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Sylvia, Sylvia, what a burden she’d always been. My cross to bear for the rest of my life. Now I was the cross for someone else to bear. I tried to swallow the self-pity I felt and found I could barely manage to make my throat muscles move. I went on thinking of that far ago day when I was eleven and Papa had brought Sylvia home for the first time. My baby sister, who was nine years younger and born on my very birthday. Cursed, the Whitefern girls, each born nine years apart …
Or was that why my Aunt Ellsbeth had always said, “Odd, so odd,” and she’d looked at me as if to give me a clue. And, of course, it was odd. My life was built on lies. That older Audrina had not been nine years my senior.
Why was I thinking as I was? Something was in the back of my brain, something that had happened in the playroom … something that made me hate Arden …
“Goodbye, Arden,” Vera said, breaking into my reverie as she moved toward the door, leaving my husband staring after her with a stricken expression. Suddenly all that the rocking chair had revealed came back, and I remembered what he had done to the first, dead Audrina. Still I ached for his terrible dilemma—to keep me, now a nothing thing, and to keep Sylvia, a mindless, wandering creature, or to leave and take what happiness he could find—or steal.
“Don’t go!” cried Arden. His voice was deep and hoarse, as if the words were torn from his throat against his will. “I need you, Vera. I love you. Maybe not in the same way I love my wife, but it’s love nevertheless. I’ll do what you want, anything you want. Just give me a little more time. Give Audrina a little more time—and promise you won’t harm Sylvia.”
Vera came forward again, all smiles, her spider eyes sparkling. Her voluptuous figure swayed from side to side as she glided into my husband’s eager open arms. Together they melded, to move in rhythm to silent music as their earthy lust began right before my eyes.
Sometimes nature was kind. My vision fogged. I began to drift away, but etched deep on my brain was the thought that I had to save Sylvia and rid Arden of a woman who would ruin his manhood in the end. Still, why should I care? He’d failed the First Audrina, too, when she needed him most… and that’s when I knew. Arden was mine to punish, not Vera’s.
I had to stay alive for Sylvia, to save her from an institution. Papa had to be somewhere—I had to save him, too, from Vera. But how, when I couldn’t move or speak?
As the monotonous days slowly passed, I began to really know Vera as never before, by the cruel words she said to me. Thinking I couldn’t hear, she always spoke the truth.
“I wish you could hear and see me, Audrina. I’m having sex with your beloved Arden. He calls it making love, but I know what it is. He’s going to pay for everything I’ve been through to win him. He’s going to give me the world, this house, Papa’s fortune, and everything this monstrosity holds will be sold at auction. As soon as I have everything in my name, I’ll get rid of Sylvia … and Papa, too.” She laughed cruelly. “Arden is so appealing in some ways, so dependent on women for his happiness. A man is a fool to allow that to happen. I admire a man who always keeps his wife in her proper place—but I’ll be the man in our family. Sooner or later Arden will be mine, never doubt that.”
Her long nails scratched as she brutally rolled me over on my side to change the sheets. She’d placed me so precariously near the edge I almost fell to the floor. By my hair and one bare leg I was seized and yanked back to safety. She delivered a hard slap on my bare bottom, as if I’d purposefully tried to roll off the bed. Next she moved me from my side over onto my back, came around to the opposite side of my bed and finished tucking in the clean sheet before she stared at my naked body in an appraising way.
It was so awful to be n
aked and vulnerable and unable to help myself—and her eyes were no kinder than those ravishing eyes of the boys in the woods.
“Yes, I can see why he loved you once. Nice breasts,” she said, pinching my nipples so I felt a dull pain. Pain … that meant I was going to recover—if she gave me time. “Slim waist, too, flat stomach, nice, very nice. But your beauty is leaving, Audrina darling, leaving fast. All those rich young curves he loves will soon be flabby flesh to hang and droop, and he won’t want you back then.”
I lay staring at the ceiling high above. Where was Papa? Why didn’t he visit me?
In the corner Sylvia leaned forward, her aqua eyes in focus as she studied Vera intently. Warily she was inching closer and closer, too. I could barely see the drift of her long hair in the dimness of the large room. Yet, I kept willing her to do something to help. If you don’t want to be put away in one of those awful places, help me, Sylvia! Help me! Do something to save my life and your own, too!
Sylvia had inched forward enough to find a spot of random sunlight that fell on her hair and turned it copper. In her hand she turned the crystal prism constantly, like a baby watching the colorful light rays sparkle myriad rainbows about the room. One ray of scarlet and orange she beamed directly into Vera’s spider eyes.
“Stop that!” yelled Vera. “That’s what you did to my mother, wasn’t it? You did it to Billie, too, didn’t you?”
Crablike, Sylvia sidled back to her place in the shadows, keeping a watchful eye on me, on Vera.
On and on Vera rambled as if I were her confessor and when she put me in the ground I’d take her secrets with me and never again would she be haunted by any of the awful things she’d done.
“You know something, dear sister, there are times when I think Arden believes it was me who shoved his mother down the stairs. When he thinks I’m sleeping, he rests on one elbow and stares down into my face, and it makes me wonder if I talk in my sleep and say things he hears. He talks in his sleep. He says your name, trying to call you back from wherever you are. And if I wake him up, he turns from me unless I want to make love. I sense that’s all he wants from me. In many ways I don’t think he trusts me, and doesn’t really love me, only needs me now and then. But I’ll make him love me more than he loves you. Ten times more than he loves you. You were never a real wife to him, Audrina. How could you be after what happened?” Brittle as thin glass her laughter tinkled, like the wind chimes in the cupola. “Wasn’t it a nice birthday present those boys had for Audrina?”
Arden came into the room just then. He seized Vera by the shoulders. “What are you saying to her? She might be able to hear! Her doctors tell me sometimes a patient in a coma can see and hear and think and no one knows it. Please, Vera, even if she dies, I want her to die believing in me and loving me still.”
Again she laughed. “So it is true, you were there, and you did nothing to save her. What a boyfriend you turned out to be. You ran, Arden, ran! But I can understand, really I can. They were so much older and bigger, and you had to think of yourself.”
Confused, I tried to put all this together—at last I knew the secret of the First Audrina, who had not been nine years older. But why had Papa told me such a silly lie? What difference would it have made just to tell me the truth? That meant Vera must have played with the First and Best, and truly she did know her and had liked her so much I could never take her place. But then I must have known her, too! My head began to ache. Lies, my whole life constructed on lies that really didn’t make any sense.
Day after day Vera tended me with loathing, looked at me with disgust, brushed my hair ruthlessly so that much of it came out. With unsanitary methods she inserted a catheter, even when Arden was in the room. Thank God he had enough respect for me and the decency to turn away.
But often when Vera was somewhere else in the house, my husband came to me and talked softly as he gently moved my arms and legs.
“Darling, wake up. I want you to recover. I’m doing what I can to keep your legs and arms from becoming atrophied. Vera tells me it won’t do any good, but your doctors say it will. She doesn’t like for me to talk to them unless she’s there, too. For some reason they seem terribly reluctant to say anything; perhaps Vera has been trying to protect me from knowing too much. She nags me every day to pull your life support system. She doesn’t have the nerve herself. Oh, Audrina, if only you could save yourself and save me from doing something that will ruin the rest of my life. She tells me I’m weak … and maybe I am, for when I see you day after day like this, I think perhaps you would be better off dead. Then I think, no, you’ll recover … but Audrina, if you grow much thinner, you’ll wither away to nothing, even if Vera and I do nothing.”
He was weak. He’d failed her, and he’d failed me. Despite all his declarations of love, he still went to Vera every night.
Then one day when I’d just about given up hope, Papa came into my room with tears in his eyes that fell onto my face like warm summer rain. I tried to blink my eyes to let him know I was conscious, but I had no control over my eyelids. They popped open or closed without my will.
“Audrina,” he cried, falling down on his knees and clutching at my thin, slack hand, “I can’t let you die! I’ve lost so many women in my life. Come back, don’t leave me alone with only Vera and Sylvia. They’re not what I need or want. It’s always been you I’ve counted on to last. God forgive me if I’ve put a burden on you by loving you too much.”
