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The vehemence of her shrill words left me quivering. “Why do you hate me so much? What have I done to you?”
She spread her hands wide, indicating the entire house and everything in it. She told me I’d stolen everything that was rightfully hers. “You idiot! How can you be so blind? Can’t you look at me, at my eyes and see who’s my father? I am the First Audrina, not you! Your papa is my father, too! I’m the eldest and I should come first, not you! Papa dated my mother before he even knew your mother, and he made my mother pregnant. Then he saw your mother, who was younger and prettier. But he didn’t say one word to my mother until she told him she was pregnant with me. He refused to believe he was the father and forced my mother to leave town. And that stupid mother of mine did just what he wanted. And all the time she kept thinking that when she came back and he saw me and how pretty I was, he’d want to marry her then. I was only one year old and she had me all fixed up so he’d be impressed—but he wasn’t impressed, for he’d married your mother in the meanwhile. Oh, Audrina, you just don’t know how much I hate and despise him for what he did to both of us. I was just a baby and rejected by my own father. He has never given me any of the things that are rightfully mine. He plans to leave you this house, and all his money, too. He told my mother that—and it belongs to me! Everything here should belong to me!” She sobbed and struck out at me. Quickly I dodged and sprang away. Whirling around, Vera, in her insane rage, hit out at Sylvia. Down flat on her face Sylvia sprawled, screaming at the top of her lungs.
That’s when I ran to tackle Vera, yelling as I did, “Don’t you ever hit Sylvia again, Vera!”
I was on top of Vera, holding her down as she writhed and kicked and tried to scratch out my eyes. She fought me wildly, trying to rake my face with her long, sharp nails. Sylvia was still screaming. I sprang to my feet and ran to pick her up. Using a chair to pull herself up, Vera was finally on her feet. She stumbled toward the bedroom door and the hall outside. She didn’t notice a small prism that Sylvia had been playing with. She stepped on it, lost her balance and fell again to the floor.
Sylvia howled in great distress, but it was Vera who screamed the loudest. When I looked, I was amazed to see great pools of blood on the floor.
With Sylvia in my arms I ran for my aunt. “Aunt Ellsbeth, come quickly! Vera is bleeding all over my bedroom floor!”
Indifferently my aunt looked my way, flour smudged on her chin.
“She’s really bleeding, and the blood is running down her legs …”
Only then did my aunt stride to the sink to wash the flour from her hands. She dried them on her spotless white apron. “Well, come along. I may need your help. There’s a wild, destructive side to that girl, and no doubt she’s managed to get herself in trouble.”
We arrived in time to see Vera crawling on the floor
, drenched with her own blood by now and still bleeding as she pawed through the congealing pools of blood, crying out, “The baby … I’ve lost my baby …” Wild and distraught looking, she raised her head when we entered the room. I hugged Sylvia closer.
“Were you pregnant?” asked my aunt coldly, doing nothing to help her daughter.
“Yes!” screamed Vera, still feeling around in the blood. “I’ve got to have that baby! I’ve got to! I need that baby! It’s my ticket out of this hellhole, and now it’s gone. Help me, Momma, help me save my baby!”
My aunt glanced down at all the blood. “If you’ve lost it, better so.”
Demented looking, Vera’s eyes went wild and her fingers curled around one huge clot of blood that she hurled at her mother. It struck my aunt’s apron and fell to the floor with a sickening clomp. “Now he’ll never take me with him,” Vera wailed.
“Clean up the mess you’ve made, Vera,” ordered my aunt, seizing me by the hand and trying to drag me away. “When I come back I want to see this room as spotless as it was this morning. Use cold water on that rug.”
“Mother,” cried Vera, looking weak now and ready to faint. “I’ve just miscarried—and you worry about the rug?”
“The Oriental is valuable.”
Closing the door behind us, my aunt shoved me in front of her as Sylvia continued to whimper. “I should have known it would happen this way. She’s no good, like her father.” She paused, seeming to reflect before she added, “And yet he made other children without her flaws …”
Feeling sick, I still managed to find a voice. “Is Vera really Papa’s child?”
Without answering, my aunt hurried back to the kitchen, where she immediately washed her hands again, scrubbing them with a brush. She hurled her soiled apron into the laundry sink, which she filled with cold water, and then took a fresh apron from a cabinet drawer. The apron was white with sharp, ironed creases. Once she had the apron strings tied, she began to roll the pie pastry she’d abandoned.
“You look paler than usual,” Papa said to Vera at the dinner table. “Are you sick with a cold or something? If so, you should eat in the kitchen. You should know better than to spread your viruses around.”
The look Vera gave him was so thick with hatred it could have been sliced with a knife. She got up and left her dinner unfinished. I felt sorry for her as I watched her stumble weakly from the dining room. She always limped worse when she was tired. “Vera, is there anything I can do to help?” I called.
“You can stay the hell away from me!”
Vera didn’t even make an effort to clean my rug of all that blood. She just left it for me to do. For hours and hours that night before I went to bed, I scrubbed on my hands and knees at the bloody stains that refused to leave the deep woolen pile. My aunt came in and saw what I was doing, left to return shortly with a second pail and a hard brush. Side by side we both worked on the rug. “Your father has gone to bed,” she said in a low tone. “He must never know about this. He’d skin Vera alive. Audrina, tell me what he’s like, this music teacher of yours. She told me he’s the father.”
How could I tell her when I knew absolutely nothing about men? To me he’d seemed a fine, kind and noble gentleman who would never seduce a young girl—but then, what did I know?
But the rocking chair knew. Knew everything that Papa knew about how evil men were, and the terrible things they did to girls.
“Where’s Vera?” asked Papa when I carried a clean and sweet-smelling Sylvia down into the kitchen the next morning. I strapped her securely into her highchair, tied a huge bib under her chin and gave her the prisms to play with until I had her breakfast ready. Finally he looked up from his morning paper and saw me. “What’s wrong with your face? Were you in a fight? Audrina … who hit you in your eye and scratched your cheek?”
“Papa, you know I sleepwalk sometimes. I did that last night and fell.”
“I think you’re lying. I noticed your face looked red last night, but Vera made me so damned mad that I didn’t pay much attention to you. Now you tell me the truth.”
