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The woods were closing in on me, smothering me. The trees wanted me, wanted me dead because I was another Audrina they wanted to claim for their own.
His lesson still not complete, heartlessly Papa dragged me onward. I was crying now, completely defeated, knowing he was right. I should never disobey, not ever. I should never have forgotten the other Audrina.
He was leading me to our family plot. I hated this place. I tried to sit down and resist, but Papa picked me up by the waist. Holding me rigid before him like a wooden doll, he stopped in front of the high, slender tombstone that seemed symbolic of a young girl. He said it again, as he’d said it a hundred or more times in the past, and just as before, his words made my blood chill and my spine turn mushy.
“There she lies, my First Audrina. That wonderful, special Audrina who used to look up to me as if I were God. She trusted me, believed in me, had faith in me. In all my life I never had another who gave me that kind of unquestioning love. But God chose to take her from me and replace her with you. There must be some meaning in all of this. It’s up to you to make her death meaningful. I cannot bear to live with the knowledge that she may have died in vain. Audrina. You have to take on all the gifts of your dead sister, or I’m sure God will be angered, just as I am angered. You don’t love me enough to believe I am doing the very best I can to protect you from the very thing that happened to her. And certainly you must have learned from the rocking chair about the boys in the woods on the day she died.”
Staring up into his handsome face, which soon streaked with tears, I twisted in his arms so my arms went around his neck, and my face tucked down on his shoulder. “I’ll do anything you want, Papa, as long as you let me see Arden and Billie once in a while. I’ll sit in the rocking chair, and really try to fill with her gifts. I swear I’ll cooperate as I never have before.”
His strong arms embraced me. I felt his lips in my hair, and later he used his handkerchief to clean my dirty face before he kissed me. “It’s a bargain. You can visit that boy and his mother once a week as long as you keep Vera with you, and make that boy escort you through the woods, and never go there after dark, or on a rainy day.”
I didn’t dare to ask for more.
Competition
The cemetery and the rocking chair had taught me their lessons. From now on I’d be the kind of girl Papa had to have in order to gain wealth and live happily. I knew he believed his way was the best way, and I couldn’t judge for myself the right and wrong of most situations. And I wanted Papa to love me more than that hateful First Audrina that I wished had never been born, just as I’m sure Vera wished that I’d never been born.
“You’ll never be as wonderful as your dead sister,” stated Vera so firmly that it seemed indeed she must have known her. She was trying to press Papa’s shirt to show him she could, but she was only managing to ruin it. The iron kept sticking and left burned places shaped like the iron. Even the steam holes showed. “The First Audrina could iron shirts like an expert,” she said, bearing down hard on the iron. “And she was so neat with her hair. Your hair is always a windblown mess.”
Vera’s hair wasn’t exactly terrific looking, either, the way it fell down into her face in wispy strings. The sun through the windows shone through her apricot hair and turned it gold on the ends and red near her scalp. Sun hair. Fire hair.
“I can’t understand why they’d name someone as stupid as you are after such a brilliant girl. You can’t do anything right,” she went on. “What fools parents can be. Just because you happened to have her coloring, they thought you’d have to have her brains and personality, too. And you aren’t nearly as pretty. And you’re moody and dreary to be around.” She turned down the heat on the iron, but it was already too late. Worry puckered her brow as she studied the burn marks and tried to figure out what to do. “Mom,” she called, “if I burn Papa’s shirt, what should I do?”
“Run for the woods,” called back my aunt, who was glued to her TV set, which was showing an old movie.
“Stupid,” Vera said to me, “go ask your mother what can be done to take out the scorched place on Papa’s shirt.”
“I’m too stupid to know what you mean,” I said, still stirring my cereal around, sure that Papa would put me in that rocking chair again tonight, as he’d been doing two or three times a week, hoping the gifts were coming my way.
“Poor second-best Audrina,” Vera continued. “Too dumb to even go to school. Nobody here wants the world to know how idiotic you are with your senile memory.” She took from the cabinet a huge bottle of bleach, poured a little onto a sponge and dabbed at Papa’s new pink shirt. The shape of the iron made an unsightly burn right where his coat wouldn’t hide it.
I went over to see what she was doing. The bleach seemed to be working.
Papa stalked into the kitchen, bare-chested, cleanly shaven, his hair styled and ready to go. He paused near the ironing board to stare at Vera, who looked extremely pretty now that she was shaping up and slimming down in her waist. Then he was looking from me to her, then back again. Was he comparing me to her? What did he see that made him look undecided?
“What the devil are you doing to my shirt, Audrina?” he asked, catching his first glimpse of the ironing board.
“She was pressing it for you, Papa,” spoke up Vera, moving in closer, as if to side with him. “And the silly girl was so busy picking on me she left the iron flat on your new shirt—”
“Oh, my God,” he cried, grabbing up the shirt and inspecting it closely. He groaned again as he saw something I hadn’t noticed until the light shone through it. Holes were appearing in the fading scorch mark. “Look what you’ve done!” he roared at me. “This shirt is one hundred percent silk. You’ve just cost me a hundred dollars.” He saw the huge bottle of bleach then and groaned again. “You burn my shirt, then pour on bleach? Where was your common sense, girl, where?”
“Don’t get excited,” said Vera, running forward and snatching the shirt from his hands. “I’ll repair this shirt for you, and you won’t know it from new. After all, Audrina doesn’t know how to do anything.”
He glared at me, then turned doubtfully to her. “How can you repair a shirt that’s been eaten by bleach? It’s gone, and I had planned to wear that to an important meeting.” He hurled do
wn his wine-colored tie, looked down at his light gray trousers, then started to leave the kitchen.
“Papa,” I began, “I didn’t burn your shirt.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he said with disgust. “I saw you at the ironing board, and the bleach bottle wasn’t a foot away. Besides, I don’t think Vera would give a damn if my shirt was wrinkled. I naturally presumed you would be the one who knows how much I like to be turned out to perfection.”
“I don’t know how to press shirts, Papa. As Vera says all the time, I’m too stupid to do anything right.”
“Papa, she’s lying, and what’s more, I told her to turn on the steam and use a press cloth, but she wouldn’t listen. But you know how Audrina is.”
He seemed ready to flare back when he noticed my look of despair. “All right, Vera. That’s enough. If you can salvage this shirt I’ll give you ten dollars.” He smiled at her crookedly.
True to her word, that evening when Papa came home, Vera showed him his pink shirt. It looked brand new. He took it from her hands, turned it over and over to look for patch stitches and could find none. “I don’t believe my eyes,” he said, and then laughed as he pulled out his wallet. He handed Vera ten dollars. “Honey, perhaps I’ve been misjudging you after all.”
