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The sweat prickling on my skin suddenly turned cold. In the bedroom, the TV clicked off, the door opening as Linda dashed out, crying, “Debbie’s outside, I’m gonna go play!”
“Stay by the building!” Claire called back as the front door opened and slammed shut, but she never took her eyes off me.
“You may have been born a Darnell, Dora, but they made a McTavish out of you in the end.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
I stood abruptly, my hands fluttering nervously in a way they never did. “It… it sounds so crass to say this, but I’d like to… if there’s anything I could do, or… your child might need…”
Claire let me ramble on, making me feel smaller and smaller until finally my words came to a stop. I didn’t even manage to get out a full sentence.
“That’s really sweet of you to offer, Mrs. McTavish,” she said after a long silence. “But I think this family’s done with y’all.”
I nodded meekly. “Thank you,” I said. “For the tea. And… well. Thank you.”
I moved to the door, but before I opened it, slipped my hand into my pocketbook, pulling out one of my calling cards. It looked ridiculous, made mefeelridiculous, that heavy eggshell card stock with its swirling black print,Mrs. Ruby McTavish, Ashby House.
Scribbling a number on the back, I said, “In case you change your mind,” then laid the card on top of a wicker and glass table by the front door.
“I won’t,” Claire replied, but I pretended not to hear.
I thought it would feel better.
Knowing at last. The true story, the one that made the pieces click into place. Mama’s weeping and drinking, her face sometimes crumpling when she looked over at me. In her heart, she must’ve known. Daddy had thought the loss of Ruby would eat her up, and it had. My presence only made those teeth sharper.
And Daddy. My beloved father, ruthless in business and now, I knew, in everything.
His wealth and his family name were supposed to protect him and his own from tragedy. Parents lose children in a myriad of ways every day, but Mason McTavish was not supposed to be like ordinary people. He was supposed to be blessed.
Special.
He couldn’t accept his loss, so he did the only thing he knew how to—threw money at it until it went away. Until his world was right again.
No matter who got chewed up in the process.
I might have had my answers, but I didn’t know what to do next.
Amends felt called for, but Claire wouldn’t take my help, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Besides, if I had given her money, it would’ve made me just like him, like Mason (I couldn’t bear to think of him as “Daddy” for some time after that).
There had to be some way, though, something I could do.Something that would, if not right the wrong, then balance the scales of the universe somehow.
It would be almost ten more years before I’d figure it out.
I couldn’t give the Darnells back what they’d lost, but Icouldtake from the McTavishes. What’s more: I could takeandgive to someone else, someone more deserving.
Claire’s question, about if I’d had children, kept coming back to me. I had never gotten pregnant despite my many husbands—the fear I’d had in Paris had proven unfounded—and I suspected I wasn’t capable of it. And by that point, I was in my midforties with no intention of marrying again, so that door was firmly shut to me.
It was yet another sign of my strangeness within my own family—well, not my family at all, I knew that now—that the question of who would inherit after me had never really raised its head until that moment. The money, the house, everything that came with being a McTavish… I had been happy enough to embrace it for myself with little thought to what would happen after I died.
Why would I care? Like Roddy, I had begun to live only in the present, terrified to look back, indifferent to what the future might hold. But Claire’s revelations changed things for me.
When I died, everything McTavish would go to Nelle. And if she died before me, then it was Howell’s. Cruel, stupid Howell, who had Daddy’s eyes and Nelle’s pinched mouth.
Howell, a real McTavish, as I was not.
It irked me, darling. The Darnells had given up everything for a shot at something more, something bigger. In a twisted way, I was the result of all of that, and it seemed… I don’t know. Unfair, I suppose. Unjust. Daddy had won, and when I died without children, the McTavishes would slowly reclaimwhat had always been rightfully theirs, the same way kudzu climbed the trees around Ashby House.
But there were other children out there. Children like me, without families.
