Because of my cast, I could only wear skirts or dresses, and I wasn’t sure which dresses of Alena’s were formal. Mrs. March had made such a thing of what I would wear when it was only the two of us. Why wasn’t she helping me choose tonight? Wasn’t this a more important dinner? Perhaps she wanted me to prove that I could make the right choice without her.
A full ten minutes had gone by, and I still hadn’t decided. Mama would surely laugh at my panic attack, especially over something to wear, I thought, and finally reached out and took a plain-looking dark blue skirt and its matching short-sleeved V-neck blouse. I was surprised at how well the blouse fit me. Earlier, I had brushed and pinned back my hair with one of Alena’s clips. I hesitated to take any more of her things. There was a beautiful gold watch, bracelets and earrings and rings, but I touched none of it.
Mrs. Duval looked pleased with my choices when she returned. “Ready?”
“Yes,” I said, and she wheeled me out to the elevator.
“Mrs. Caro has made an Irish dish that Mr. March favors. It’s called Dublin Lawyer. It’s made with lobster. Have you eaten lobster?”
“Once,” I said.
“Once? Well, you’re in for a delightful surprise.”
The elevator doors opened. My heart felt as if it was shrinking in my chest as Mrs. Duval wheeled me toward the formal dining room. When we entered, I saw that they were all there and seated. Kiera wore a yellow keyhole-bust cap-sleeved top and a black skirt. I had seen other teenage girls wearing something like it lately and had wanted one for myself. She looked as if she had been born in hers; it fit her that well. As we drew closer to the long, dark wood table, I saw that her skirt was barely below her knees. She wore the most beautiful turquoise necklace I had ever seen and looked as glamorous as any young movie or television star.
How plain I look in comparison, I thought, but then again, I never imagined ever competing with her, especially for her father’s attention. I couldn’t help but wonder if Alena had felt the same way. Two daughters not all that many years apart must have been vying for their father’s favor constantly. Once Alena became seriously ill, that competition had surely ended with Mr. March doting on Alena. I remembered reading a story about two sisters in which one did become ill and the other, jealous of the attention she received, pretended to be ill herself.
Being an only child, I often wondered what it would be like to have a sister or a brother and to share my mother’s love. How could any mother have enough? It was clear to me that Mrs. March favored Alena, and Kiera perhaps still couldn’t forgive her, even now, even with her sister dead and buried. Was that why she was afraid of my being there so much? I knew I wasn’t any weight on her conscience, as Mrs. March had hoped I’d be. I wasn’t sure she even had a conscience.
My gaze shifted to Mr. March, who sat at the head of the table with his elbows on the table, his hands clasped together, and I noticed his striking gold pinkie ring with a lapis, which I would find out later was his birthstone. He wore a dark blue velvet sports jacket and a black shirt opened at the collar. There was a gold chain around his neck with whatever was on it hidden under his shirt.
His light brown hair looked closer to blond. It was beautifully styled, with a slight wave in front. Against the color of his hair and his tanned face, his dark blue eyes were more prominent. They nearly matched his lapis ring. I could see that Kiera inherited most of her good looks from him, because the features of his face, his perfectly shaped nose and strong mouth, seemed as sculptured as hers were. He looked athletic, and later, when he stood, I’d see that he was a good four inches taller than Mrs. March.
He sat back when Mrs. March rose to take me from Mrs. Duval.
“Here she is,” Mrs. March said. She put me to the right of Mr. March. Kiera sat across from him, and Mrs. March sat on his left. “Sasha, this is my husband, Donald.”
“Hello,” I said, or at least I thought I did. My voice seemed trapped inside my trembling body. I saw that Kiera had a look of disgust on her face.
Donald March sat back, still studying me. “How’s your leg doing?” he asked as a greeting.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Ugh,” Kiera said. “Couldn’t she put a shoe on that foot?”
Mrs. March pushed me closer to the table. My broken leg just slipped under it so she wouldn’t have to look at my foot. She glared at Kiera and took her seat across from me.
“You’re putting her in Alena’s place, you know,” Kiera said.
Mr. March raised his eyebrows as if he’d just realized that himself. The table could easily seat a dozen people. Why was Kiera sitting at the end? Shouldn’t Mrs. March be sitting across from her husband?
“You could sit closer, Kiera.”
“I’m fine where I am,” she said. Then she smiled. “I can look at Daddy better.”
I glanced at him. He obviously liked that and smiled back at her.
Mrs. Duval began to bring in our salads. Mr. March sat forward again and lifted his salad fork. Was that all he was going to say to me? I wondered as he began to eat.
“Sasha is off to a wonderful start with Mrs. Kepler, who says she has no doubt she’ll have her up to speed before the end of the summer,” Mrs. March said.
“Who’s Mrs. Kepler again?” Mr. March asked.
“Her tutor, Donald, remember?”
“Oh, yes.” He looked at me and nodded.
“I hate talking about the end of summer. I can’t stand the idea of it ending,” Kiera muttered. She pushed some of her salad off to the side. “Look at this! I keep telling her I don’t like beets and artichokes. Why can’t they remember?”
“Why can’t you remember to hang up your clothes, especially those that we have dry-cleaned and pressed for you?” Mrs. March countered.
“I thought that was what servants are for,” Kiera said.
“If you don’t cherish the things we buy you, we shouldn’t buy you so much.”
“Whatever,” Kiera said, shrugging. Then she smiled. “I’ll buy my own things.”
Mr. March seemed not to hear the exchange. He was too involved in his wine, bread, and salad. I began to eat my salad and thought it was wonderful. It had so many flavors and was crunchy, just the way I liked it. The hospital salad and the salads I had eaten at the March house before were not as good, I thought. Maybe special things were saved for dinners with Mr. March.
“We’re going to have to do something with your fingernails,” Mrs. March told me, smiling. “I’ll take you to my manicurist.”
I looked at my fingers. My nails were uneven, but the idea of trimming them and putting on nail polish was something I hadn’t thought about for quite a while. Ages, it seemed. It was almost a foreign concept. Mama used to do them for me, but that was so long ago that it was like something I had seen in an old movie on television.
When Mr. March finished his salad, he sat back and turned to me again. “How long were you and your mother homeless?” he asked.
“Nearly a year.”
“She lived in a carton, you know. Didn’t you? You told me you did,” Kiera added before I could admit to it or deny it.
“Yes, we did,” I said.
“How did you bathe?” Kiera asked. “Or didn’t you?”
“We bathed in the public restrooms. Mama always tried to keep us both clean.”
“Yeah, right,” Kiera muttered. “You need to take a bath as soon as you walk out of those places. I’d rather go in my pants.”
“Kiera,” Mrs. March snapped.
“Well, Kiera’s not all wrong. It is quite difficult for people like that to take good care of their hygiene,” Mr. March said. “It’s lucky she didn’t suffer from some disease.”
“Who knows what she’s brought into this house—or what Mother has brought into it, I should really say,” Kiera said.
“I think, of all people, you should know what I brought into this house, Kiera, when I brought Sasha here,” Mrs. March responded, her face reddening.
/> “No, Mother, I don’t know. Do tell me.”
“Please. Let’s enjoy the dinner,” Mr. March said sharply.
Rosie came in and began to clear away the salad dishes. Mrs. Duval followed with a tray holding the main dish, which she had called a Dublin Lawyer. She served it to Mr. March first and then to us.
“You’re in for a special treat,” Mrs. March told me.
“Just eating indoors is a special treat for her,” Kiera said.
Mr. March poured himself some more white wine and then looked at Mrs. March.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Daddy, can I have some, please?” Kiera asked in a sweet, syrupy voice.
“I don’t think …” Mrs. March began.
“White wine goes perfectly with this,” he said. “It’s harmless,” he added, and looked to Mrs. Duval. She took the bottle and went around to pour a glass for Kiera.
“Thank you, Daddy.”
He nodded. “This is as fantastic, as usual,” he said after eating some Dublin Lawyer. “Give my compliments to Mrs. Caro, please, Mrs. Duval.”
“I will, sir,” she said. “Anyone need anything else?”
“My water glass is empty,” Kiera said.
The bottled water was right in front of her. Mrs. Duval picked it up and put some in her glass. I waited to hear her say thank you, but she simply drank her water. Mrs. Duval looked at me and then went back to the kitchen. I started on my meal. It was delicious. I remembered the lobster Mama and I had had, but it was nothing like this.
“What did your mother do before things fell apart for you?” Mr. March asked me as he ate.
I looked at him. Fell apart? Did he mean before the accident or after Daddy left or before she met Daddy? I didn’t know what to say.
“Before you were out on the street,” he added, seeing my confusion.
“She was a waitress and she did her calligraphy.”
“Really? Calligraphy?” He turned to Mrs. March. “You have something from our trip to China five years ago, don’t you, Jordan?”
“It’s in our bathroom,” she replied.
“Right. So your mother did that sort of thing?”
“Yes. There’s one hanging on the wall in the Grave-diggers bar,” I said proudly.
Kiera laughed. “Gravediggers. What is it, a bar in a cemetery?”
“I’ve heard of it,” Mr. March said, and Kiera lost her smile.
“Well, what kind of a place is that for whatever she called it?”
“She called it ‘heaven,’” I said.
“The bar?” Mr. March asked me.
“No, the word she had drawn and painted, the calligraphy. She would tell me that people go to the Gravediggers to see heaven.”
He stared a moment and then burst out laughing. “That’s really clever,” he said.
I looked at Kiera. She pressed her lips together and dug into her food as if she hated it and wanted to kill it first. Mrs. March laughed, too. “It is clever,” she said. “Can you do calligraphy?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I often did it with my mother, just as she had done with hers.”
Mr. March’s eyebrows rose.
“Well, we’ll have to get you what you need so you can do some,” Mrs. March said.
“I thought you said you sold lanyards on the beach,” Kiera quipped.
“I did,” I said. “My mother sold calligraphy.”
What have you sold, I wanted to ask her, besides unhappiness?
But I didn’t. I looked down at my food and continued to eat, thinking only of Mama and how pleased she would be to see me having such a wonderful dinner in so elegant a dining room with what was obviously expensive silverware and dishes.
She would have said, “You’re in the pink, kiddo.”
I was sure I heard it.
“What’s so funny?” Kiera asked.
“What?”
“You’re laughing. What are you laughing at?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t realized I was smiling so widely.
“Well, there you are,” Kiera said, nodding at me. “Smiling like an idiot. May I be excused, please? I have an important phone call to make.”
“You haven’t had dessert,” Mrs. March said. “Mrs. Caro has made a very special cake in honor of Sasha.”
“I don’t need it. This was fattening enough,” she said, pushing her plate away. There was at least half of her meal left. I had eaten every bit of mine. “Daddy?”
“Go ahead,” he said. Mrs. March widened her eyes. “She’ll only spoil our enjoyment pouting there, Jordan.”
Mrs. March glanced at me. I could see that she wanted to respond but lowered her eyes instead.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Kiera said. She rose and went over to give him a kiss. She looked at her mother and then brushed past me on her way out.
Both Mr. and Mrs. March were very quiet.
“You made a very nice choice of something to wear tonight, Sasha,” Mrs. March told me.
Mr. March looked at me. I could see in the movement of his eyes and his mouth that he was just realizing that I was wearing one of Alena’s outfits. I waited to see if he would say something, but he shifted his eyes down quickly and then turned to Mrs. March.
“I can’t put off that trip to Hawaii any longer,” he told her. “It’s too big an opportunity for us to lose. Are you or are you not coming along?”
“I can’t just now, Donald,” she said, nodding at me.
“You have doctors, tutors, servants looking after her, Jordan.”
“I just can’t,” she said.
Mrs. Duval came in with the cake. It was chocolate with raspberry and looked scrumptious. Mrs. Caro had drawn my name with the raspberries. Now I was glad Kiera had left. She would probably have thrown it up later.
“How beautiful,” Mrs. March said.
After we had dessert, Mr. March said he had to make some calls and rose. He looked down at me and said, “It was nice meeting you.”
He had been quiet the whole time we were eating dessert. Before he reached the door, Mrs. March said, “I’ll be right back,” and followed him.
I wheeled myself away from the table and turned toward the door, too. I thought I might wheel myself outside to the patio. I stopped before I reached the door, because I could hear them arguing in the hallway.
“Can’t you be nicer to her, Donald?” Mrs. March said.
“I don’t know why you’re making us do this.”
“We can’t escape our responsibility, Donald.”
“Who says we should? We can simply set up a trust for her and have her live with some foster family, can’t we? You can involve yourself in all that, if you like.”
“That’s what she’s doing here now, Donald. We’re her foster family, but you’re right. We should set up a trust for her as well.”
“I don’t know, Jordan. You saw how Kiera’s reacting to all this. I don’t know.”
“I do. It’s good that she isn’t permitted to forget, to ignore and minimize what a terrible thing she has done, Donald.”
“How can she forget with you harping on it so much?” he said sharply. I heard him walking away.
I knew I would be embarrassed to be caught listening and started to turn. Mrs. Duval was standing right behind me. She had heard everything, too.
“People say things they don’t really mean,” she told me.
Mama did, I thought, but she was half out of her mind with cheap gin.
What’s his excuse?
13
Family
Why stay here now? I asked myself. For the big room, the clothes, the food, my tutoring, and my doctor, another part of me replied. Remember Jackie’s advice. No matter what, take everything they want to give you. You deserve more than what they give you. Take it.
I really didn’t know what I should do. Except for Mrs. March’s obvious sense of guilt over what Kiera had done and the servants speaking some kind words to me, I felt not only unwanted but in some w
ays even more invisible than I was when Mama and I lived in the streets. How lucky other young girls my age were to have loving parents and caring friends to whom they could go for advice and sympathy. I had only the memory of Mama when she was healthy and strong, now speaking to me from the grave.
“Oh, did you want to go up to your room?” Mrs. March asked when she returned to the dining room. She saw Mrs. Duval standing there, but Mrs. Duval went immediately to supervise the cleaning of the dining room. I saw that Mrs. March suspected that I had overheard the argument she had just had with her husband.
“I was going outside for a while first,” I said.
“That’s such a good idea. Let me take you.” She got behind my wheelchair and started pushing me through the hallway, but this time she turned right. “We’ll go to a different patio this time,” she said. “This side of the house is better lit, and if we look east, we can see the lights of downtown Los Angeles.”
She continued to talk, almost babbling, as we proceeded to another exit. The house did seem like a hotel to me. No wonder I couldn’t think of it as someone’s home. She pointed out some guest bedrooms and another, smaller living room.
“Donald had it designed just for the guests. He doesn’t mind our having guests,” she continued explaining, “but he likes us to have our private areas. Do you know who Citizen Kane was?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s a movie, actually, but in it, this man Kane builds an enormous mansion, which is actually modeled on the Hearst Castle. Have you ever seen that?”
“No.”
“I keep forgetting how limited your life was,” she muttered, more like someone chastising herself or someone else living inside her. “Well, anyway, Donald always got a kick out of a line in the movie suggesting that there were guests still there, guests Kane and his wife had forgotten. Can you imagine a house so big that you’d forget your own guests were still there? It could almost happen here, I suppose. At least, some of Donald’s friends tease him about it.”
I could see myself very easily being forgotten here.
She turned us through the smaller living room, which was surely bigger than the living rooms in almost all of the other houses in America, and then to the French doors that opened onto the other patio. She was right about the lighting. The grounds were illuminated like some major league ball field. There were more beautiful gardens, pruned bushes, and an area that seemed to be under construction. I asked about it.