Whitefern (Audrina 2)

Recently, before Papa grew weaker and sicker, he and I had discussed the possibility of getting her an art teacher. When I told Arden, he said it would be a waste of money.

“How can she learn anything like that? She barely knows how to dress herself and brush her teeth.”

“There are people like her who can’t do well in school or even in everyday life with common activities but have specific talents, Arden.”

“Then what good is it? They can’t handle any money they make or go shopping for themselves. She can’t even carry on a conversation. Just teach her how to clean and polish the floors and furniture. At least then she’ll be of some value,” he said, and went on reading his Wall Street Journal.

Nevertheless, I promised myself I would look into getting an art tutor once our lives resembled any normalcy. More than any of us, Sylvia needed something to distract her and take her mind off our loss. I knew how her mind worked. When she picked up a thought, plucked it seemingly out of the air like a wild berry, she turned it over and over in her mind for hours if she was left alone. This told me that she wasn’t really dumb; she had deep curiosity about everything that was brought to her attention. The problem was trying to get her to think about something else once she hooked onto an idea, whether it was a dead fly she carried around all day or an old photo of Whitefern. She was that way about dinner preparations. No surgeon in an operating room had more intense concentration.

I had decided earlier in the day to prepare one of Arden’s favorite dinners, angel-hair pasta and chicken in olive oil, garlic, and basil. I worked on the sauce and started heating the water for the pasta. Everything was going along fine when he called unexpectedly.

“I won’t be home for dinner,” he said as soon as I answered. “I have a very important dinner meeting with one of our high-net-worth clients who’s worried about his portfolio since your father’s death. I have to assure him that we are going to be as efficient and profitable for him as ever. Fortunately, no one but you, me, and our attorney knows about this stupid thing your father did, but the danger remains that it will be discovered. Stupid.”

“My father didn’t do stupid things, Arden.”

“Oh. I suppose the whole ruse of creating the first Audrina wasn’t stupid, or marrying my mother, a woman without legs, was brilliant. She was happy and safe where she was. I would have provided for her. There wasn’t a woman within arm’s length that he didn’t claim, no matter what.”

“You didn’t complain about him back then, Arden. You were very grateful, as I remember it.”

“What could I do? I didn’t have a job, and my real father had deserted us.” He inhaled a ragged breath. “But that’s not the same as liking it,” he added, his voice straining with frustration and rage. “I put up with a great deal to make him happy, to pay him back, and look what he did. That’s what I call ungrateful.”

“Have you been drinking?” I asked. He was slurring his words a little, and he would never say these things before my father died.

“Of course I’m drinking. You think a teetotaler could survive in this business? I have to entertain clients, Audrina, and not do things that will make them feel uncomfortable. Your father was quite the drinker. If you want to know the truth, he taught me. That’s why I’ve been telling you that you simply do not understand the business. It all doesn’t happen over the phone. People need to be reassured about things in person. You don’t have the worldly experience I have. You never went to college. You were practically a prisoner in Whitefern. I’ve given you the important worldly knowledge you have.”

I heard him take a deep breath, pausing like someone who was fighting to get control of himself.

“Everything is being arranged to correct what your father did,” he said in a softer voice. “It will take two days. I’ll bring you to Mr. Johnson’s office to sign the paperwork. It has to be notarized.”

“I’m not signing anything until I read it and think about it properly. It was how my father brought

me up.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “How he brought you up? Do you really want to resurrect that subject?”

I heard music in the background. “Where are you?”

“I’m in a very upscale restaurant. You don’t entertain clients in a fast-food joint. I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up for me.”

“You didn’t call all day, Arden, and you never asked what happened with Sylvia last night.”

“Save it for my bedtime story,” he said. Someone laughed near him. “Gotta go.”

“Arden—”

He hung up. I looked at Sylvia. She was watching me, her face full of trepidation. She was always very sensitive to my moods and feelings and would even start to cry seconds before I did when something upset me or made me sad. Maybe there was something to the theory that people who shared blood were more aware of each other’s moods and feelings than even close friends would be.

I smiled quickly. “Everything’s all right, Sylvia. Arden has to work late tonight, so it will be only you and me for dinner, okay? We like it all anyway. It’s not just for him that we cook.”

She narrowed her eyes, looked toward the stairway, and then I thought she nodded to herself as if she had heard a whisper. I told myself her behavior shouldn’t be so surprising to me. Like me, she had seen too many deaths in this house. She was in the shadow of the Grim Reaper. Vera, in fact, had tried to blame her for Billie’s death when Billie fell down those stairs. Vera resented the attention Papa was giving Sylvia, just like she resented any attention he gave me. Jealousy, rather than blood, ran through Vera’s veins. If she cut herself, I would expect to see the green slime of envy instead of blood.

Sylvia went about setting the table in the dining room for the two of us as meticulously as ever. That didn’t surprise me. I knew her better than anyone, even Papa. I had practically been her mother all these years. When her body began to look like the budding figure of a beautiful young woman, I spent hours alone with her talking about sex, in as much of a scientific, even fantasy way as I could, especially when we discovered baby mice or a nest of hummingbird eggs and she had a child’s curiosity about how they got there.

Everything became more dramatic for her when she had her first period. No matter how I tried to prepare her for it, it came as a big shock. Her scream at the sight of blood made Whitefern’s walls tremble. I looked at Papa and hurried up to her. I recalled how frightened I had been when I had gotten mine, and I could handle such changes, so I appreciated what she was going through.

She hadn’t forgotten what I had told her, but it was always more like a story to her, something that happened to other women. Why did it look so bad? This sort of thing happened only when you hurt yourself, and the cramps, the pain? How could this mean anything good? What did it have to do with babies?

When she questioned me time after time about it, I was thrown back to when my aunt Ellsbeth had tried to terrorize both Vera and me with biblical references, claiming that women suffered so much with their monthlies and the birthing process because of what Eve had done in the Garden of Eden.