“Thank you, dear. If you don’t want to wear this,” she added, holding up the skirt and blouse, “you don’t have to. You can pick out something else.”
“No, it’s all right,” I said. I almost told her about my doll but somehow felt that there were things so private that they still belonged only with Mama and me. Despite what Jackie called her charity, Mrs. March had not earned that trust. She was not my mother; she was not even a friend yet. She was simply someone who felt sorry for me and felt guilty because of what her daughter had done. It was I who was being the charitable one. I was letting her live with the guilt. That’s what Jackie had told me, and it made sense to me now more than ever.
I reached for the outfit.
“Can I help you get dressed?” she asked.
I nodded, and she began by helping me take off the blouse I wore. She moaned at the sight of the fading black-and-blue marks and mumbled, “Poor child. What a horror you’ve gone through.” She looked as if she was going to burst into tears, so I made sure to tell her that none of it hurt as much as it had.
After I was dressed in the sailor outfit, she wheeled me in front of the vanity table. I was amazed at how well it fit.
“Let’s do something with your hair,” she said, and began brushing it. “You do have beautiful hair, and thick, too. I bet your mother’s hair was beautiful.”
“Yes. She used to wear it down to her wing bones.”
“I wish I could have long hair, but Donald says it makes me look older, and if there is one thing Donald hates, it’s my looking older.”
“What about him?”
“Men can always look older and call it distinguished, didn’t you know?” she asked, smiling.
She opened a drawer in the vanity table and chose some hair clips. When I saw how she had shaped my hair, I looked at the framed photo of Alena and realized it was very similar.
“There now,” she said, stepping back. “Don’t you look very pretty?”
“I hope someday I’ll be half as pretty as my mother was,” I said.
She kept her smile, but it lost its excitement and warmth. She nodded and turned me away from the vanity table. “I do hope you like Irish stew. Mrs. Caro makes the best.”
“I don’t remember ever having it,” I said as she pushed me to the doorway.
“Well, you eat just what you want. She’s made a special dessert for us, a surprise, too. Here we go,” she said, and turned me down the corridor toward the elevator.
I had seen only a small part of the house when I arrived. When the elevator door opened, she pushed me to the left and around a corner. The hallway seemed endless, but along the way, she pointed out the game room, the formal dining room, the den and library, the entertainment center, and then a hallway that branched off to the right. She said that was where the indoor pool was located.
Right off the kitchen was what she called their informal dining room. No room in this house was small to me, but she called it one of their smaller rooms. It had a beautiful dark hardwood table with twelve cushioned hardwood chairs. The walls were paneled in a lighter wood, and a large window looked toward the rear of the property.
“Is that a lake?” I asked, looking out.
“Donald’s lake, yes. It’s man-made. He says he’s going to stock it with fish. What fun is that, right? It would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but once Donald sees something someone else has, he wants it, too. There are two rowboats. That’s fun, at least.”
She pulled a chair away next to the chair at the end of the table and fit me into that place. Two dinner settings, glasses, and silverware were already there. Almost as soon as Mrs. March took her seat, Mrs. Duval came through the door that led from the kitchen. She carried a bowl of rolls and a jug of water.
“Good evening, Mrs. Duval,” Mrs. March said, sounding very formal all of a sudden.
“Good evening, Mrs. March.”
“Doesn’t our little girl look pretty tonight?”
Mrs. Duval paused after she poured Mrs. March’s glass of water and looked at me as if I had just arrived. I caught the slight tic in her eyes, the little moment of surprise. She glanced at Mrs. March and then forced a smile and said, “Sí, muy bonita.”
Mrs. March looked satisfied. She leaned toward me as Mrs. Duval returned to the kitchen. “That means ‘very pretty’ in Spanish,” she whispered. “Do you know any Spanish?”
“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I know some words.”
“Alena spoke fluent Spanish, because Mrs. Duval had been her nanny since birth. I’m sure you’ll learn quite a bit just being around her. It’s the best way to learn a language, better than in a classroom. That’s what Donald says.”
“I know some Chinese words because of my mother,” I told her.