Scare Crow

by Julie Hockley

  My mother was screaming in French, but my father responded in English. He never needed to scream—even at its coolest, his officious tone was enough to change the earth’s rotation.

  “You need to get off your French high horse and start pulling your weight. We need their support, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to ensure that this happens.”

  “How far? How far will this have to go before you realize that it’s enough? Last night, Mr. Greyson dropped a shrimp in my cleavage and used his fat fingers to fish it out. And you watched. And you laughed. And you offered him another drink. What else do I have to do, Burt? Pull my dress up so that he can stuff money in my undergarments?”

  “That would be rather helpful,” my father said without any trace of hilarity in his voice. “He’s our largest financier, dear. If he wants to pinch your ass, dress you up as a French maid, and make you clean his lavatory, then you do it.”

  “Lavatory,” I sneered to myself using my father’s self-important tone. Only my parents could snob up something as simple as a bathroom.

  “Is that what I’ve been reduced to? Prostitution?” my mother wondered shrilly.

  “I didn’t marry you for your ability to think, dear.”

  “And I didn’t marry a man who is willing to do anything for a buck.”

  “Ah, but you did, my love. Who pays for the mansions, the cars, the trips, the extravagant lifestyle you love so dearly? Just smile and look pretty. You’ll be fine.”

  “What lifestyle? I’m stuck here, with you, playing little miss hostess to people who would like nothing better than to see us sink. We have to pretend that everything is all sunshine and rainbows when I’ve had to let almost all of our staff go and I’m running to my family for money when they’re barely keeping afloat as it is.”

  “This reminds me,” he said. “Have you called your brother, as I asked you to do yesterday?”

  “Henri just had a heart attack, Burt. Because of all the stress that you’ve been causing him. If I bother him with any more of this ugly business, it might just be enough to kill him.”

  “Bother him?” my father said as though he had swallowed a handful of sand. “If you don’t bother your mindless, spineless brother, we will lose everything. If they decide to sell Chappelle de Marseille, it will send our backers running, with their money.”

  “But if my family doesn’t pull out, they will lose what little they have left.”

  “Tonight. Call him tonight.”

  My mother paused, her voice hushed. “I’ve already asked them for so much. They’re barely taking my calls anymore. This will be the last straw. I’ll never be able to convince my brother, and my family will disown me.”

  “You could convince the pope to lend you his dirtiest underwear. You can convince your dimwitted brother.”

  “I can’t. Burt, I just can’t.”

  There was a long, dramatic sigh. “I knew I ought to have never married into your dirty family money.”

  “My dirty family money saved your perfect, old, bankrupt family. Do you even realize the mess you made? Do you see what people are saying about you in the papers? Cheat. Fraudster. Thief. No one wants to get anywhere near you, and you call my family dirty?”

  I had never spent much time with my mother’s family. A vague memory of a cousin in France with leaves stuck in her hair and muddy feet was all I knew of my mother’s family. As for my father’s family, they hadn’t hidden their disapproval of my mother and me. Mostly me (my mother had apparently proven to be a little useful). It seemed I didn’t turn out the way anyone thought I would or should.

  Growing up, I was taught to keep quiet and listen to what I was told to hear. Apart from Bill, I knew almost nothing of my family members, even my own parents. There was never a time when I was lying in front of a sparkling fire, chin cupped in hands, listening with my heart open as my parents told the story of the day they met and fell in love. Perhaps they had been in love, once upon a time. But I had never seen this. I was rarely in the same vicinity with either of my parents for longer than a few minutes at a time, let alone with both of them together in one place. And certainly not long enough to hear a When Harry Met Sally story.

  It wasn’t until my father’s face started appearing in the news that I really got to know my parents. The Sheppards had come to hard times in the eighties, when my father quickly divorced Bill’s mom and miraculously fell for breathtaking Isabelle Tremblay, heir to the Chappelle de Marseille empire. It was a bit of so-called luck given that my mother’s company had recently bloomed and was ripe for a Sheppard takeover.

  I remember sitting around a table the size of a soccer field as my grandmother, the first Emily Sheppard, called the Tremblay family a bunch of hippies whenever she could, whenever my mother was within earshot. My father, her one and only precious child, would chortle. My mother would keep smiling and order me to sit up straight.

  When my father strolled out of the quarters he shared with my mother, he saw me sitting on the bench a few feet away from him. There was barely a pause before he kept his pace all the way out into the hall until he disappeared.

  Sometimes I wondered if my father would recognize me if we happened to be passing each other on the street. Probably not.

  When I found my mother in her room, she was sitting in front of her mirror, dabbing at the tear stream that had dug a path through her foundation, one straight line down each cheek. Even her tears were calculated—enough to get a point across, not enough to completely ruin her makeup. Her eyes unflappably peered to my appearance in her mirror before going back to her own reflection. She had her lilac silk bathrobe on over a midnight-blue evening gown that went to her elfin shoeless feet. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, with a waterfall of curls gushing through the middle of the knot.

  I waited behind her, waited like a soldier would for a dormitory inspection. I was suddenly conscious of my to-be-deemed disagreeable appearance. I was wearing the only oversize cotton sweatshirt that fit me, under which an unbuttoned pair of jeans was hidden. My hair was in what had once been a ponytail. Now it was just an elastic band hanging on edge.

  When my mother finally finished working on herself, she turned around to examine what had become of me. The smirk that spread thin on her lips warned me that she wasn’t thrilled. She let her silk robe slide over her bare shoulders and fall to the back of her chair. She pulled her chin up and glided off the chair toward me.

  I stood still, too spellbound to be scared. She stood in front of me and cupped my chin under her long fingers. And then she pinched the skin under my chin, hard enough that I let out a yelp.

  “Is this what they call the college weight gain?” she sneered in a heavily French-accented English before releasing her pinch but not her stare.

  It was actually called the freshman fifteen, but I didn’t correct her because there was no point. It always seemed that she purposefully blundered English expressions, in a mocking sort of tone. Her undertone mutiny against my father’s heritage, I guessed.

  I wanted to say something, perhaps defend myself and come back with something witty to insult her with. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, which should have been enough time for me to at least have some one-liners ready and waiting. But I was still too entranced to say anything. Being under my parents’ roof, in my mother’s snare, I felt like I was back to being the little girl whose pigtails had to be tight enough to withstand tornado winds.

  My mother’s gaze left my fattened face and my double chin to find Meatball. I pulled him close, as though I could protect him from her.

  I could hear her teeth grinding. “This is new,” she said. “Yours?”

  “Mine,” I said resolutely, feeling as though my feet had just steadied to the ground.

  “Well, you can tie him up in the garage while you’re here.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. He goes where I go.”

  My mother’s eyes jumped back to my face, clearly taken aback. I rested my ha
nd on Meatball’s head, and he pressed against it as a show of unified strength.

  Isabelle glided back to her mirror and picked out a pair of diamond earrings.

  “Why are you here?” I asked her before she could demand the same from me.

  “Your father can’t leave the country.” She said this with triumph, as though my father heard her, as though her words could embarrass a man like him. “And now I get to play good wife while your father talks his way into getting favors.”

  She pricked an earring into her lobe and stretched a smile into the mirror. “If I’d thought you would come, I would have let you know that we would be here.”

  I smiled back. We both knew what she was really saying and what I was really thinking: sorry to ruin your Christmas alone.

  The young security guard came in to announce the guests’ arrival.

  My mother glanced at him, thanked him, and smiled until he left.

  “We have a long week of guests coming here and events to attend,” she told me.

  “You don’t need to change your plans,” I said. “We’ll only be here for a few days.”

  She stood erect, taking one last disapproving look at my frumpy disposition and my hairy dog.

  I understood. I was to stay hidden.

  “You’ll hardly know I’m even here,” I reassured her.

  My mother stepped into her heels and walked out.

  When the chatter noise from the guests downstairs dissipated out from the foyer into somewhere out back, I felt secure enough to walk across the mezzanine without being seen. The last thing I wanted was to embarrass my poor distraught mother.

  As ornate as the main-floor rooms were, the east wing—the children’s wing—was undressed. Plastic-wrapped furniture, paintings leaning against the marble walls, bubble-wrapped statues, boxes stacked up. This wing was being cleared out and was certainly not to be seen by the important guests. My parents’ reality was sinking in. They were broke, selling their possessions and perhaps eventually the Hamptons estate. I didn’t know how to feel about this. I never really thought about any place as my home, but if I had, this was the closest place I had to it. This was where I had been cooped up most of my childhood.

  I headed into my quarters and straight into Bill’s room, afraid of what I would find. His bed had disappeared, as had everything else. His books, his clothes, his posters, all of what I had left of him—gone. I made it to the center of the room before sinking to the carpet. It didn’t even smell of him anymore—just fresh paint and carpet cleaner. Meatball left my side and sniffed around the room. He found a clean spot against a built-in bookcase that my mother could sell off, lifted a leg, and left a new scent.

  I laughed so hard I cried.

  We left Meatball’s self-appointed room and headed to the opposite side of the sitting room, where my room was.

  Though empty boxes waited in a corner, my room had been mostly untouched. A few packed boxes were on the floor marked “For Emily” in black Magic Marker. I wouldn’t have cared what was inside had I not recognized Maria’s handwriting. I grabbed a side, pulled, and grinned. It was Bill’s stuff. Of course Maria would never let my mother get rid of all of Bill’s stuff without saving the stuff that mattered for me: pictures, yearbooks, old maps, notebooks filled with stupid car drawings.

  ****

  When I woke up, it was to a blinding spotlight in my eyes. I had forgotten what it was like to sleep in a room with windows. I would have gotten up to close the curtains, but these had already been removed.

  My king-size bed was littered with Bill’s stuff. At the time Bill died, people had real books and shoeboxes filled with pictures and were still using maps—paper maps—to find their way. My heart tightened. Bill never got to grow old and see the world change.

  Meatball was sleeping next to me, so closely that I was about to fall over the edge. It was as though the dog were afraid of space.

  I rolled over the side, stretched, and went to wash up in the bathroom—the “lavatory.” While I waited for the shower water to warm up, I stood over the sink. It was in these lavish surroundings that I realized how much I looked like my mother, or at least, what my mother looked like somewhere under all the plastic. The freckles over the cheeks and nose that reminded me of the Milky Way. The eyes a shade lighter than seaweed. The nose that curved at the base. The bony parts around my neck that stuck out under another cluster of freckles.

  This would have normally made me cringe and turn away from the mirror’s reflection. But as I started to undress, letting my clothes fall to my feet, I smiled.

  My face was rounder now and I had a second chin, as my mother had so subtly pinched out last night. I let my hands fall to my expanding waist, resting over the little bump that was pushing out. If it were a girl, would she look like me? If it were a boy, would he look like Cameron?

  All of a sudden, I could picture a little girl running with a full head of red hair splashing behind her. Beautiful freckles dotting little hands, feet wiggling. I turned my green eyes back to my own reflection, a reflection that would be mirrored in my child. And I realized how beautiful I was.

  It didn’t take long for Meatball to come find me in the shower. It was one of those open, privacy-lacking showers. Meatball lapped at the water pooling on the floor, but stood far enough away so that he wouldn’t have to get wet. I flicked water off my fingertips into his face to make sure he got wet. This was enough to make him hop back and around like a bunny.

  I put my bathing suit on under a large terrycloth robe and took him over to the indoor pool. At least one of us should have fun while we were here. I was about to pull my robe off when I saw my mother lounging in the corner in her evening dress, dozing off as she held a glass of orange juice precariously over her chest. While Meatball sniffed around the edge of the pool, I went over to grab the glass before it smashed to the ground.

  My mother’s eyes snapped open as soon as my fingers touched the glass.

  “Rough night?” I wondered, though the distinct smell of alcohol that came off her breath and through her pores and over the rim of her glass told me it was also a rough morning.

  I took a seat on the chair next to her as she steadied herself and tightened back up her drowsy features. She glared as Meatball paced around the pool. “I don’t want that thing anywhere near the pool or around my house.”

  “Don’t worry; he’s scared of the water.” Lying was second nature to me under the Sheppards’ roof. So was hostility. “What happened to Darlene and Lansing?”

  “Who?”

  “The chef. The security guard. The people who had been working for you for twenty years.”

  “I had to fire them. Things had been going missing around the house.” She pressed a finger into her temple as though a headache were throbbing, one that started with an E and ended with Emily. “How they could rob us after we have been so good to them over the years? With everything that your father and I have been going through? It’s inhumane.” My mother’s view on inhumanity was viciously skewed. First-world problems skewed.

  “You mean you fired them on a so-called suspicion of theft so that you wouldn’t have to give them the exit package they deserved?”

  Isabelle chortled a laugh. “Did you learn those big words at your half-rate college?”

  “I learned enough to know that what you did was wrong. If you and Dad have fallen on hard times, it’s your fault, not theirs. You should give them the money you owe them.”

  “Your father and I are not on hard times. Please don’t state such things.” She took a sip of her screwdriver.

  “Oh? Is that why you’re emptying the east wing? Bill’s room, my room? Or are those part of the things that have mysteriously gone missing?”

  “Those rooms have been empty for a very long time. I decided it was time to clean house. You’re never here, and William will certainly never be coming back.”

  William—Bill—will never be coming back. She had said this with an edge of humor in her voi
ce. My fists clenched so hard I actually thought I was going to punch my drunken mother.

  Instead, I decided to fight back the only way she knew—with words. “Well, it’s good to know that you and Dad are doing fine because I need money.”

  “Am I to understand that because you want money now, our money is no longer beneath you?”

  “I didn’t say that I want your money, Mother. I said I need money. I believe I still have a trust fund.”

  There was a sadistic twinkle in her eye. I had just given her enough ammo to bring down the barriers I had spent years building to keep her out. But there were things that needed to be said on both sides.

  My mother said, “I need to get out of this house. I need to get out of this country. Your father needs his legal problems to go away. Everybody needs something, dearest. It does not mean they will get it.”

  Meatball had been inching his way closer to the edge of the pool, trying to see how far he could stretch out his neck without falling in. He fell in. My mother swore like a French sailor.

  It was in the shallow end, so his head popped back up right away. He stood on his hind legs, paddling with his front paws just enough to keep him upright. He stared at me, shock washed into the fur of his face. It was as though he had forgotten he could swim. Less than twenty-four hours in my parents’ clasp, and he had already forgotten what he could normally accomplish on his own.

  I got up and pulled my robe off, revealing a crescent moon bump under my bathing suit. “I’m expecting, Mother,” I announced calmly and walked over to the pool, jumping in.

  I swam over to Meatball, who all of a sudden saw great fun in the fact that I was in the water with him. I could tell his little tail was wagging by the tremble that went up his body and made his head shake from side to side.

  “You’re expecting?” my mom said, in a whisper loud enough that I could hear but not loud enough that the staff could hear. “A baby?”