My Sweet Audrina

  Papa refused to bring Sylvia home no matter how much I pleaded. It was over a year now since my mother had died and Sylvia had been born.

  “Surely she’s weighing over five pounds by this time?”

  “Yes, she weighs a bit more each time I see her.” He said that reluctantly, as if he wished she didn’t.

  “Papa, she’s not blind, without arms or legs—everything is there, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said in a heavy voice, “she’s got the right parts where they should be, and all four limbs, same female equipment you have. But she’s still not strong enough,” Papa explained for the zillionth time. “She’s not exactly normal, Audrina. But don’t ask for more details until I’m ready to give them.”

  My thoughts about Sylvia kept me from feeling good. I longed for her as I dusted and pushed the vacuum. Vera couldn’t vacuum because it made her short leg ache. She couldn’t dust because she had little control of her hands and she dropped what she picked up. That also excused her from setting or clearing the table. I did every one of her chores. I even made all the beds, which was the one duty my aunt insisted Vera do. Perhaps because she was grateful, Vera seemed to like me more. Trustingly, I tried to treat her as a friend. “How’s your music proceeding? I never hear you practicing like I do.”

  “That’s because I practice at Lamar’s,” she said with a small insinuating smile. “I told him you wouldn’t let me use your mother’s piano, and he believed me.” She giggled as I frowned and started to speak. “He’s so handsome he sends chills over me.”

  “I guess he is, if you like his type.”

  “Not your type, huh? I think he’s exceptionally handsome. He’s told me all about himself, too. I’ll bet he didn’t tell you anything. He’s twenty-five years old and graduated from the Juilliard School of Music. Right now he’s composing a musical score for some play he’s writing, too. He’s sure he’ll sell it to a producer he met when he lived in New York.” She pressed forward to whisper. “I’m hoping and praying he does sell his musical and he’ll take me with him.”

  “Oh, Vera, Papa would never let you go with him. You’re too young.”

  “It’s none of Papa’s damn business what I do, is it? He’s not my father and he doesn’t own me like he owns you. And don’t you dare tell him I’ve got designs on Lamar Rensdale. We’re just as good as sisters … aren’t we?” I needed her friendship and gladly promised not to tell Papa anything.

  Wishes Come True

  It was spring again. Momma had been dead for more than a year and a half. She was gone but far from forgotten. I pored over her gardening books and taught myself to care for her roses. Each rose petal reminded me of Momma with her creamy skin, her glorious hair, her rosy cheeks. In the backyard my Aunt Ellsbeth tended the onions, the cabbages, radishes, cucumbers and everything else she grew to eat. Things that grew and couldn’t be eaten were valueless to my aunt.

  Vera was sometimes hateful to me, sometimes nice to me. I didn’t trust her even when I wanted to. Now that Vera had claimed the rocking chair, I avoided it as I had before, though Papa believed I still rocked in it, believed sooner or later the gift it had would be mine.

  “How old did you say you were?” asked Mr. Rensdale one day after he’d explained again how I had to “feel” the music as well as learn to strike the right keys. For some odd reason tears began to streak my face, when long ago I’d learned to accept my unique plight.

  “I don’t know,” I wailed. “No one tells me the truth. I’ve got a smeary memory full of half-seen images that whisper I might have gone to school, yet my father and my aunt say I never have. Sometimes I think I’m crazy and that’s why they don’t send me to school now.”

  He had a graceful way of rising, like a ribbon unfolding. Slowly he came to stand behind me. His hands, much smaller than my papa’s, caressed my hair and then my back. “Go on, don’t stop. I’d like to hear more of what goes on in your house. You confound me in so many ways, Audrina. You are so young, and so old. I look at you sometimes and see someone haunted. I’d like to take away that look. Let me help.”

  Just the tender way he spoke made me trust him, and out it all came, like a river bursting through the dam. All that confounded me came gushing out breathlessly, including Papa’s insistence that I sit in that rocking chair and “catch” the gift that had once belonged to my dead sister. “I hate having her name! Why didn’t they give me my own name?”

  He made some compassionate sound. “Audrina is a beautiful name, and so right for you. Don’t blame your parents for trying to hold onto what must have been an exceptional girl. Accept the fact that you, too, are exceptional, and maybe even more so…” But I thought I heard a something in his voice that said he knew more about me than I knew about me, and he pitied me, and wanted most of all to shield me from whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to know. And it was that one thing I didn’t know that I had to know.

  Then, before I knew what to expect, he had his fingers under my chin and was looking deep into my eyes. It was strange to be so close to an adult man who wasn’t my father.

  I pulled away from him, a mixture of emotions stirring me into panic. I liked him, and yet I didn’t want him to look at me in the way he was looking. I remembered Papa’s warning about being alone with boys and men as flashing visions of the rainy day in the woods dazzled my eyes, making him seem a smeary vision of the past, too.

  “What’s wrong, Audrina?” he asked. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to reassure you. You’re not crazy, you’re quite wonderful in your own special way. There’s passion in your music and in your eyes, too, when you lower your guard. Nature is going to wake you up one day, Audrina; then the sleeping beauty inside you will come into her own. Don’t smother her, Audrina. Let her come out. Give her a chance to set you free and your dead sister will haunt you no more.”

  Filling with hope, I stared at him pleadingly, unable to voice my needs. Still, he understood. “Audrina, if you want to go to school, I’ll find a way to see that you go. It’s against the state law to keep an underage child home unless that child is mentally or physically unable to attend. I’ll talk to your father or your aunt … and you’ll go to school, I promise.”

  I believed him. It was in his chocolate-brown eyes, he meant what he said. I know my eyes lit up with gratitude for Lamar Rensdale, who swore the very next day he’d visit my aunt. I warned him my father wasn’t likely to listen to him.

  Arden, Vera and I swam in the river that summer, fished and learned how to sail the small boat Papa had bought. Each month saw Papa just a little richer. Now he was making plans to fix up the house and restore it to its former grandeur. He talked so much about it without doing anything that I feared he never would. Anyway, it didn’t matter now, for Momma was dead.

  My aunt was not as grouchy as she had been; in fact, I often saw her looking rather happy. Papa no longer made sarcastic, cruel remarks about her long face and her skinny figure. He even complimented her new hairstyle and the makeup she’d begun to wear.

  Papa still wouldn’t tell me why he couldn’t bring Sylvia home. I saved money from the allowance he gave me to buy Sylvia rattles and teething rings, but he never brought her home. Now she was too old for those things. He told me the hospital wouldn’t let her have her own toys. I still didn’t understand what was wrong with Sylvia.

  Day by day Arden was growing taller. He was fifteen now, but seemed much older. He was beginning to plan for his future. “Now, please don’t think this silly,” he began in a tentative way, “but ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted to be an architect. At night I dream of the cities I’ll build, functional and beautiful, too. I want to plan the landscaping, have trees in the middle of town. I’d make the highways multilevel so they won’t take up so much ground space.” He smiled at me. “Audrina, just you wait and see the kind of cities I build.”

  I wanted for Arden what he wanted for himself, and many times I’d wondered why he bothered with me when so many older gir
ls must have attracted his eyes. Why did he give me the feeling sometimes he was duty-bound to me and no other?

  Arden had up days, and a few down days. He liked being outdoors more than he liked being in, and I told myself time and time again that’s why we never went into his house. And Billie must be just the opposite, for she never came outside. In all the time I’d known Billie and Arden, not once had she invited me into their home. Of course, I couldn’t invite Arden into my home, either, because of Papa, and maybe they were just retaliating. Vera often teased and said Billie didn’t think I was good enough for her son, and not good enough for her house, either.

  At the edge of the woods Arden and I paused to say goodbye. As the sun sank low over the horizon, Whitefern loomed up dark and lonely against a sky that was purple and shot through with crimson and orange. “What kind of sky is that?” I asked in a small whisper, holding tighter to his hand.

  “A sailor’s sky,” he said in a low voice. “Signaling a better day tomorrow.”

  How like Arden to say that, even if it wasn’t so. I looked from the house to the drive, and then I stared off in the direction of the family cemetery. I had to clear my throat before I could ask, “Arden … just how long have you known me?”

  Why did he let go of my hand, blush and turn away? Was that such an awful question? Was I convincing him with such a question that I was truly crazy?

  “Audrina,” he said at long last, in the tightest of all possible voices, “I met you first when you said you were seven.”

  That wasn’t the answer I wanted.

  “Hey, stop frowning. Run on home so I can see you enter safely before I go.”

  From the doorway I looked back to see him waiting there. I waved, then waited for him to wave back. Reluctantly, I entered the gloominess of Whitefern.

  Time had slowed down, and August really dragged. The sultry, sticky days made me wish for a vacation where it was cool, but we never went anywhere. Inside the house the high ceilings made it cooler than outside, but the dimness of the rooms made the stained-glass colors too brilliant, and the colors still tinkled the wind chimes that still tried to whisper secrets.

  “Papa,” I said in September when Vera was going back to school, “is Vera three years or four years older than me?”

  “She’s three, almost four years older,” he said without thought, then gave me a strange look. “What age does she tell you she is?”

  “It doesn’t matter what she tells me, for she lies all the time, but she tells Arden she’s older.”

  “Vera is fourteen,” said Papa indifferently. “Her birthday is November the twelfth.”

  I marked that down as possibly true, knowing that birthdays in our house just didn’t happen normally. Knowing, too, that First Audrina’s never-never party had spoiled all birthdays for everyone.

  I did remember my eleventh birthday, for Arden gave me that piece of pink quartz he’d had made into a rose. It hung around my neck on a slender gold chain and made me feel very special. No one at my house gave me anything for my birthday—or even wished me a happy birthday.

  * * *

  I was still using my string-tied-to-the-ring trick and giving Papa my lists. Sometimes I found those lists in his office wastebasket, and sometimes I saw him stare at those lists for long, long moments, as if memorizing every stock I listed before he threw the list away.

  In November I caught him doing this. “You wanted me to do something to help you, and when I do, you pretend I don’t. Papa, why do you go to such trouble to convince me I’m special, then toss away my lists as if you don’t believe I am.”

  “Because I’m a fool, Audrina. I want to gain by my own abilities, not by yours. And I’ve seen you perform your silly little trick by swinging the ring over the stocks. I want honest dreams, not contrived ones. I know when you’re honest and when you’re not. I’m going to make you what you should be if it takes me the rest of my life—and yours.”

  Chilled, I froze in position, frightened by his determined tone. “What is it you want me to be?”

  “Like my First Audrina,” he said resolutely.

  Even colder, I backed away. Maybe he was the crazy one and not me. His dark, brooding eyes followed my every motion, as if commanding me to run to him now and love him as she’d loved him—and I couldn’t do what he wanted. I didn’t want to be her. I only wanted to be me.

  I wandered into the front salon and found Vera sprawled again on Momma’s purple chaise. Lately she had taken to lying around all the time on Momma’s favorite chaise, reading those paperback romances Momma had adored. She said they were teaching her about life and loving. And it seemed they were, for certainly something besides medical books was putting sophistication in Vera’s dark eyes, making them even harder and more brittle. Time and again she had told me that she was going to make herself so beautiful and charming that no man would notice her left leg was one inch shorter than her right.

  “Vera,” I asked, “why don’t you have your shorter leg put in traction like your doctor advised? He said it would stretch out and be even with the other.”

  “But it would hurt. You know I can’t stand pain, and I hate hospitals.”

  A fine nurse she was going to make. “Wouldn’t the pain be worth the reward?”

  She seemed to look inward and weigh the cure against the outcome. “I used to think so.” Then, after more consideration, she said, “Now I’ve changed my mind. If I walked normally, then my mother would make me a slave, as she makes you one. Now I can live the life of luxury, like your mother did while my mother slaved until she dropped exhausted into bed.” Meanly, she grinned. “I’m not stupid, idiot—or vacant headed. I’m thinking all the time. And my game leg is going to stand me in better stead than both your normal ones.”

  There was no reasoning with Vera. It had to be her way or no way. Vera didn’t want to do anything. When it suited her purpose, and often it did, she’d torment me with saying my mother had faked her incessant fatigue just to gain Papa’s sympathy and her sister’s free housemaid services.

  As I ran the next afternoon to visit Arden, the wind blew leaves and scuttled them everywhere. Geese overhead were flying southward. Soon the snow would be falling. We were both bundled to our ears in heavy coats. Our breath came in small puffs of steam. What were we doing walking in the woods in freezing weather like this? Why couldn’t we go into each other’s houses like most people? I sighed as I stared at him, then lowered my eyes.

  “Arden, you know why I can’t invite you inside Whitefern. But I don’t understand why Billie doesn’t invite me inside your home. Does she think I’m not good enough for an indoor relationship?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, and I understand.” He hung his head, looking more and more embarrassed. “You see, she’s fixing up everything. Both of us are painting and wallpapering. She’s sewing new slipcovers, making bedspreads, curtains. She’s been working on our place ever since the day we moved in, but because she has to stop and sew for other people, ours gets done last. Our house isn’t fine inside … not yet. One day soon, very soon, we’ll be finished, and then you can come in and sit down and have a nice visit.”

  Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s came and went, and still Arden and Billie didn’t think their home fine enough to invite me in. Workmen came to our house in droves to paint, wallpaper, remove old finishes, put on new stain, polish and redo the whole house. We had many, many rooms. The cottage had only five.

  “Arden,” I finally asked one day, “why is it taking the two of you so long to fix up your house? I don’t care if it’s pretty or not.”

  He had a habit of holding my hand and comparing it to his own hand size, just as a way to keep from meeting my eyes. His fingers were twice as long. Although it was a sweet sensation, I wanted him to meet my eyes and speak honestly. Yet he was evasive. “I have a father somewhere. He left when … when—” He stumbled, stammered, blushed, shuffled his feet and looked panic-stricken. “It’s Mom …”

&nb
sp; “She doesn’t really like me.”

  “Of course she likes you!” He tugged me forward, as if he were going to drag me into his home whether or not his mother approved. “It’s not easy to talk about, Audrina. Especially when she’s asked me not to tell you anything. I said from the beginning we should be honest, and that would have saved us both a lot of embarrassment, but she wouldn’t listen. I’ve seen you look at her, at me, and wonder what the heck was going on. I know your father doesn’t want me in your life, so I don’t question why I’m not invited inside Whitefern. Let’s get it over with. It’s time you knew.”

  It seemed all my life had been spent inside one house. I’d never been in another house—one without ghosts from the past. The cottage’s small rooms couldn’t be dim and frightening like our giant rooms, nor could they be full of faded splendor and decaying antiques. I was going to see, for the first time in my life, a small house, a cozy house, a normal house.

  We reached the cottage where smoke limp as chiffon scarfs drifted heavenward. Seagulls were flying and sounding off, making the day seem very bleak. I came to an abrupt stop when Arden was about to pull me through the door. “Before we go in, answer one question. Just how long have we known each other? I’ve asked before, and you didn’t give me a straight answer. This time I want the honest answer.”

  Such a simple question to make him shift his eyes away. “When I think backward, I can’t remember when I didn’t know you. Maybe I dreamed of you even before I met you. When I saw you in the woods, hiding behind the bushes and tree, it was like a dream coming true—that’s the day I first knew you in reality. But I was born knowing you.”

  His words spread a magic shawl of comfort about my shoulders as with eyes locked and hands clasping he opened the cottage door and stood back to let me enter first.

  This time I hadn’t seen Billie at the window. Nor did I see her in the room I entered. Arden whispered, “I think my mom planned to postpone this day forever, so trust me as I trust you. Everything will work out fine.”