A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

Abby, in the chair across from him, seemed to consider the proposition. He could see she wasn’t wearing stockings. She looked back over her shoulder through the potted palms. No one was paying any attention. She put her foot on the edge of the ottoman, which raised her knee, and the hem of the skirt started to slide toward her lap. She stopped it with her hand, but he could see the pale hourglass between her bare thighs.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  Something dropped on the tile floor by the front desk, and Abby put her foot quickly back on the floor.

  “It’s just the bellboy,” Peter said. “He’s far away.”

  “Someone’s going to see us.”

  “We can always go upstairs.”

  She shook her head.

  The bellboy’s cart rolled across the lobby floor, the wheels rhythmically hitting the seams in the tile. Abby laughed nervously, and it made Peter brave.

  “It’s not really because people would talk, is it, that you won’t go upstairs?”

  “No.”

  “And it’s not really because of me that you left.”

  She hesitated.

  “What is it then?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come upstairs,” he said. “Please come upstairs.”

  28

  ABBY WOKE UPwhen the sun came into the small, pretty room on the third floor of the hotel. In the bathroom she pulled her hair into a ponytail, distractedly considering her naked body in the mirror. There was no dizziness yet, which made her feel happy, but she guessed it was because she knew she had a way out; she was going to Argentina. She was going to a different continent, a different hemisphere. She went back out, and Peter was awake.

  “Can I order room service,” he asked, “or will some high school friend of yours deliver it?”

  “I’ll go in the bathroom when they come.”

  “Look at you,” he said.

  She climbed under the white sheets. “My uncle showed up, right before I left the house yesterday,” she said.

  “Have you told me about an uncle?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is he an old, decrepit uncle or a young, handsome one?”

  Abby wondered if everyone saw through her, or only Peter.

  “Young,” she said. “He has a fiancée. He wants me to go to Argentina with them, so I can talk to her senile mother’s adopted Romanian orphan.”

  “That would have been my second guess.”

  Abby smiled.

  “You speak Romanian?”

  “The kid speaks Spanish.”

  “So will you go?”

  She hesitated. “I said I’d think about it.”

  “When would you leave?”

  “Soon.”

  “It sounds weird enough to be something to do,” he said. “What are the downsides?”

  She smoothed the wrinkled sheet with one hand. “I’m not really sure.”

  “I feel like I’m missing something here,” he said. “Is there more to the story?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “No,” she said again. If she could say it with enough conviction, it might be true.

  He waited, and she said nothing, and finally he said, “Then you should go.”

  Part Two

  29

  ABBY HAD HER LAPTOP set up on the tiny antique writing desk in her room at the estancia, and she read over what she had written:

  What Jamie didn’t Know was who was his father? He asked his sister about the dance teacher, though he didn’t tell her what he suspected.

  “He came to school on Thursday afternoons with Miss Adair,” Clarissa said. “They taught dancing lessons—you know, waltz and fox-trot. All the girls had crushes on him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He wasn’t tall, I guess, but he was handsome. Dark hair. And Miss Adair was beautiful, with her hair in a French twist and perfect makeup. I wonder if she was sleeping with him.”

  “Probably.”

  His sister gave a little gasp of astonishment. “Oh, my god,” she said. “That never occurred to me before now.”

  [Why should all this matter to anyone but jamie?]

  She stared at the question in brackets, which suddenly seemed like the whole question. And she would have to change the names, soon; she couldn’t call them Jamie and Clarissa. There was a knock at the door, and she closed the computer and put a book on top.

  The knock came again, a little louder, and Abby crossed the cold tile floor and the soft rug in her bare feet, and opened the door. Saffron stood outside. She was wearing a blue pireo tied around her narrow hips, and a white bikini top that showed off her lean torso and long brown arms. She was startlingly beautiful and completely disconnected from reality.

  “Hi,” Saffron said. “I wanted to make sure you were coming to lunch.”

  “Sure,” Abby said.

  “My mother wants to bring T.J. out and show him off.” Saffron had made clear her annoyance at the idea that Tomas and Josef might be Romanian names, and she called the boy T.J. instead.

  “Okay,” Abby said.

  “It would be great if you were there—so there’s someone besides my mother who can talk to the kid. He already speaks Spanish too fast for her.”

  At dinner the night before, Josephine had told the same story twice between the soup and the chocolate mousse. Abby thought she must have seen the frozen smiles on her listeners’ faces and guessed that something ungraspable was wrong.

  “We’re out by the pool,” Saffron said. “What are you doing in there?”

  “Reading.”

  Saffron looked over Abby’s shoulder, as if for evidence. “Well, come out and read by the pool if you want.” She gave a little wave and walked barefoot away.

  Abby lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, which had patterns in it, in relief in the plaster. The house had been a drafty, barnlike Spanish building for raising a giant family and sheep, but Josephine had made it grand and comfortable, with deep couches and red pillows and hammered silver. The idea that they needed Abby to talk to the kid was crazy. He was happy and smart, and if Saffron wanted to talk to him, she should just start speaking English. He would learn. But maybe Saffron didn’t want to talk to the boy any more than her mother did.

  When Abby got to lunch on the covered patio, no one was there. The table was set for five, with blue and white linens and plates, and a vase of blue flowers. There were birds on the grass, with long legs and white striped wings. They marched purposefully across the vast lawn, hunting something.

  Then Josephine swept onto the patio, in a green dress with a blue sash. “Darling,” she said to Abby. “Where is everyone?” She rang the little bell on the table, and Hector the butler came outside. “Where is the child?” she asked. “Go find him.”

  Hector disappeared.

  “Where is my daughter?” Josephine asked Abby.

  “I think she and Jamie were at the pool.”

  “Run and get them, darling,” Josephine said, but just then they saw Saffron and Jamie coming across the lawn from the pool house, Saffron still in the bikini top and the pireo. Jamie wore a wrinkled button-down shirt over his swim trunks. Jamie wasn’t sleeping in Saffron’s room, on some kind of principle, but they lay next to each other all day at the pool.

  “Ah, there they are,” Josephine said.

  While they waited, Josephine put her hand on the carved stone statue of a squat bird on a small pedestal beside her. “Do you know what this animal is?” she asked Abby.

  “A dodo,” Abby said.

  Josephine looked startled, and she stared at Abby in wonder. “Well,” she said finally. “You’re erudite .”

  When T.J. came outside with Magdalena, wearing a dress shirt and pressed pants, the pretty maid helped him climb into a chair. He had huge, dark eyes and fine, pale, almost colorless hair.

  “Not that chair,” Josephine snapped. “This one, by me.”

  Magdalena moved the b
oy, who stared up at Josephine as if she were a creature from outer space.

  “You sit on the other side of him, darling,” Josephine said, pointing, and Abby sat down, convinced that Josephine had forgotten her name. “That leaves…those two together. But oh, well.”

  Saffron and Jamie took the two remaining seats. Abby wondered if Josephine knew anyone’s name—it seemed she remembered that couples shouldn’t be seated together, but she couldn’t remember what she’d called her own daughter.

  Josephine smiled triumphantly, having successfully assembled a small luncheon, and rang the little bell. Hector came back, took the clean top plates away, and brought smaller ones with blue figs and prosciutto on them, the skin of the figs peeled back in sections so they looked like tropical flowers resting their petals on the plate.

  The little boy, on Abby’s right, bounced his heels against his chair and considered this production.

  “Son higos,”Abby told him, producing the word from childhood.

  “Y jamón. ¿Te gustan?”

  He looked unsure if he liked figs and ham or not. She cut a piece of fig and offered it to him, and he ate it, watching her. She did the same with a piece of ham, and then handed him his fork. He held it in his small, fat fist, close to his chest, still chewing on the ham.

  “He’s a very healthy boy,” Josephine said. “He came to me when he was just a baby.”

  “Gautier feeds him well,” Saffron said.

  “ Ifeed him well,” her mother said.

  “He lives with the staff, Mother,” Saffron said. “Admit it. He’s happy there.”

  “He lives with me .”

  “Do you know anything about his parents?” Jamie asked.

  Josephine widened her eyes. “The situation in Romania is terrible,” she said. “There is murder, there is rape—total chaos. The children are left behind.”

  “She means she doesn’t know,” Saffron said.

  “He might be a child of rape,” her mother said.

  “Mother, if you say that in front of him again, I will never speak to you again. I don’t care what language he speaks.”

  Josephine ignored her. “My friend the princess knew this child must be saved, and she sent him here.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Saffron said. “Don’t act like you’re on Amnesty’s list of safe houses. You asked for a child and you got one. Everyone wants a white baby, and you pulled strings.”

  There was a long silence while Josephine stared at her daughter. Abby cut the boy some more fig. Then Josephine said, in a hurt voice, “I was pregnant with a boy once, myself, but I had malaria, a terrible fever. I had a very good doctor, a Jew, but I lost my son.”

  Saffron glared at her mother. “And if only you’d had the boy, things would be better now.”

  “To lose a child is a great strain on a marriage,” her mother said.

  “You don’t know. And it’s very helpful to have a son.”

  Saffron clanked her knife and fork down on her plate and glared out at the lawn.

  The fig plates were taken away, and plates of roast beef arrived. T.J. had a purple fig seed on his chin. Abby cut his meat into small pieces, then showed him the fork. “Fork,” she said. He didn’t say anything. “Knife,” she said, pointing. “Napkin. Plate.”

  “Plate,” he said.

  “Beef.”

  “Rosbif,”he said, more confident, shaping the word with his small, fat lips.

  “Yes. Roast beef. Water.”

  “Agua.”

  “Yes, agua . Water.”

  “Teach him ‘Mama,’ ” Josephine said suddenly, her eyes full of need.

  Abby hesitated. “What does he usually call you?”

  “I don’t know,” Josephine said. “I’ve asked Magdalena to teach him ‘Mama,’ and she says she will, but she doesn’t.”

  “¿Quién es ella?”Abby asked the boy, pointing at Josephine.

  “La señora,”he said.

  “Mother, it’s very weird to teach him ‘Mama’ at this point,” Saffron said. “He’s almost five.”

  The older woman’s eyes filled with tears. “I wanted him to call me Mama,” she said, in a plaintive voice, and Abby wondered how she hadn’t accomplished such a simple thing.

  “ I’llcall you Mama,” Saffron said. “We’ll all call you Mama. Don’t do this to him. It’s so weird.”

  “But if I’m not his mama, then he doesn’t have one.”

  “Well, that’s his tragedy,” Saffron said. “It’s still better than Romania.”

  The lunch plates were taken away, and small dessert bowls came in their place, and there was another silence while they consoled themselves with caramel ice cream. The boy got it all over his face.

  After lunch, when the boy’s hands and face had been wiped down, Abby took him for a walk, thinking she couldn’t sit through another lunch like that. She said the English words for stairs, flowers, fountain, garden, grass . Two bounding yellow Labs appeared and leaped into the fountain, splashing water everywhere.

  “Perros!”the boy cried happily.

  “Dogs,” Abby said.

  That night, in her room, Abby was trying to come up with new names for her characters that were as good as the real ones—none were as good as the real ones—when the phone rang: Josephine calling from her own part of the house.

  “Please come to my room,” Josephine said. “Saffron isn’t answering her phone.”

  Abby went out in her pajamas, past the open bedroom door where she could see Saffron lying on the bed in a baby-doll nightgown, reading a magazine. Her phone hadn’t been ringing. Saffron’s door seemed to be open to tempt Jamie, and the phone unplugged to deflect her mother.

  Abby went downstairs in the guest wing, and across the big living room, and up the staircase to a little mezzanine with a piano and a backgammon table, outside Josephine’s suite. She listened outside the door for a second, then knocked.

  “Who is it?” Josephine asked. She must have been waiting just inside the door, because her voice was close.

  “It’s Abby. You asked me to come.”

  The door opened, and Josephine, completely naked, stood inside.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, and she stepped back to let Abby in. “I’m frantic. I don’t know if my business manager is coming for luncheon tomorrow.”

  Abby was trying not to look at Josephine’s body, but there it was. Her breasts were small and still had most of their shape, and she was tan and surprisingly fit. It wasn’t the body of a woman who forgot everything.

  “I asked Magdalena and the laundress,” Josephine said, “but they don’t know. It’s very hard to get good staff.”

  “Would you have written it down?” Abby asked.

  “Written what down?”

  “The date your business manager is coming.”

  Josephine looked around the room helplessly. It was all white, with a vast white canopy bed at the center, in the glow of a bedside lamp. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Together they found a leather-bound calendar on a vanity under the window. Scrawled on the square for the next day was “Fauchet. 10 a.m. heli.” Josephine beamed with amazement, as if Abby had produced the reminder out of a hat. “I can tell the chef!” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Will you meet the helicopter in the morning? Fauchet is my good friend.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll be five for lunch, not including the boy,” Josephine said, writing it on a piece of paper, the tanned skin of her stomach folding as she bent over the desk. She seemed to draw strength from having facts at hand—a sudden clarity. “I wish we had a man for you. I don’t think we’ll have the boy at lunch, not tomorrow.”

  “All right,” Abby said.

  “Slip this under Gautier’s door when you go down. He has the room next to the kitchen.”

  Abby took the piece of paper.

  “I’m sorry to treat you like a little daughter,” Josephine said. “I used to have a secretary to do these
things, but she left. She was unhappy, and she wanted to marry. Good night, darling.” Still naked, she saw Abby out and closed the door.

  Abby went downstairs to slip the note under the chef’s door, then back through the length of the dark house to the guest wing, and upstairs again. On the stairs she ran into Jamie coming down.

  “Come for a walk with me,” he whispered. “I can’t stand this anymore.”

  “I don’t have any shoes.”

  “Just out on the lawn, it’s okay.”

  They went out a heavy wooden door to the dark patio where they had eaten lunch, and Abby rolled up the legs of her pajamas, but the grass wasn’t wet, only a little cool and damp under her feet. The striped birds were gone, at night, and the trees at the far edges of the lawn made a dark border for the sky. There had once been trees all the way to the house, Saffron said, but a tornado had taken down a hundred and fifty of them, clearing space for the lawn, as if the tornado had been specially ordered by Josephine to open up the view.

  When they were well clear of the house, Jamie said, “What do you think?”

  “Of Saffron?”

  “Of everything.”

  Abby thought about it. “It’s not really your scene, is it?”

  “I guess not,” Jamie said. “But the people aren’t the scene.”

  “Really?” Abby said.

  “Okay, maybe they are.”

  They walked in silence until they reached the trees at the edge of the lawn, and then they started back toward the house, along the edge of the vast circle of grass. A light was on upstairs, in Josephine’s room, and two lights were visible in the guest wing.

  “Are you still engaged to Saffron?” Abby asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You aren’t even sleeping with her, right? There’s some kind of moratorium?”

  “I think I’m obsessed,” he said. “I get so jealous. I know she’s unfaithful and I don’t want to get involved again, but I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “That seems like a good reason to get out.”

  “But I can’t,” he said. “I know I should, but I can’t.”

  “What do you think about?”