He lost his smile. “All right, Audrina. Don’t shout. You’re getting yourself unnecessarily overwrought. What do you want?”
I fumed inside, but I couldn’t explain it simply. I was sure Mrs. Matthews was outside his office listening. Was I going to bring up my childhood, what it was like to be so constrained, trapped, after I had been raped?
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe just to get this over with.”
“Exactly. It isn’t much longer now, and the outcome will please you. We’ll have protected Sylvia, and there’ll be a baby in our house, a child to raise, someone to inherit all we have. Whitefern won’t go to strangers,” he said calmly. Then he walked over to me, hugged me, and kissed me on my forehead and cheek. “Mrs. Matthews says it’s all going well now. You’re doing your part. As soon as we’re able to, as soon as Sylvia gives birth and the baby can travel, we’ll all take a holiday, okay?”
I nodded, gazing down at the floor, my heart still thumping with the frustration I felt.
“I need to finish something here, and then I’ll come out and sit with you and Sylvia.”
“And Mrs. Matthews,” I reminded him, the bitterness undisguised.
He nodded. “Yes, and Mrs. Matthews.”
“Promise me something, Arden. Will you promise me something?”
“I’ll try. What is it?”
“When this is all over, you’ll tell me what secret you have of hers, what you hold over her. Will you?”
I saw the reluctance in his eyes, but he saw the need in mine. “Okay,” he said at last. “You’re right. By then, it might not matter to her. She’ll be gone from our lives.”
“Good.”
I turned and started out. When I reached the mirror in the hallway, the full-length one in the mahogany frame, I glanced at myself and paused. I did look pregnant, but I felt idiotic. I was a walking, talking lie. What would I say when people in the supermarket stopped to ask how I was and if I had any idea if my baby would be a boy or a girl?
“It will be neither,” I whispered. “It will be a hunk of wool.”
I couldn’t help laughing. I was still laughing when I entered the Roman Revival salon and saw Mrs. Matthews sitting with Sylvia and helping her do her jigsaw puzzle. They both looked up, surprised, which only caused me to laugh harder. Sylvia didn’t need to know why I was laughing. She began to laugh, too. Mrs. Matthews looked from her to me, astonished. I was laughing so hard now that tears were streaming down my cheeks.
“I think,” Mrs. Matthews said, “that you should go to your room and gather your wits.”
“Gather my wits. Yes,” I said, and hurried away.
I went to bed early that night. I was as exhausted as a real pregnant woman might be. It was getting very weird, I thought. There were times when I imagined a baby moving inside me, just the way it was moving inside Sylvia, surprising, frightening, and exciting her almost at the same time. As a matter of fact, it felt like it was kicking right now.
I fell asleep dreaming that the roles were reversed. It was Sylvia who was mimicking me. I was the one who was really pregnant. And Sylvia, who was truly still a child, wanted to be like me. She always wanted to be like me.
“Let her pretend,” Arden told me in my dream. “What harm could it do?”
Sylvia was even lying in the bed beside me in the delivery room, screaming with pain.
And when I gave birth to a beautiful baby, Sylvia gave birth to the baby she had drawn with eyes on fire.
The image shocked me awake. I sat up, my heart pounding. I could hear the house creaking more down here. Upstairs, I didn’t hear how the wind threaded through every crack. My dream raised my worry about Sylvia, so I got up and went to her room. The door was always left open.
When I didn’t see her in her bed, I began to panic, but then I saw her in the rocking chair in the corner. She was asleep. I wondered if I should wake her and get her into her bed. I recalled how often I had fallen asleep in that chair, under Papa’s orders to dream and capture the imaginary first Audrina’s gifts. What was Sylvia dreaming about?
Let her dream, I thought, and returned to my bed. It took me almost until morning to fall asleep again. I was afraid of returning to the nightmare that had woken me.
That morning, Arden delayed going to work so he would be home while Mrs. Matthews and I went shopping. I was almost too tired to go along, but I forced myself to do it. Ironically, if I ever complained about being tired or having a pain, both Mrs. Matthews and Arden acted as though it was expected. After all, I was supposed to be pregnant. They were both sure to do this whenever Sylvia was present.
“Try a heating pad,” Mrs. Matthews might tell me. “I don’t like giving medication to pregnant women.”
I glanced at Sylvia and saw how that pleased her, because Mrs. Matthews surely had told her something similar. It wasn’t only my movements and activities that were restricted. I even had my thoughts confined. When did I pretend t
o cross the line into and out of reality? How could I be defiant? I was gagged and handcuffed, trapped and imprisoned, even more than I had been as a young girl who was forbidden to tempt the evil spirits that had ravished my supposed namesake. As a result, I kept my complaints to myself and even began doing jigsaw puzzles.