“You will never die for each other,” he said. “It will never be necessary.”
Ava relaxed.
“But you must live as if it could be necessary,” he warned, losing his smile quickly. “We have no one but ourselves. Never forget that.”
Whenever he made pronouncements like that, it felt as if he had stamped the words on my brain and in my heart. I could feel the way they thundered inside me and quickly became part of who and what I was to be. I fed on his words the way most people fed on food. Nothing made me feel more special than Daddy talking directly to me and to me only.
When I attended a private elementary school, I listened closely to other students to see how different their family lives were from my own, especially girls with older sisters. I was interested in how much sibling rivalry went on in their houses and what their fathers or mothers did to encourage or discourage it. From what I had heard, no other parents wanted such resentment or competition between their children. They did their best to keep one or another of their children from feeling favored, but it seemed natural that sisters and brothers felt that their parents treated one or the other more favorably. It was inevitable, so maybe it was inevitable with us as well.
Eventually, I decided that Daddy was being more honest, perhaps, by admitting and even encouraging sibling rivalry. Why pretend that it doesn’t exist in all families? Some of us might not know all of the secrets another one knows, but lying to each other was a form of betrayal, and betrayal was as big a sin as any in our world. We had our own religion, our own holy trinity: obedience, loyalty, and sacrifice. So when it came to facing the truth about each other, Daddy was most encouraging and continued to stress why sibling rivalry was a good thing in our world.
“Not wanting it is like not wanting one or the other horse to win in a race,” he said. “How foolish is that? Someone, something, always has to be at least a little better, a little stronger, a little faster. It’s what nature teaches us and expects us not only to accept but to cherish and to embrace.”
Who among us, then, would be a little better, a little stronger, a little faster? Who would indeed be Daddy’s best daughter? Who would serve him best? Who would give him the assurance he needed that he would live on? For our whole purpose in life was to do just that.
I had no idea that was the reason for my being brought to live in Daddy’s home, even after I accidentally made that first discovery. I was too young yet to appreciate the full meaning of what I had seen and heard and how it all related to me. Even now, I didn’t think I understood it completely, but that would come. There was no doubt. That would come.
Something had awakened me that night. Usually, I fell asleep easily. Maybe, now that I knew about it, it was because of what Mrs. Fennel put in my dinner. Maybe it was her fault. Maybe she had forgotten to do it that particular night. However, even back then, I couldn’t imagine Daddy ever getting angry with or reprimanding Mrs. Fennel. Whatever the reason for it, my eyes just popped open, and I felt wide awake. I tried to go back to sleep, but suddenly, I heard Brianna’s laughter. It was obviously very late, but she was very loud. It sounded as if she was right outside my window. What was she doing right outside my window? And what was so funny so late at night?
We were living just outside Rhinebeck, New York, at the time, in an old Queen Anne–style house with more than fifty acres. The house had been refurbished without losing its character. Daddy had moved in his furniture and paintings, and as all of it would in houses to come, it seemed as though all of it was made just for this house. Everything fit perfectly; every color coordinated. When I commented about that after we had moved into our Brentwood home, Daddy cryptically replied, “All our homes were built especially for us.”
It did seem as if nothing happened accidentally or by coincidence. Everything Daddy did was well planned, and there was a network of support, not only in America but seemingly all over the world. All our needs were always anticipated and fulfilled, no matter where we were or when we were there.
The Queen Anne house was, of course, the only family home I had known. I had been brought there directly from the orphanage. Mrs. Fennel, who didn’t look much different to me then, had a large herbal garden just behind the house, and when I was old enough, I often had to work with her, weeding and nursing her plants. As far as I could tell, they were the only things toward which she showed any affection. I was actually jealous of the plants and sometimes wished I had been planted in a garden. She spoke to them as though they really were her children, encouraging them to grow and be healthy and complimenting them on their maturation. She’d stroke t
heir leaves lovingly and even kiss some. Nothing was worse than my accidentally stepping on one of her newly placed plants. Her rage made me tremble and start to cry.
“Don’t drop your tears in my garden,” she would tell me, her whole body poised and slightly tilted, giving me the impression that she would turn sharply and slice me in half. She made me feel I could contaminate the earth and kill her plants with my tears, and that feeling more than anything, perhaps, had me suck back my sobs and stop crying quickly. Apologies didn’t satisfy her back then, either, even from a small child.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she would say, sweeping the air between us as if my words were as clearly visible as soot to her. “Just be more careful.”
I would look back at the house to be sure Daddy hadn’t been watching from some window and seen my blunders. Of course, I hoped she wouldn’t tell him. He never said anything, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know. There wasn’t much about me, what I did or what I said, that he wasn’t aware of, just the way an omnipresent deity might be. Other children might hear their parents say, “God hears and sees everything.” Mrs. Fennel told me, “Your daddy hears and sees everything.”
Ava was in school and didn’t have these chores to do with Mrs. Fennel, and of course, neither did Brianna. Afterward, I would go into the house with Mrs. Fennel, wash up, and have my lunch. Then Brianna would take control of my day, and I would be at the piano or learning words and other important basic information. All the toys I had seemed to have some educational purpose, whether they were coloring books that taught me about animals and geography or little plastic dining sets to teach me how to sit at a table properly and eat properly. The dolls I had were mainly there to serve as props for my education in social graces. I was never permitted to develop any sort of relationship with or affection for one particular doll and take it to bed with me. When I tried that once, Mrs. Fennel smashed the doll’s head.
No, the security and comfort I would find had to be found inside myself. There was never any hesitation about closing my bedroom door at night. If something frightened me and I screamed or cried, Daddy was the only one who would come to comfort me.
“You’re one of my precious little girls,” he would tell me. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Why, it would be like letting something bad happen to myself.”
Little did I know how true that was to him.
But I got my first hint of it that particular night, when I woke suddenly and heard Brianna. After her laughter, she sounded as if she was pleading with someone. My room was at the corner of the house closest to the driveway that led to the unattached garage. I slipped out from under my comforter. It was the beginning of fall, and although we hadn’t yet had a night with temperatures below freezing, it was cool enough to justify sleeping with a heavy but soft comforter.
Because of the foliage and the trees surrounding our house, it was always in a blanket of shadows and dark inside. Those windows that faced the east in the morning and the west in the afternoon were shuttered. Neither Daddy nor Mrs. Fennel liked it to be too warm in the house anyway, and the heat was turned up only during the coldest winter months. Mrs. Fennel told me we would all sleep better that way. I liked the early fall, the colors of the leaves and the crisp air. I wasn’t permitted to wander far from the house, but because of the proximity of the woods and the foliage around us, I could see and watch the squirrels and often deer and rabbits that seemed as curious about me as I was about them.
I thought the moon was a deeper shade of yellow in the fall so it could match the color of leaves. This particular night, we had a full moon with a cloudless sky. The glow fell like a great spotlight over the house, the illumination threading itself through the leaves and branches, twisting and turning shadows into new shapes as if they were made of black clay. One of my bedroom windows had been left open enough for me to be able to hear Brianna’s laughter and then the voice of a stranger, a young man.
When I peered out at them, I saw he had driven Brianna home and was dressed formally in a jacket and tie. Brianna had gotten out of the car and was on his side now, urging him to get out, too. She was actually pulling on the door handle and tugging at his arm through the opened window. For some reason, he was resisting.
I pushed my window up a bit higher so I could lean out and hear what they were saying more clearly.
“Stop being such a coward and a jerk,” Brianna told him, and let go of his arm.
“I’m not being either. I’m just being sensible. All the lights are out. We’ll wake them up.”
“I told you. My father’s away,” she said.
Why was she lying? I wondered. Daddy wasn’t away. He had just come back yesterday.