Family Storms (20 page)

A
few days later, I learned that despite how powerful and influential Mr. March was and despite how good his attorney was, they couldn't put off Kiera's court hearing again. With only a week left before school began, she would have to go to court. No one discussed it in front of me, but I overheard enough to know the details, and by now, I understood that both Mrs. Caro and Mrs. Duval knew everything. In fact, Mrs. Duval apologized to me one day when I was sitting out on the patio that faced the pool, reading. Without my asking, she brought me a glass of Mrs. Caro's famous lemonade.

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Duval,” I said, surprised. I started to drink, expecting her to leave, but she stood there looking out at the cabana. I could tell that she wanted to say something, and I waited.

“When you were first brought here,” she began, “we all thought some organization had chosen you or singled you out for a special opportunity because of your accident and
terrible loss and that Mrs. March had volunteered to take you in. She and Mr. March have done many wonderful charitable things. No one told us what or who caused the accident you and your mother suffered. We had some suspicions, but no one thought it was necessary for us to know the truth, so no one asked any questions.”

I didn't say anything.

She shook her head. “If we had known the truth, we would have treated you better when you first arrived.”

“You treated me just fine, Mrs. Duval. Everyone has.”

“Not as fine as we would have if we had known how you lost your mother and who was responsible,” she declared, and left.

I appreciated what she had told me, but I was worried that it would now cause even more friction between Kiera and me, especially now that her court hearing was scheduled. I felt the way Mama had always felt when she told me she was waiting for the second shoe to drop.

“What does that mean?” I had asked her.

“It means that when the second shoe drops, the whole ceiling comes down on you,” she had told me. “The problem is, it doesn't happen right away, so you're always waiting for it, and that's nerve-wracking. That's the way my life has been with your miserable father. Every time the phone rings or someone comes to the door, I expect trouble.”

Maybe that was why she had hated answering the phone and always made me look out the window to see who it was when someone came to the door before she would open it. I wished I had someone to do all that for me now, run interference. I had no doubt that the second shoe was about to drop.

Two days later, the Marches went to court. I practically locked myself away in my suite, reading, working on calligraphy, and watching television. The minutes went by like hours and the hours like days. Finally, a little before six o'clock, I heard footsteps in the hallway. I heard Kiera's door slam closed, and then I heard the recognizable
click-clack
of Mrs. March's stiletto heels on the tile floor as she headed in my direction.

“Well, that's over for now,” Mrs. March said as she entered. I shut off the television. She came all the way into the sitting room and stood there looking at me. “The judge put her on probation, but only if she goes to serious therapy. If she doesn't go, she loses her driver's license indefinitely, so you know she'll go. What she'll get out of it is anyone's guess.

“I just don't want to think about it anymore,” she continued. “Donald will handle the arrangements with the therapist. This is what we've come to in this country. A child will listen to a therapist but not her own parents. At least, that is what the judge believes. I can't say he's wrong.”

I could see that she was waiting for me to say something, but I didn't know what I was supposed to say.
Good? That's all the punishment she gets? What?

“I'm telling you all this so she doesn't tell you that the judge decided she was not at fault or something,” Mrs. March continued. “She will probably tell her friends that, the ones who know the truth, but you should know different. I don't imagine any of this makes you feel any better, Sasha.”

I realized that she thought I wanted to see Kiera get
a far more severe punishment. It certainly wouldn't have bothered me if she had, but on the other hand, it wouldn't have brought back my mother. At this point, I really didn't care. I didn't like her, and I didn't expect that any therapist would, either. He or she would have to have a magic wand to turn Kiera into a different person, turn her into someone who wasn't selfish and spoiled.

“Let's just concentrate on happy new things, okay, Sasha?” Mrs. March said. She smiled, looked around the sitting room as if she was worried that something had been changed, and then left.

Kiera said nothing to me about the judge's orders. In fact, she made more effort to avoid me, often finding excuses not to be at the table for dinner and then getting herself away from the house as much as possible so that we wouldn't even cross each other's path. I did learn that Mr. March had forbidden her to have any friends over to party. However, I wasn't sure whether he did that as a punishment or out of concern for me. Ever since Kiera had given me her logic for defending herself, a logic that essentially blamed me and Mama for being there in the rain, I imagined that she used the same argument with her father and maybe even with the judge. At least I was sure the judge hadn't accepted her excuse.

Perhaps Mr. March had ordered Kiera to avoid me so as to avoid any more conflict. After all, not only was I still there, but I had been enrolled in her school. She could no longer barge in to tell me her father was going to throw me out. I was sure that she was upset about that, as well as what happened the day after I completed my calligraphy of
mother.

I brought it down to dinner the following evening, an evening when I was sure that Mr. March was going to be there. Kiera was there, too, this time. She looked as if she was going to burst out laughing when I arrived carrying the framed calligraphy, but Mr. March's exclamation of “Wow!” stopped her dead in her tracks. He rose and came to me to take it and hold it up.

“Isn't this something?” he asked Mrs. March.

She smiled. “Amazing.”

“You know,” he said, still holding my calligraphy and looking at it, “this gives me an idea for something. I'm doing this co-development deal with some South Koreans. We should do a logo in calligraphy.” He smiled at me. “Maybe we'll hire you to do it, Sasha.”

I didn't know what to say. He laughed and handed the calligraphy back to me.

“No,” I said, handing it back. “I brought this as a gift for you and Mrs. March.”

“Oh, how sweet,” Mrs. March said.

“It'll look good in the entertainment center,” Mr. March said. “Thank you.”

He took it back with him to his seat and set it aside.

“How can you hang that up in the house? I don't know what it's even supposed to be,” Kiera said. “No one will.”

“We've got a number of works of art that few can figure out in this house that your mother bought,” Mr. March said, laughing. “But at least we do know what this means,” he said, lifting the calligraphy.

“What?” Kiera demanded.

“Sasha?” Mr. March said, looking at me.

“It means
mother
,” I said.
“Love.”

Kiera looked as if she had swallowed an apple whole for a moment and then began to stab at her salad. I took my seat and, during most of our dinner, answered questions that Mr. and Mrs. March asked about calligraphy. It was actually the happiest and most pleasant dinner I had had at the March house. Afterward, Mr. March asked me to follow him to the entertainment center to help choose the wall space for my art. Kiera went directly up to her room.

The day before school was to begin was the last day that Sheila Toby, my physical therapist, came to the house. By now, I was doing twenty laps in the indoor pool. Toward the end of the session, Mrs. March came in to watch, and when I got out of the pool, she handed me my towel and said, “That was terrific, Sasha. I bet you can do ten laps in our outdoor Olympicsize pool now, just like Alena could do before she got sick.”

Before I could say anything, she turned to Sheila Toby to compliment her on the job she had done with me.

“It wasn't hard working with a young girl who is so cooperative and determined,” Sheila said.

“Exactly. She starts the ninth grade tomorrow,” Mrs. March said. “Come, let me give you your check,” she told Sheila, and they left together.

I dried myself and dressed and then went outside to walk over to the lake. I was still limping, but I had no pain and did feel much stronger. I probably could swim those ten laps Mrs. March wanted me to swim one day, I thought, but I felt conflicted about it. Almost everything she had done for me and wished for me were things she had done and wished for Alena.

I imagined that was only normal for a mother who had lost her daughter and had someone else wearing her things and staying in her room. There was no way for her to look at me and not think of Alena, but that also told me that as long as I lived there, I wouldn't be Sasha. I wouldn't be my mother's daughter. No matter what Mr. and Mrs. March did for me, I thought, the moment I could leave and be on my own, I would.

Did that make me ungrateful? Did it make me as self-centered as Kiera? Whenever I thought that, I had to remind myself of what my private nurse in the hospital, Jackie Knee, had told me. I could never be ungrateful, because they could never do enough for me.

I sat on the dock and dangled my feet over the water. The breeze drew ripples in the surface of the lake. I saw water bugs navigating through some floating leaves and blades of grass. The rowboats tied to the dock bobbed and swayed gently, and on the far end of the lake, those terns I had seen sailed what seemed to be inches above the water before lifting toward the tops of the trees.

Tomorrow, I would return to school. I'd be back in a classroom but sitting among boys and girls who came from wealthy families. When they looked at me, would they immediately see how poor and lost I had been, despite my living now in the March house? Not my tutor, my physical therapist, my clothes and shoes, my manicured fingernails and styled hair—none of it could disguise the pain of the past and the loss I had suffered. If anything, I'd be more of a curiosity than any other new student would be.
How did this one get here?
they would
surely wonder.
She doesn't belong here. She belongs out there.

Despite what Mrs. Kepler said, would I look inadequate? Would my voice falter and crack when I was called upon to answer questions aloud? Would I do so badly on tests that I would quickly become the class dunce? And when they all talked about their possessions, their family travels, their rich parents, and brothers and sisters who might be in expensive colleges, fashions and styles, famous people they had met and seen, shows they had gone to and were going to go to, what would I do? What would I say?

My silence would reveal everything. No matter how well Mrs. March dressed me, despite my being brought to the school in a limousine every day and living in a bigger house than any of them, they would recoil and whisper, “She's an imposter. She doesn't belong here. She's not really one of us.”

If I thought I had been lonely during my final days at my last school, what did I think I'd be at this one? Lonely would probably be a choice I would take rather than what I would find now. Wouldn't it have been better, wiser, for Mrs. March to enroll me in an ordinary public school? The other students wouldn't seem so superior. I'd be more comfortable. Why hadn't she thought of that?

And then there was Kiera, waiting and watching, hoping for me to fail. If I did something wrong or did poorly in class, she would pounce on her mother. I could almost hear her claiming, “This is embarrassing, Mother. She's dragging me down with her. You're making us the laughingstock of the school. Put her in a public school, at least.”

I certainly wouldn't argue about it. I half hoped that was exactly what would happen. Of course, I expected that when any of the other students went to Kiera to ask about me, she would tell them that I was her mother's charity case, a girl from the streets, homeless, carrying some contagious disease. I could see her whispering in ears, especially the ears of the other girls in my class. She would sabotage me anyway. What chance did I have to succeed? Why even bother to try?

When I heard her say my name, I thought I was thinking about her so hard that I had imagined it, but she said it again, and I turned around to see her standing there. The sight of her startled me, and I got right to my feet.

“What do you want?” I asked her.

“What do I want? I want you to disappear,” she said, and then smirked. “But that's not going to happen.”

“So? What do you want?”

“Chill out,” she said, and walked to the edge of the dock to look down at the rowboats. “I used to take my sister for rides,” she said. “Especially when she first got sick.”

Was she going to invite me to go for a ride? Maybe to drown me?

She turned to face me. “I've had two sessions with my therapist. Don't try to look surprised. I know Mother has told you everything.”

“I'm not surprised that you're seeing a therapist, but I am surprised that you're telling me,” I said.

“It wasn't my idea.”

“Whose idea was it?” I asked, expecting her to say it was her mother's.

“My therapist's.”

“The therapist's? Why?”

“It's part of my therapy, something I have to do.”

“What is?”

“Talking to you. Not to get you to forgive me or anything like that,” she added quickly.

“Why, then?”

“I told you. It's part of my therapy. I don't understand half of it myself, but if I don't do it …” She took a breath. “If I don't do it, he says the therapy won't work. Whatever that means. It could mean I would have to return to court, and then who knows?”