Family Storms (17 page)

“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

W
hy 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 ways 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.”