Most Precious Blood

by Susan Beth Pfeffer

  “So you can leap to his defense, the way you always do?” Michelle asked. “I don’t see why you bother. It isn’t like he really is your father.”

  Val slapped her. It was an instinctive reaction, and she knew then just how Bob must feel, and she knew she would never forget that feeling and always hate herself for it.

  Michelle stood absolutely still, then rubbed her cheek with her hand. “It’s true,” she said. “And it’s about time you knew it. He isn’t your father. Everybody in the family knows. I’ll bet even Kit knows. Probably half the girls in school know too.”

  “Stop it, Michelle!” Kit said. She hadn’t moved any closer to the girls, and Val took that to be an ominous sign. Why wasn’t Kit by her side, protecting her with more than distant words? What was Michelle saying, and how could it possibly be true?

  “Everybody knows except you,” Michelle said. “It isn’t like something like that can be kept secret. If you weren’t so dumb and so spoiled, you would have realized it long ago. You’re not really family. You don’t really count.”

  “You’re a liar,” Val said, praying that that was true. Holy Jesus, make her a liar. She couldn’t even look down any more, she was so afraid the ground beneath her was cracking.

  “Don’t say any more,” Kit said. Had she edged any nearer? Val couldn’t be sure. “Michelle, stop, before you regret it.”

  “Of course you would know,” Michelle said. “Your father must have done all the legal work. Assuming Rick bothered making it legal. If jail wasn’t involved, he probably didn’t care.”

  They were on safer ground now. “Dad’s never been in jail,” Val said. “Your father’s been, but not Daddy.”

  “Daddy,” Michelle mocked her. “You can’t call him that. Not when he isn’t even a relative of yours. Unless of course you are. Maybe you’re his bastard, and he just brought you home for your poor mother to raise as her own. Maybe all those times she picked you up and cuddled you, she was hoping you would die. Maybe it was hating you that killed her.”

  Val leaned against the wall of lockers. Michelle was speaking loudly enough that she had gotten the attention of everybody still in that wing of the school. Sister Gina Marie stuck her head out of her classroom. “Stop this at once, Michelle,” she said. “Or you’ll be in big trouble.”

  “I won’t,” Michelle said. “Val’s sixteen. She’s old enough to know.”

  “Know what?” Val cried.

  “You really are stupid,” Michelle said. “You’re adopted, you bitch. You’re no more a Castaladi than Kit is.”

  Chapter 2

  The combination lock cut into the small of Val’s back. She thought, I’ll be paralyzed. The rest of the world seemed to be already. Michelle, Kit, even Sister Gina Marie, were all standing absolutely still, frozen at the moment of truth and betrayal.

  Val sensed she was the only one who could force them out of their poses. “Liar!” she cried. The word worked. Michelle gasped, then ran down the hallway. They could hear the click of her heels against the floor and the stairs, could hear her open the door, could imagine hearing her running off the school property, to her home, to her bedroom, to her own private corner of space. And once there was no more Michelle, Kit and Sister Gina Marie came alive. They rushed over to Val, who wasn’t sure whether the wall was holding her up, or she holding it, but feared the consequences of moving away from it as much as she’d ever feared anything, even her mother’s death. Sister Gina Marie looked as though she wanted to do something, to reach out to Val, but then she pulled back. Kit didn’t hesitate. She grabbed Val’s arm and pulled her toward the center of the hall.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Put your head between your knees. I think you’re going to faint.”

  Val did as Kit told her. Kit had a bossy streak. It was something Val had put up with all the many years of their friendship. At some point, Val would have to complain to Kit about it. But at that moment, it felt better to do as Kit told her, to have the blood rush back into her head, to feel less woozy, more in control.

  “Can you believe her?” she asked. “Saying things like that?”

  Neither Kit nor Sister Gina Marie answered. Val didn’t know what to make of their silence.

  She tried standing up, and found with a little effort she could force her legs into place. Standing up was good. She could look straight at Kit and Sister Gina Marie. “I’ve seen her angry before,” she said. “Michelle has a terrible temper. She gets it from her father.” She remembered hitting Michelle and felt weak again. Her father had never hit her mother, never hit her. Her mother, even when she was strong and healthy, had never hit her. Yet she’d seen them both angry, had provoked their anger on more than one occasion. They must be saints, she thought, to keep from hitting.

  “She was lying,” Val said. “I didn’t know Michelle lied, but she was real angry, and I guess that’s why. I hope she doesn’t keep lying. I’d hate it if she kept lying like that, lying about me. She can lie about herself for all I care, lie about anything she wants to, except me. Me and my family, that is. She should never lie about family. How could she say something like that? She has to know it isn’t true. Her father and my father are cousins. Her name isn’t Castaladi like mine, but she’s one anyway. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Michelle. She gets mad all the time, and she’s a very jealous person, but she’s never lied before. Why do you think she’s lying now?”

  “I think we should get the school nurse,” Sister Gina Marie said, but she didn’t move.

  “I don’t need a nurse,” Val said, and then realized she was going to have to prove it. “I’m fine.”

  “Bruno must be outside,” Kit said. “Bruno is the Castaladi chauffeur. He takes Val to and from school. He can drive Val straight home.”

  “No,” Val said. “I don’t want to go home.” She surprised herself with the words, and with how deeply she meant them.

  “All right,” Kit said. “You’ll come home with me.”

  Val nodded. She bent down, gathered her books and her jacket, which seemed to have fallen onto the floor, and straightened herself out. It wasn’t hard to put on her jacket, to stuff her book bag with books. It wasn’t even hard to look straight at Sister Gina Marie. “I’m fine, really,” she said. “Michelle and I will work it out. Don’t report her or anything, all right.”

  “I’m not worried about Michelle,” Sister Gina Marie replied sharply. “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’ll take care of her,” Kit said. “It’ll be all right.” She smiled at Sister Gina Marie, then taking Val by the hand, led her down the corridor. Val could sense Sister Gina Marie looking at them, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was to get out of there, and not to go home.

  “I’ll tell Bruno he’s taking us to my house,” Kit said, once they were outside. Outside felt good. The crisp October air refreshed Val.

  “No,” she replied. “Don’t bother with Bruno. I want to walk.”

  “I’ll tell Bruno that then,” Kit said.

  “No!” Val said. “Don’t tell Bruno anything. I don’t owe him any explanations. He isn’t my jailor. If I want to walk home with my friend, then I’m just going to walk home with my friend. Everybody else does it, just walks home, no chauffeur to drive what, half a mile, maybe less. Let’s just walk.”

  “Stand here,” Kit said. “Don’t move.” She used her best no-nonsense tone, and Val obeyed her. She watched as Kit deliberately disregarded her wishes and walked to the car, stuck her head in, and told Bruno what Val’s plans were. Val couldn’t understand why people treated her that way. Didn’t her wishes count for anything?

  “I told you not to do that,” she said to Kit as the girls began their walk off the school grounds.

  “I heard you,” Kit said. “But you were wrong. Bruno had been waiting there for ten minutes already. He was worried. If you’d just walked off without saying anything to him, he would have followed us to my house to make sure you were okay. I told him you stayed late be
cause you had to talk to one of your teachers, and that you were coming to my house to have supper with my father and me. Now he won’t worry, and he won’t call your father. I did the right thing.”

  “You did the smart thing,” Val said.

  “Yeah,” Kit said. “That’s what I’m good at. The smart thing.”

  “You’re not going to get your paper done,” Val said. “The one for Sister Gina Marie. You won’t get it done tonight, will you.”

  Kit grinned. “It’ll keep,” she said.

  “I’ve never just done something,” Val said. “I’ve never just gone over to your house, or stayed late after school, or gone to the mall without telling anyone I was going. Bruno’s always known, or Connie. You do things by yourself all the time, don’t you. Take walks, visit me, shop. You don’t have to report to …” She paused for a moment, trying to find the right word to label Bruno and Connie. Servants didn’t sound right. They were family too, some distant cousins of her mother. Her mother and Connie had gone to school together. Saint Ursula Elementary and Our Lady of Lourdes High School in Queens. They called her father Ricky, the way her mother had. Servants didn’t do that. Even Jamey Farrell, Kit’s father, called her father Rick, and Jamey was Rick’s best friend.

  “My father doesn’t worry about me the way Rick worries about you,” Kit replied. “He worries about my mother instead.”

  “But that’s my point,” Val said. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized she had a point, so she got even more excited. “Worrying doesn’t help. It doesn’t stop anything.”

  “It stops you from going to the mall,” Kit replied.

  Val nodded, and when she did, she discovered that moving her head unleashed a terrible headache. “This has been the worst day of my life,” she declared. “Even worse than the day they told me how sick Mama was.”

  Kit stopped walking. “Then you believed her?” she asked.

  “No, of course not,” Val replied. “Michelle was lying. Why should I believe her?”

  “I don’t know,” Kit said. “It just seems to me if all you think it is is lies, this shouldn’t be the worst day of your life.”

  “I think I flunked that pop quiz,” Val said. “And I have a headache. And it makes me really angry that I can’t just walk to my best friend’s house without having to report in to my …”

  “Bodyguard,” Kit said.

  Val turned sharply to face her friend. Her head nearly exploded from the gesture. “He isn’t my bodyguard,” she said. “I don’t have a bodyguard. I don’t need a bodyguard. What made you say something so stupid?”

  Kit shrugged her shoulders. “This hasn’t exactly been my best day either,” she declared. “Better than yesterday maybe, but not by much. I’m sorry if calling Bruno a bodyguard offends you.”

  “Daddy’s a businessman,” Val said. “Businessmen don’t need bodyguards. At least not for their daughters.”

  “I guess not,” Kit said.

  Val’s brain eased itself back into her skull. She could feel the wretched pain subside. “How bad was it?” she asked. “This weekend.”

  “You don’t want to hear about it,” Kit replied.

  “I do,” Val said. “Really.”

  Kit smiled. “Then I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “Was she very drunk?” Val asked. It would be good for Kit to talk. She kept too much locked in. Jamey was like that also, but her father said that was good in a lawyer. It wasn’t necessarily good in a sixteen-year-old though.

  “Yes,” Kit said. “She was.” She paused for a moment, but Val kept on walking. She didn’t think her head could take another sudden stop. Kit stared at her, then scurried to catch up. “I meant to write the paper,” she said. “I like Sister Gina Marie. I didn’t want to put her on the spot like that.”

  “What would you have done if she refused to let you hand in the paper late?” Val asked. Papers seemed like such a pleasant subject, compared to the alternatives.

  “I wouldn’t have promised to write the paper,” Kit said. “I would have taken the F instead.”

  “You never got an F in anything,” Val declared. “You’ve always talked your way out of bad grades.”

  “This one wasn’t that important to me,” Kit replied.

  “What would Jamey have said?” Val asked. “If you brought home an F.”

  “It’s hard to say,” Kit replied. “He might have gotten angry. Or maybe he would have understood. Pop isn’t always predictable.”

  “You’re the only person I know who calls her father Pop,” Val said. “Pop. I like it. Maybe I should call Daddy Pop.”

  “Don’t,” Kit said. “It would be too confusing. Besides, Rick is hardly a Pop.”

  “Neither’s Jamey,” Val replied. She laughed. They were two blocks from Kit’s house, and she was starting to block out everything that had happened in school that day. She loved October. It was her favorite month. She remembered suddenly a perfect October Sunday from years before, she must have been around nine, when out of nowhere her father suggested that he and Val’s mother and Val all go to the Giants football game. Neither Val nor her mother had ever been to a game before, and they spent a wonderful hour just debating what to wear, finally settling on brand-new wool skirts, and cashmere sweaters of blue and green. Bruno had driven them, but Val didn’t remember him at the game. She didn’t have that many memories of just her parents and herself, with nobody else along. The afternoon was sunny and perfect, the seats were on the fifty-yard line, and Val was cocooned between her mother and her father, blanketed by her parents’ love for each other and for her. During half time the three of them stood on line together to get food and souvenirs, and Val could still feel the warmth of their hands as each one held one of hers. Her father had promised her mother that if the Giants won, she could buy a new fur coat, and the Giants did, so on the drive home all her mother did was joke about how expensive the coat was going to be. She and Connie went shopping for it the very next day. Silver fox, still sitting in a closet. Val supposed it was hers now. Whenever her mother wore it, she called it her football souvenir, and Val’s father always laughed and said that was the last game he was taking them to, it was too expensive a proposition.

  Val was glad October was her favorite month. May used to be, but her mother died in May, and she couldn’t shake off the associations. Of course the way her head felt just then, she couldn’t shake anything off. She laughed again.

  “I’m going to have to call Pop,” Kit said. “Tell him that you’re here. He didn’t want anybody over today. We were going to spend the evening just straightening things out.”

  “What things?” Val asked.

  “It was a bad weekend,” Kit said. “There’s a lot of breakage. We got in too late last night to do anything about it.”

  “What if all that business with Michelle hadn’t happened?” Val asked. “Would you have invited me over anyway?”

  Kit shook her head. “Not tonight,” she said. “I would have just cleaned up what I could and made omelets for Pop and me and written that paper for English.”

  It bothered Val that she wouldn’t have been welcome at the Farrell house that night. They knew her father was away, how lonely she could get with just Bruno and Connie around. Her head throbbed. She knew she could never forgive Michelle her lies. Was Kit turning on her too? “What if I’d insisted?” she asked. “What would you have done then?”

  Kit thought for a moment. “I would have called Pop and told him not to come home from the office,” she replied. “Then I would have made you help me clean up. I may make you do that anyway. Do you think you can be trusted around broken glass?”

  “Of course I can be,” Val said. “What are you so worried about? I know Michelle was lying. I’m not adopted. How could I possibly be adopted?”

  Kit shifted her schoolbag so she could examine her bitten-off fingernails.

  “I’m not adopted,” Val said.

  “We’ll discuss it inside,” Kit repl
ied. She unlocked their front door. “The living room is okay. Most of the damage is in the kitchen, and their bedroom.”

  Val loved Kit’s home. Her own was Tudor, old fashioned and dark. Kit’s house was bright and airy. Jamey collected contemporary art. Their walls were covered with boldly colored paintings.

  “Oh, no,” Kit said, walking over to one of them. “Mother slashed this one. She must have done it with this.” She gingerly picked up a piece of broken glass and sighed. “It’s one of Pop’s favorites too. I’d better call Pop and tell him you’re here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Val said. “I shouldn’t have come.” She hadn’t realized it until she saw the way the canvas had been ripped. She didn’t belong there any more than she belonged at home. At that moment, there was nowhere she belonged, but that was hardly Kit’s responsibility.

  “It’s all right,” Kit said. “You’re here, you might as well stay. I’ll worry less if I know where you are. Sit down. I’ll call Pop from the den.”

  But Val wasn’t ready to sit. She walked around the living room making an inventory of damaged goods. Then she walked to the kitchen. It was a nightmare of spilled and spoilt and broken. She found a box of garbage bags, pulled one out, and started filling it with things that could never be repaired.

  “Thank you,” Kit said when she saw what Val was doing.

  “She must have gone on a rampage,” Val said. “Couldn’t Jamey stop her?”

  “He wasn’t here for most of it,” Kit said. “Neither was I, for that matter. I got here first, but you know, she’s bigger than I am, and I couldn’t talk her down. I got to the den and I called Pop, and he came right over, but by then the worst was over. He was at the office.” She began picking up shards of glass and dropping them into the opened garbage bag. “She destroyed some things in my room too,” she said. “Not much, but she’s never done that before. I guess because I wasn’t home. I didn’t tell Pop. I don’t know. Maybe I should.”

  Val tried to remember her own mother, but all she could picture was how she looked in her coffin. “This has really been a lousy day,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not making things any better for you and Jamey.”