from talking about Lucy any more. I felt a little guilty
using what really had happened to her to help lend credence to my fabrications.
“Died? What happened to her?” she asked, her voice breath-less.
“She was sick, and she got sicker, and they found out she had leukemia.”
“That’s… I forgot what it is.”
“It’s cancer, Karen,” I said. “She died shortly before my mother died and I had left.”
I could almost see the sheet of white fear fall over her. For a few moments, she sat speechless, staring. I wondered if rich people thought less about death. All their money insulated them from confronting what was ugly and painful in this world, at least suggesting they were further from the grip of who Mazy called the Grim Reaper.
There was probably some truth to that. Even though I was quite protected in Mazy’s world, homeschooled and confined for most of my life with her, I knew about the violence in the inner cities, the pain of the poor when it came to their health care. We watched it together on television. Mazy always had a personal story to add to what we had seen on the news, stories that had come from her years as a grade-school teacher.
“To the rich,” she said bitterly once, “all this is just on television. They make sure their chauffeurs take detours.”
After she had said it, she snapped out of her moment of anger and smiled at me. “But don’t let that stop you from becoming rich,” she said, and laughed.
Because of the death of a boy in high school who was in a car accident and Lucy’s tragedy, I already had seen how strange, almost impossible, death seemed to young people. You couldn’t reduce the pain by saying and thinking, Oh, well he was ninety. He had a good life. The boy and Lucy hadn’t had that chance, that way of rationalizing the sorrow.
So Karen’s reaction wasn’t unusual. Even our story of my fictional mother’s recent death didn’t affect her like my telling her my best friend died. This was about someone our age. Death had managed to sneak in despite it can’t happen to me thoughts.
“Couldn’t they do anything to save her?” she asked.
“No, it was too late and very bad,” I said. “I don’t like talking about it,” I quickly added. “It still gives me nightmares.”
Out of the Rain Page 13
