My Sweet Audrina (Audrina 1)

willing. Not to be willing would spoil Vera’s game. At least, I thought it was a game. Vera pushed and pulled the vacuum, but all the time her eyes were on the many treasures. While the machine idled, she pulled out a notepad and began to write. Very quietly, leaving Sylvia in the hall, I slipped up behind her to read over her shoulder.

1. Vacuum, dust, use furniture polish. (Mirrors, huge, gold leaf, worth a fortune.)

2. Pick up newspapers, arrange magazines, neatly. (Lamps, Tiffany, Venetian, solid brass, priceless.)

3. Should make beds before coming downstairs. (Genuine antiques everywhere now, oil paintings, originals.)

4. Help with laundry. Don’t use bleach on towels. (Oriental and Chinese rugs, bric-a-brac of porcelain and blown glass, especially birds.)

5. Run for the mail early. Never forget! (Checks stored in his office safe. Never saw so many checks come in the mail.)

“What an interesting way to list your chores,” I said when she sensed my presence and whirled around, looking startled. “Along with the valuables, you want to run for the mail. Are you planning to rob us, Vera?”

“You little sneak,” she snarled. “How dare you steal up on me and read over my shoulder!”

“One always watches a cat who becomes very quiet. Is it really necessary to list everyday ordinary chores? Don’t they come naturally to you? As for the rest, most of it Was here before. Everything has been refurbished and upholstered, that’s all. Papa hunted up some of the older Whitefern antiques that had been sold. Since you weren’t impressed before, why be impressed now?”

For a moment it seemed she might slap me. Then she sagged limply into a chair. “Oh, Audrina, don’t fight with me. If only you knew the horror of being with a man who doesn’t want you. Lamar hated me for forcing him to take me with him to New York. I kept insisting I was pregnant, and he kept insisting I couldn’t be. When we reached New York, we moved into a boarding house, and he went to teach at Juilliard. He was always throwing you in my face, saying he wished I was more like you, and then maybe he could have loved me. The fool! What man could enjoy a woman like you?” Then she flashed me a strange look and allowed tears to trickle from her eyes. “I’m sorry. You are very beautiful in your own way.” She sniffled, then went on. “While Lamar taught, I started my student nurse training. The pay wasn’t enough to feed a parakeet. In what little spare time I had, I did some modeling for an art school. I told Lamar he could do the same thing in his spare time, but he was too modest to take off his clothes. Models don’t wear a stitch. I’ve always been proud of my body. Stupid Lamar was too modest to do that, and too proud. He hated me more for showing myself to all those men in the classes. Every time I modeled I’d come home to find him dead drunk. Soon he was drinking so much he didn’t have any job at all. He lost his touch at the piano, forcing us to move to a slum area where he taught music to poor kids who never had the money to pay him—that’s when I left. I was fed up. The day I graduated as a registered nurse, I picked up the newspaper to read that Lamar had drowned himself in the Hudson River.” She sighed and stared into space. “Just another funeral I had to miss. I worked the day they buried him. I was glad his parents came to claim his body, or else he might have ended up one of the cadavers in the hospital where I worked.” She grimaced before she looked downward. A heavy silence filled the room.

I bowed my head, weighed down with sorrow for a man who’d wanted to help me and had fallen innocently into the trap Vera had set. I knew who’d done the seducing.

“I suppose you’re thinking I helped kill him, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“No, of course you don’t!” she cried scornfully, jumping up and beginning to pace the room. “You’ve had it easy, staying on here and being taken care of. You’ve never had to face the real world and all the ugliness out there, and all the things you have to do in order to stay alive. I’ve done it all, Audrina, the whole can of worms. I came back to help—and you don’t want me.” Sobbing, tears beginning to course down her cheeks, she fell onto the sofa.

Disbelievingly I watched her cry. Billie, who must have been listening, came scooting into the room. In a flash she was on the sofa beside Vera, trying to comfort her.

Instantly, Vera bolted. A short hysterical scream escaped her lips. Then she paled. “Oh … I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t like to be touched.”

“I understand.” Billie lowered herself onto the dolly and disappeared.

“You’ve hurt her feelings, Vera. And you promised that as long as you’re in this house, you would never say or do anything to hurt Billie or make her feel unwanted.”

Vera said she understood. She was sorry, and never, never would she pull away again. It was just that she was unaccustomed to being touched by a legless woman, a cripple. I stared down at her shoe with the inch lift, perversely enjoying the way she blanched.

“You can’t notice my limp now, can you?” she asked. “We all have small idiosyncrasies, such as yours for forgetting.”

Soon Arden was telling me whenever we were alone, usually not until we were in bed, what a wonderful help Vera was, taking so much work off his mother’s shoulders—and mine. “We should all be glad she’s back to help.”

I turned on my side and closed my eyes. To turn my back was my way of telling him to leave me alone. Quickly he turned me against his front so that my back was fitted into the warm curve of his body. Our breathing coordinated even as those uncontrollable hands of his began to search out the curves he wanted to trace again and again.

“Don’t be jealous of Vera, darling,” he whispered, moving so he could rub his cheek against mine. “It’s you I love, only you.”

And once more, I had to let him prove it.

Thanksgiving Day came and went, and Vera stayed on. For some odd reason Papa stopped ordering her to leave. I reasoned he saw how much help she was to Billie while I taught Sylvia how to talk, to walk, to dress herself, to comb her own hair, to wash her own face and hands. Slowly, slowly, Sylvia was emerging from her cocoon. With each new skill she mastered, her eyes came more into focus. She began to make a real effort to keep her lips together and not let the drooling begin. In some ways it was like finding myself, as I taught her all she needed to know.

In the First and Best Audrina’s playroom, she seemed to learn best. On my lap while we rocked together, I’d read to her from Mother Goose and simple books for very young children of two or three. With the dolls and stuffed animals on the shelves for schoolmates, we sometimes sat at the small tea table and ate our lunch, and it was there that Sylvia picked up a tiny spoon and stirred the bit of tea in her miniature cup.

“And one day very soon, Sylvia is going to pick up her own knife and fork and she will cut her own meat.”

“Cut meat…” she repeated, trying to pick up the fork and knife and hold them as I was demonstrating.

“Who is Sylvia?”

“Who … who ess …”