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She smiled. “Amazing.”
“You know,” he said, still holding my calligraphy and looking at it, “this gives me an idea for something. I’m doing this co-development deal with some South Koreans. We should do a logo in calligraphy.” He smiled at me. “Maybe we’ll hire you to do it, Sasha.”
I didn’t know what to say. He laughed and handed the calligraphy back to me.
“No,” I said, handing it back. “I brought this as a gift for you and Mrs. March.”
“Oh, how sweet,” Mrs. March said.
“It’ll look good in the entertainment center,” Mr. March said. “Thank you.”
He took it back with him to his seat and set it aside.
“How can you hang that up in the house? I don’t know what it’s even supposed to be,” Kiera said. “No one will.”
“We’ve got a number of works of art that few can figure out in this house that your mother bought,” Mr. March said, laughing. “But at least we do know what this means,” he said, lifting the calligraphy.
“What?” Kiera demanded.
“Sasha?” Mr. March said, looking at me.
“It means mother,” I said. “Love.”
Kiera looked as if she had swallowed an apple whole for a moment and then began to stab at her salad. I took my seat and, during most of our dinner, answered questions that Mr. and Mrs. March asked about calligraphy. It was actually the happiest and most pleasant dinner I had had at the March house. Afterward, Mr. March asked me to follow him to the entertainment center to help choose the wall space for my art. Kiera went directly up to her room.
The day before school was to begin was the last day that Sheila Toby, my physical therapist, came to the house. By now, I was doing twenty laps in the indoor pool. Toward the end of the session, Mrs. March came in to watch, and when I got out of the pool, she handed me my towel and said, “That was terrific, Sasha. I bet you can do ten laps in our outdoor Olympicsize pool now, just like Alena could do before she got sick.”
Before I could say anything, she turned to Sheila Toby to compliment her on the job she had done with me.
“It wasn’t hard working with a young girl who is so cooperative and determined,” Sheila said.
“Exactly. She starts the ninth grade tomorrow,” Mrs. March said. “Come, let me give you your check,” she told Sheila, and they left together.
I dried myself and dressed and then went outside to walk over to the lake. I was still limping, but I had no pain and did feel much stronger. I probably could swim those ten laps Mrs. March wanted me to swim one day, I thought, but I felt conflicted about it. Almost everything she had done for me and wished for me were things she had done and wished for Alena.
I imagined that was only normal for a mother who had lost her daughter and had someone else wearing her things and staying in her room. There was no way for her to look at me and not think of Alena, but that also told me that as long as I lived there, I wouldn’t be Sasha. I wouldn’t be my mother’s daughter. No matter what Mr. and Mrs. March did for
me, I thought, the moment I could leave and be on my own, I would.
Did that make me ungrateful? Did it make me as self-centered as Kiera? Whenever I thought that, I had to remind myself of what my private nurse in the hospital, Jackie Knee, had told me. I could never be ungrateful, because they could never do enough for me.
I sat on the dock and dangled my feet over the water. The breeze drew ripples in the surface of the lake. I saw water bugs navigating through some floating leaves and blades of grass. The rowboats tied to the dock bobbed and swayed gently, and on the far end of the lake, those terns I had seen sailed what seemed to be inches above the water before lifting toward the tops of the trees.
Tomorrow, I would return to school. I’d be back in a classroom but sitting among boys and girls who came from wealthy families. When they looked at me, would they immediately see how poor and lost I had been, despite my living now in the March house? Not my tutor, my physical therapist, my clothes and shoes, my manicured fingernails and styled hair—none of it could disguise the pain of the past and the loss I had suffered. If anything, I’d be more of a curiosity than any other new student would be. How did this one get here? they would surely wonder. She doesn’t belong here. She belongs out there.
Despite what Mrs. Kepler said, would I look inadequate? Would my voice falter and crack when I was called upon to answer questions aloud? Would I do so badly on tests that I would quickly become the class dunce? And when they all talked about their possessions, their family travels, their rich parents, and brothers and sisters who might be in expensive colleges, fashions and styles, famous people they had met and seen, shows they had gone to and were going to go to, what would I do? What would I say?
My silence would reveal everything. No matter how well Mrs. March dressed me, despite my being brought to the school in a limousine every day and living in a bigger house than any of them, they would recoil and whisper, “She’s an imposter. She doesn’t belong here. She’s not really one of us.”
If I thought I had been lonely during my final days at my last school, what did I think I’d be at this one? Lonely would probably be a choice I would take rather than what I would find now. Wouldn’t it have been better, wiser, for Mrs. March to enroll me in an ordinary public school? The other students wouldn’t seem so superior. I’d be more comfortable. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
And then there was Kiera, waiting and watching, hoping for me to fail. If I did something wrong or did poorly in class, she would pounce on her mother. I could almost hear her claiming, “This is embarrassing, Mother. She’s dragging me down with her. You’re making us the laughingstock of the school. Put her in a public school, at least.”
I certainly wouldn’t argue about it. I half hoped that was exactly what would happen. Of course, I expected that when any of the other students went to Kiera to ask about me, she would tell them that I was her mother’s charity case, a girl from the streets, homeless, carrying some contagious disease. I could see her whispering in ears, especially the ears of the other girls in my class. She would sabotage me anyway. What chance did I have to succeed? Why even bother to try?
When I heard her say my name, I thought I was thinking about her so hard that I had imagined it, but she said it again, and I turned around to see her standing there. The sight of her startled me, and I got right to my feet.
“What do you want?” I asked her.
