And now I was supposed to act like her, talk like her and be everything that she’d been … and where was the real me supposed to go?
Sunday came, and as soon as the church services were over, Papa drove, as he always did, straight to the family cemetery near our house where the name Whitefern was engraved on a huge arching gateway through which we slowly drove. Beyond the archway the cemetery itself had to be approached on foot. We were all dressed in our best, and bearing expensive flowers. Papa tugged me from the car. I resisted, hating that grave we had to visit and that dead girl who stole everyone’s love from me.
It seemed this was the first time I could clearly remember the words Papa must have said many times before. “There she lies, my first Audrina.” Sorrowfully, he stared down at the flat grave with the slender white-marble headstone bearing my very own name, but her birth and death dates. I wondered when my parents would recover from the shock of her mysterious death. It seemed to me that if sixteen years hadn’t healed their shock, maybe ninety wouldn’t, either. I couldn’t bear to look at that tombstone, so I stared up into my papa’s handsome face so high above. This was the kind of perspective I would never have once I grew up, seeing his strong, square chin from underneath, next his heavy pouting lower lip, then his flaring nostrils and the fringe of his long lower dark lashes meeting with the upper ones as he blinked back his tears. It was just like looking up at God.
He seemed so powerful, so much in control. He smiled at me again. “My first Audrina is in that grave, dead at nine years of age. That wonderful, special Audrina—just as you are wonderful and special. Never doubt for one moment that you aren’t just as wonderful and gifted as she was. Believe in what Papa tells you and you will never go wrong.”
I swallowed. Visiting this grave and hearing about this Audrina always made my throat hurt. Of course I wasn’t wonderful or special, yet how could I tell him that when he seemed so convinced? In my childish way I figured my value to him depended on just how special and wonderful I turned out to be later on.
“Oh, Papa,” cried Vera, stumbling over to his side and clutching at his hand. “I loved her so much, so very much. She was so sweet and wonderful and special. And so beautiful. I don’t think in a million years there will ever be another like your First Audrina.” She flashed a wicked smile my way to tell me again that never would I be as pretty as the First and Best and Most Perfect Audrina. “And she was so brilliant in school, too. It’s terrible the way she died, really awful. I’d be so ashamed if that happened to me, so ashamed I’d rather be dead.”
“Shut up!” roared Papa in a voice so mighty that the ducks on the river flew away. He hurried then to put his pot of flowers on that grave, and then he seized my hand and pulled me toward his car.
Momma began to cry.
Already I knew Vera was right. Whatever wonderful specialness the First Audrina had possessed was buried in the grave with her.
In the Cupola
Not wanted, not worthy, not pretty and not special enough were the words I thought as I went up the stairs and into the attic. I wished the First Audrina had never been born. I had to wade through the clutter of old dusty junk before I came to the rusty, iron, spiraling stairs that would take me through a square opening in the floor that once had a rickety iron guardrail that someday Papa was going to replace.
In that octagon room there was a rectangular Turkey rug, all crimsons, golds and blues. Each day I visited I combed that fringe with my fingers, as Papa often raked through his dark hair with his fingers when he was enraged or frustrated. There were no furnishings in the cupola, only a pillow for me to sit on. The sunlight through the stained-glass windows fell upon the carpet in swirls like bright peacock feathers and confused the designs with patterns of colored light. My legs and arms were patterned, too, like impermanent tattoos. High above, dangling down from the apex of the pointed roof, were long rectangles of painted glass—Chinese wind chimes that hung from scarlet silken cords. They hung so high the wind never made them move, yet I often heard them tinkle, tinkle. If just one time they would sway for me while I watched, then I could believe I wasn’t crazy.
I fell down on the cushion on the rug and began to play with the old paper dolls that I kept lined up around the walls. Each one was named after someone I knew, but since I didn’t know too many people, many of the paper dolls had the same names. But only one was named Audrina. It seemed I could vaguely remember once there had been men and boy dolls, but now I had only girls and ladies.
I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn’t hear a sound until suddenly a voice asked, “Are you thinking about me, sweet Audrina?”
My head jerked around. There stood Vera in the haunted, colored lights of the cupola. Her straight hair was a pale apricot color unlike any other color I’d ever seen, but that wasn’t unusual in our family. Her eyes very dark, like her mother’s, like my father’s.
The colors refracted from the many windows cast myriad colored lights on the floor, tattooed patterns on her face, so I’m sure my eyes were lit up just like hers, like many-faceted jewels. The cupola was a magic place.
“Are you listening to me, Audrina?” she asked, her voice whispery and scary. “Why do you just sit there and not answer? Have you lost your vocal cords as well as your memor
y?”
I hated her being in the cupola. This was my own special, private room for trying to figure out what I couldn’t remember as I moved the dolls about and pretended they were my family. Truthfully, I was putting the dolls through the years of my life, trying in this way to reconstruct and dredge up the secret that eluded me. Someday, some wonderful day, I hoped to retrieve from those dolls all I couldn’t recall so that I’d be made whole, and just as wonderful as that dead sister ever was.
Vera’s left arm had just come out of a cast. She moved it gingerly as she stepped into my little sanctuary.
Despite my off-and-on dislike for Vera, I felt sorry she could break her arm just by banging it against something hard. According to her she’d had eleven broken bones, and I’d never had any. Little brushes against a table and her wrist fractured. A slighter bump and huge purple bruises came to mar her skin for weeks. If she fell off her bed onto a soft, padded carpet she still broke a leg, an ankle, a forearm, something.
“Does your arm still hurt?”
“Don’t look at me with pity!” ordered Vera, limping into the cupola, then scrunching down on her heels in an awkward way. Her dark eyes bore holes into me. “I have fragile bones, small, delicate bones, and if they break easily, it’s because I have more blue blood than you do.”
She could have her blue blood if it meant broken bones twice a year. Sometimes when she was so mean to me I thought God was punishing her. And sometimes I felt guilty because my bones were tough and refused to break even when I occasionally fell.
Oh, I wondered again, if the First, Best and Most Perfect Audrina had been as aristocratic as Vera.
“And of course my arm hurts!” shrilled Vera, her dark eyes flashing with reds, greens and blues. “It hurts like hell!” Her voice turned plaintive as she went on. “When your arm is broken it makes you feel so helpless. It’s really worse than a broken leg because there are so many things you can’t do for yourself. Since you don’t eat much, I don’t know why your bones don’t break more easily than mine … but, of course, you must have peasant bones.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“There’s a boy in my class who looks at me so sympathetically, and he carries my books, and talks to me, and asks me all kinds of questions. He’s so handsome you just wouldn’t believe it. His name is Arden Lowe. Isn’t that an unusual and romantic name for a boy? Audrina, I think he’s got a case on me … and he’s kissed me twice in the cloakroom.”
“What’s a cloakroom?”
“My, are you stupid! Holes in the belfry with bats flying ‘round, that’s Papa’s sweet Audrina.” She giggled as she tossed her challenge. I didn’t want to fight, so she went on to tell me more about her boyfriend named Arden Lowe. “His eyes are amber colored, the prettiest eyes you ever saw. When you get real close, you can see little flecks of green in his eyes. His hair is dark brown with reddish highlights when the sun hits it. He’s smart, too. He’s a year older than me, but that doesn’t mean he’s dumb, it just means he’s traveled around so much he fell behind in his schoolwork.” She sighed and looked dreamy.