by Peggy Jaeger
In the crowded elevator, Buddy kept his hold on me, even squeezed my hand reassuringly when the doors opened on our floor.
I didn’t know what I expected when we walked to the nurse’s station, but it certainly wasn’t the sight of my stepmother sitting alone in a chair, crying.
I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw her. The last time I’d actually laid eyes on Vivienne was the day I went back to my childhood apartment, which was now hers, when I received word she was no longer paying my college tab. I had to ring the doorbell to gain entrance because she’d changed all the locks. She met me with that cold, frozen expression on her face, devoid of all human emotion. I could have been a bug under her shoe for all the feeling she showed for me.
At the time, Vivienne had been dressed from head to toe in couture widow’s black, ever the doting and mournful wife. Every bottle-colored hair was coifed and contained in a classic twist at the nape of her neck. Her nails were professionally manicured and long enough to scratch a foe’s eyes out, if necessary. Her makeup was subtle and expertly applied by the cosmetologist who came to the apartment regularly.
For ten years, that was the picture I held of her in my mind. Rigid, controlled, unbending and unemotional.
That image went right out the window the moment I realized it was, in fact, her sitting slumped forward in the waiting room chair, her head hung in her hands.
“Ella?” Buddy said softly at my ear. “You okay?”
With a quick glance at him, I nodded, took in a deep breath, and made my way to the woman whom my father had married.
My first thought when she lifted her tear-stained face to mine was she needed a Botox refresher. Gone was the immovable, frozen-in-place brow I remembered, replaced by deeply corrugated worry lines. Where once upon a time the outer edges of her beautiful pale blue eyes were smooth and plump, crepe paper wrinkles now branched outward to her temples. Hollow, pale cheeks drew in under the bone, but instead of resembling ripe apples as they had in the past now looked sunken and wane.
This Vivienne Delatuer Cadence Jones Fairfield Boufourd did not resemble in any way the perfect ice queen I’d known and lived with for four years.
Like a column of calm and tranquil water, she rose fluidly from her chair, breeding and movement lessons still ingrained deep despite the grief on her face. I didn’t expect her to gather me like a prodigal into outstretched and welcoming arms, and she didn’t disappoint. The closer I came, the more erect and stiffer she stood, hands cinched into clasped fists in front of her, lips pressed so tight together they were the only color on her lifelessly pale face.
“Vivienne,” I said when I was within inches of her frame—a frame emaciated to skeletal proportions.
“Cynderella.” Her voice shot a bullet of familiar anxiety straight to my already nervous stomach. Just the mention of my name in that condescending tone evoked years of censure, disapproval, and scorn.
“How is Dolly?” I asked, twining my own shaking hands together to keep her from witnessing the effect she still had on me.
The hard, tight line of her lips wavered a bit and trembled. During all the years I’d lived with her, I’d never known Vivienne to cry or lose her composure, not even at my father’s funeral. She’d stood perfectly still and rigid at the church, her features a composed mask of insouciance, as if she couldn’t be bothered to show any emotion, as if all this was a terrible bore she simply had to face for decorum’s sake.
“She’s not doing well,” Vivienne said, on a sigh. “She has swelling…in her brain.”
“I’m so sorry. What happened?”
With another dramatic sigh, Vivienne reached behind her, grasped the chairs’ handrail, and lowered herself back into it. The effort it took just to do it seemed monumental for her, and for a moment I wondered if she, too, were suffering from an illness. It would explain her nearly wasted frame.
“Dolly was on her way uptown to a luncheon engagement when she…slipped…while crossing Fifth Avenue. One of those annoying and deplorably behaved bike messengers barreled into her, causing her to fall backward and hit her head on the curb.”
“Oh my God.”
She lifted her lifeless gaze to mine, tears pooling in the outer canthi of her eye. “He didn’t even stop to help her. Just sped away.”
“Was anyone able to describe him to the police? Any bystanders?”
She waved an impatient hand at me. “Details. They don’t matter now. What’s important is Dolly.”
“But surely someone saw something, is able to give a description to the police.”
“We went over all of this weeks ago, Cynderella. The police have given up searching for the person responsible. My concern is with my daughter.”
“Weeks ago.” That couldn’t be right. “Vivienne, didn’t this just happen? When you called me?”
She smoothed a hand down the length of her bodice, averting her eyes from me. A chill tripped down my spine.
“When, exactly, was Dolly hurt?” I asked.
“The beginning of March.”
“It’s May now.”
An elegant shrug lifted from one shoulder.
“And you’ve just notified me today? More than two months after the fact?”
“There wasn’t any reason to tell you before now. There was nothing you could do. Telling you would have been an…unnecessary waste of time.”
“Really? Unnecessary to inform me my stepsister had suffered a traumatic brain injury?”
To that, she had no response.
“Why, then, did you call me tonight? Let me think that this had just happened?”
“I never said it had just happened, Cynderella. That was your assumption.”
“Yes, seemingly based on the fact it was unnecessary to alert me before now.”
Heels clacking on the hard floors sounded like a typist doing one hundred words a minute from behind us. I turned in the direction of the sound and found Dolly’s twin, Daisy, rapidly approaching.
“Mother?”
Memories are photographs of time stamps. Just as I pictured Vivienne the way I saw her the last time we’d met, the picture I had of Daisy in my mind was of a teenager. Both twins had been beautiful little girls, and their beauty had stayed with them through the years most girls experience blackheads, greasy hair, and a body that changed overnight from flat and waifish to plump and pleasing. Daisy’s beauty hadn’t faded as she’d gotten older. Her golden blonde hair was still perfect, the makeup defining her blue eyes expert. And although her features were round and comely, there was a meanness floating in her eyes that had aged along with the years into an almost callous disregard for the world.
She breezed by me, never even once acknowledging my presence, and shot to her mother’s side.
“How is she?”
“The same. The doctors are waiting, hoping the medication will decrease the brain swelling.”
“Daisy?”
Her spine stiffened, and the knuckles of her hand went white under their grip of her mother’s arm.
With a lift of her perfect heart-shaped chin, she turned to me, dragged an arrogant gaze down my face and body, then back up again, spending a beat or two on my earrings.
“I’m surprised you came,” she said.
Just like with her mother, I received no hugs, no kisses, no reaction of any kind that would give the impression she was happy to see me.
“Of course I came,” I said.
Her lips pressed together at my words. Turning her attention back to her mother, she said, “Did you ask her?”
Vivienne shook her head. “There hasn’t been time. She’s only just arrived.”
They were obviously talking about me.
“Hello. Standing right here, you know? Ask me what?”
Daisy’s eyes lit on me and were filled with such, well, hatred was the only word that could adequately describe it, that I took a step back, fearful she was going to strike me. I bumped straight into Buddy, who placed a calming hand across my back.
Daisy’s hatred melted when she glanced over my shoulder to him. A moment later, something nasty and feral skipped across her gaze. She went back to ignoring me and began speaking as if I weren’t there again when, to her mother, she commanded, “Ask her.”
Vivienne lifted her shoulders and chin and addressed me.
“We need money.” Her hand waved casually around her. “Dolly’s care and treatment are expensive.”
“That’s what insurance is for.”
She stopped and heaved in what I took for a fortifying breath. She was so skinny, I could see her ribs retract through her blouse. “I need you to pay for it. You owe it to us, Cynderella. You owe it to Dolly.”
For a moment, I thought I’d imagined or misheard what she’d said. But the look of absolute certainty crossing her face told me I hadn’t.
“Again, that’s what medical insurance is for.”
“Dolly doesn’t have any.”
“Everyone has insurance. It’s the law.”
She waved that regal hand dismissively at me again. “It was a superfluous expense, so Dolly didn’t purchase any.”
“What about savings? Capital? Stocks you can liquidate? My father left everything to you, Vivienne. Surely you can use that to pay your daughter’s medical expenses.”
Another hand wave. “No longer available.”
“What does that mean?” My voice rose, and the hand at my back pressed a little harder in warning. I lowered my tone. “Is it all gone?”
She folded her hands in front of her midsection and nodded.
“All of it?”
“What don’t you understand here, Cynderella?” Vivienne’s stern composure finally snapped. “Yes, it’s all gone. We had to live, didn’t we? We had expenses. Needed to eat, clothe ourselves. Travel.”
“You’ve been married and divorced two more times since my father died. What about those settlements? Where’s all the money you received in your divorces?”
“There were some…bad investments. I was given poor advice by a financial planner. It’s gone.”
“All of it?”
She nodded.
“What about the apartment? Surely you still have that.”
“No. It was sold a year ago.”
“A year ago?” I echoed. A light bulb of meaning flashed in front of my eyes. Turning to Daisy, I said, “Just about the time you were getting married, wasn’t it? Let me guess. The home I grew up in, the one I lived in with my parents, the one you kicked me out of when I turned twenty, paid for your country club blowout, didn’t it? A wedding I wasn’t even given the courtesy of an invitation to.”
Buddy’s hand pressed against me again, and only then did I realize I’d shouted the last few words.
I dragged in a breath to try and calm myself.
Both women glared at me with expressions reminiscent of all the times they’d stared down their perfectly sculpted noses at me. Their dislike was evident, and the fact they were actually asking me for money went a long way in validating they were in dire straits.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Daisy spat. “Still selfish and thinking only of yourself. My sister is lying in a bed, dying, and all you can do is complain about things that happened in the past. Christ, you’re a self-centered bitch.”
That was a little too much like the soup pot calling out the proverbial kettle for me. Before I could reply, Vivienne raised her hand.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said. Her voice was thick with weariness as she shook her head.
To me, she said, “We need your help, Cynderella. Dolly needs your help. You’re a successful businesswoman. You must have a great many assets, a way to get us the money we need to pay for her medical care.”
I let those words settle in for a moment. One, she knew I owned my own business. How? And two, she’d called me a successful businesswoman. Again, where did she get her information? It’s not like we ran in the same social circle.
“I couldn’t help even if I wanted to,” I told them truthfully.
Vivienne’s eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared as she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Everything I have is tied up in my business.”
“That’s a lie.” This from a pissed-off Daisy. “You’re loaded. You’ve got three carats, minimum, sitting on your fat, ugly ear lobes. You’ve got money. You just won’t give us any.”
“No, Daisy, I don’t. My business is successful, yes, but I have payroll to meet, expenses involved in running it. Not to mention office rent, health insurance, which I give my employees because, again, it’s a law. I live within my means, something you’ve never done,” I told Vivienne.
Hatred fired through her eyes. She reached a hand out to slap me, but Buddy, God bless him, pulled me out of her reach.
“You don’t want to do that.” His voice was low and calm, but forged steel laced through it.
The corridor grew silent as Vivienne dragged her hand back to her side.
“You’re Duncan Prince,” Daisy said, squinting at him.
“Prince?” her mother repeated. “Sean Prince’s son?”
Buddy nodded.
“And you’re with her?”
I never wanted to hit someone so much in my life as I did the moment Daisy, pure disbelief etching her features, said that as she pointed to me.
“If I am, it’s none of your business,” he told her.
She recoiled as if he’d struck her, like I’d been daydreaming of doing.
“Well, well, well.” Vivienne’s annoyance turned nasty as her gaze bounced from him to rest on me. Her eyes glazed with a savage indecency as they raked across my face, and a knowing smirk bent her lips.
“It seems your success comes with a price tag. I wonder what your father would think of that.”
I took me few seconds to understand what she meant. I didn’t automatically go into the gutter when I wanted to hurt or strike back at someone. But Vivienne did, a fact I remembered all too well from overhearing snippets of conversations between her and my father when I was a teenager.
I realized her meaning the same time Buddy did. He flexed and extended his hands, the sound of his knuckles cracking as he did as spine tingling as fingers dragging down a chalkboard. The moisture in his beautiful jade eyes iced over, and he clenched his jaw so tight I heard his teeth crash and click together. Her words had hit a nerve in him, and I couldn’t help wondering if he was insulted for himself at being thought of as a sugar daddy or for me because she believed me to be a gold digger.
I really wanted to know the answer too.
Her insinuation was petty, spiteful, and juvenile. Not to mention, incorrect. I made sure she knew it.
“It’s pathetic how just because you hop from bed to bed and man to man to garner anything you can for yourself that you’d assume every other woman does the same. You’re disgusting, Vivienne. I don’t have to put out to get ahead. Think about that.”
Living with her for all those years and witnessing how she dealt with criticism of any kind had taught me how much she hated anyone casting aspersions on her character.
Her face turned florid in a heartbeat. Like when one of those old black and white cartoon characters got mad, I expected to see steam explode from her ears any moment.
“Get out!” she screeched. “You’re just as useless, selfish and mouthy as you were as a teenager. I wish I had never let you know about Dolly. Get out. Get out.”
The first order was enough. The two that followed only served to propel the nursing staff from all corners of the unit to deal with the commotion.
Without another word, I turned on my heel and stalked back to the elevators, Buddy following me.
“And don’t come back,” Daisy, always pitifully desirous of the last word, said.
The elevator arrived, and we both got in. When I turned to face the front, Vivienne and Daisy were both glaring at me from down the hallway. I kept my head high and stared them down.
As soon as the
elevator doors closed behind us, I collapsed against the back wall.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
In a heartbeat, Buddy pulled me into arms, and I clung to him like we were two halves of Velcro. I knew I was shaking because I felt my tremors banging against his body.
I don’t remember much about the ride home. I do know Buddy held me in his lap in the back of his limo, kissing my temple, rubbing my back, whispering words I couldn’t decipher but that somehow comforted and soothed me.
We took the elevator up to my apartment, his arm slung around my shoulders, as he kept me close to his body. His natural warmth went a long way in fighting the chill seeping through my bones. After he opened my door, he guided me to my living room and helped me settle on the couch. It was only when I heard him rummaging around in the kitchen that I finally started to come out of my fugue state.
From the kitchen doorway, I watched him opening cabinet after cabinet.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for cups and tea bags. A-ha.” He pulled a forgotten box of Lipton from the back of my snacks cabinet, along with a ramekin bowl I’d filled with sugar and artificial sweetener packets.
“People really say that when they find something?” I asked.
One corner of his mouth lifted as he filled a pot with water. “I couldn’t find a tea kettle.”
“I don’t have one. Why are you making tea? I usually drink coffee.”
“A wise woman once told me that a strong cup of good tea can make any situation better. Sit down.” He pointed to the bar stool surrounding the counter. “When was the last time you ate anything?”
I had to think for a moment. “I had a bagel this morning.”
Lord, was it really only this morning that I’d sat with Nell and Danny to plan our strategy against Culverson?
He glanced down at the watch on his wrist. “It’s after six now.” When he opened my refrigerator, he shook his head and chuckled.
“Don’t eat in much, do you?”
“I’ve been meaning to go grocery shopping, but things have gotten a little busy and hairy all of a sudden.”
From the way his lips pressed together, he knew I was referring to the upcoming meeting. He pulled out his phone and started typing.
