Daughter of Darkness (32 page)

But what about me? Wouldn’t I go on to become Daddy’s new Ava, and wouldn’t that harden me so that I would never find anyone like Buddy again? Maybe I would come to believe what Mrs. Fennel taught us, that love was a disaster for us. Years from now, I might even persuade myself to be grateful for the separation. After all, I had come too close to a catastrophe. I had taken a drink from the poisonous fountain and, luckily, had survived.

For now, however, I had to throw off sorrow and brace myself for the cold waves of anger that I would soon face at home. Ava was right. I could look and act sorry, but I couldn’t overdo my remorse, or I’d give it all away. I drove faster. There were still a few hours left before Daddy and Mrs. Fennel were to return. I decided I would take a soothing bath and do my best to relax.

When I pulled into our driveway, however, I was shocked to see Ava’s car. What was she doing home so early? Where would I tell her I had been? Would she believe me if I told her I had to get out for a while because I was driving myself crazy with nervousness? One thing was for sure, I couldn’t appear frightened about her being there and catching me away.

“Ava?” I called as I entered.

“I’m in here,” she called back from the living room.

She was sitting in Daddy’s chair.

“Why are you home so early? I thought you said it was important for you not to miss those classes.”

“That’s what I told you,” she said. “Sit.” She nodded at the sofa across from her.

I sat.

“I can’t believe that for one moment, one tiny second, you believed you could put one over on me, Lorelei. I’m the expert when it comes to gold-quality lies. How could you forget that I have the instincts? You’re good, but you’re not in my class yet. For your sake, I hope you will be soon, but as I told you a while ago, and as Daddy believed, you appear to lack some of that necessary instinct. We don’t survive without it,” she concluded.

I started to speak, but she put up her hand.

“Let’s get quickly past your look of innocence, your amazed protestations, and your farcically asking me what I am talking about. Let’s get right to the truth, huh? Daddy and Mrs. Fennel will be here soon.”

I stared at her for a moment. The sharpness in her voice and the heat in her eyes were normally terrifying for me, but for some reason, I didn’t feel as vulnerable and weak as I usually did when she was in a rage. I wasn’t going to burst into tears and beg for her forgiveness. I wasn’t going to plead for her to help me. And I could see by the way her eyes twitched that she saw something stronger in me as well.

“What did you do, Ava, follow me?”

“Of course, I did. I waited, knowing you were going to go to him. You were in that house quite a while. Enjoy it?”

“Matter of fact, yes, I did, very much.”

“Well, I’m glad, because that will be the first and the last time you enjoy him,” she snapped, leaning forward.

“Don’t threaten me, Ava,” I threw back at her.

She surprised me with a wide smile and then a short laugh.

“Threaten you? I’m not threatening you, you fool. I’m threatening him.”

A thin sheet of ice slid down my back.

“I’m not going to guard the door or follow you around to be sure you don’t go to him.”

“Daddy won’t let—”

“Daddy. Don’t you dare mention Daddy to me. What you have done during the day and a half he and Mrs. Fennel have been gone would probably knock him off his feet, and you know how hard it is to do that,” she said.

“And I’m sure you’re going to enjoy telling him everything,” I said, but it sounded more like me feeling sorry for myself than anything else.

“I would, yes, but if you cooperate, I won’t.”

“What do you mean, cooperate?”

“I know you’re pretty smart, Lorelei. Daddy’s probably right to think of you as one of his most intelligent daughters, so don’t pretend you don’t understand what I mean, what I want. It’s perfect timing, actually. Daddy is ready for a feeding. We talked about this possibility.”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. In the end, it’s a simple decision to make, isn’t it? Daddy or him?”

I tried to swallow, but my throat felt as if it had turned to stone.

“Just think. We’ll be co-conspirators. It will be a surprise for Daddy, but he won’t care now. We’re moving away. He’ll forgive us for violating the rules.”

I think my heart actually stopped for a few moments. She was sitting there describing the nightmares I had about Buddy.

She laughed at the shock on my face. “Think of how funny this will be,” she said.

“Funny? How can you say that?”

“You can invite him to meet your father. Finally, you can do what I know you’ve always wanted to do, Lorelei, bring a boyfriend home to meet Daddy.”

17
 
Lies

“You keep our little secret,” Ava told me, rising, “and I’ll help you today with Daddy and Mrs. Fennel. I’ll tell them I was the one who called you at school to tell you I’d be late for dinner. I know Buddy was the one who called you, Lorelei. Don’t try to deny it. But I’ll take some of the blame off you this way.”

Once I would have told her that I never lied to Daddy, but that seemed stupid now. I said and did nothing to lead her to believe I agreed and walked away. She left to pick up Marla at school. Daddy and Mrs. Fennel arrived less than a half-hour later, earlier than Ava and I had expected. The moment Daddy saw me, he knew something was wrong. I should have been at school and not home yet. He glanced at Mrs. Fennel and then asked me what was going on.

“I got suspended from school for two days,” I immediately confessed. Was there any way to skirt the truth? I struggled to think of a way around it and came up with nothing else.

“Suspended? You? Why?”

“There’s a strict rule about the use of cell phones
in the building. I used my cell phone in the hallway between classes. Actually, I was a little late for a class because of it. I’m sorry, Daddy. I just wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have left it on, but when it rang, I answered.”

“Who called you?” Mrs. Fennel immediately demanded.

Choices bounced back and forth in my mind like Ping-Pong balls. Should I become indebted to Ava and accept her help? Should I try to convince them of the same story I had used on Ava and say it was a wrong number? I could even say that whoever called realized it was a wrong number and there was no one on the line when I answered. The only choices I had were lies. I certainly couldn’t tell the truth now.

“Ava,” I said.

Mrs. Fennel grimaced. “Ava? Why would she call you? What did she want?”

“She wanted to tell me she would be late for dinner,” I recited.

Daddy’s eyes narrowed. I tried to avoid his gaze and look only at Mrs. Fennel.

“Why was she going to be late?” Mrs. Fennel asked.

“She wouldn’t say,” I replied. “There wasn’t time to ask her. Once I got caught and was sent to the principal’s office, I was too upset to care. I knew how unhappy you would be about my suspension, Daddy. I’m sorry. It just happened.”

“This is quite unlike you, Lorelei, to forget an important rule like that. Something very serious must have been on your mind.”

“There was. I wanted to speak to Mrs. Fennel about it, but you were both gone.”

“About what?” she asked. “What was distracting you to such an extent?”

“Things have been happening to me recently, things I described before,” I told Mrs. Fennel, “only now they’re more intense and more frequent.”

“What things?” Daddy asked impatiently.

“For no apparent reason, muscles in my body start to harden.”

Mrs. Fennel looked at Daddy. “I gave her something to make it easier,” she told him.

He nodded. Whatever was happening to me was something they appeared to have expected. My using it was succeeding in deflecting their scrutiny.

“I guess that was heavily on my mind, and I didn’t think about anything else,” I continued. “Ava thought I was still at lunch and could take the call outside the building. It was all just an unfortunate accident.”

“Where’s Ava now?” Daddy asked.

“She went to pick up Marla. I’m not permitted to be on the school grounds during a suspension. I’m sorry, but you have to go to school with me tomorrow to meet with the principal. Anyone suspended can’t return without one of his or her parents meeting with him. There’s a message about it on the phone answering machine.”

“This is precisely the wrong time for something like this to happen,” Mrs. Fennel muttered.

“Go to your room,” Daddy ordered. “I’ll speak with Ava about this before I come to see you.”

“Don’t tell us how sorry you are again,” Mrs. Fennel
warned instantly. “You know how I feel about that stupid word.”

I nodded, lowered my head, and walked off to my bedroom. I knew from the stories I overheard at school that kids my age often lied to their parents. Some bragged about how successful they were, not even realizing that they were making their own parents sound gullible and stupid. In fact, the way they spoke about it made it seem as if they believed that kids our age who told their parents the truth about what they did were the stupid ones. For most of my life, I couldn’t help but want to be more like the other girls and boys in my classes, but I never wanted to feel good about fooling Daddy and Mrs. Fennel.

Being a good liar, however, had become part of the job description. Clever liars mixed their fabrications with half-truths and thus muddied the waters, making it more difficult for their parents to understand what was true and what wasn’t. Others left out the unpleasant things or things that would anger their parents. The stock excuse once they were caught was a simple “I forgot.” From what I could see of some of these kids, they were very good at it. They could lie with straight faces, lie to their teachers, to their families, and even to their friends, without feeling a bit remorseful or guilty when they were caught. To me, that was like building relationships on a foundation of bubbles.

But too many famous, powerful, and influential people had been caught lying, and once they were exposed, they apologized and sounded and looked remorseful. They talked about the burden now on their shoulders
to win back the trust of those they loved. They were so successful at it that lying was rapidly becoming a minor infraction and hardly a sin. Even those who perjured themselves in courtrooms could get good lawyers and get away with it. Why was it such a surprise, then, to see young people relying on falsehoods?

Even so, and with all of the reasons for me to be less conflicted about it, I still felt terrible about lying to Daddy. I saw the pain in his eyes, the disappointment. It was enough to make my heart feel like a pincushion.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that both Mrs. Fennel and Daddy had expected when I had described how my body would suddenly harden. Neither seemed terribly concerned. Was this happening to me because of the things she fed us? Was it somehow part of the normal changes that occurred in a young woman? Nothing in my high school health class suggested such a thing, but I never felt that our teacher, who was also a part-time nurse, was comfortable discussing sexual maturing. It was probably a mistake to have boys and girls in the same class.

I went into my room, sat on my bed, and waited. I knew it wouldn’t be long before Ava and Marla would be there. It suddenly occurred to me that Ava might have tricked me. The possibility brought the blood into my face. What if she acted as if she didn’t know a thing about my story when Daddy asked her? I’d be trapped and have to confess to a bundle of lies. Maybe she and Marla had been plotting against me all along. Now that I thought more about it, I wondered why Ava would risk angering Daddy and Mrs. Fennel for me, anyway. Did
she hate the fact that I had a boyfriend, someone I really cared for and who cared for me that much? Was her hatred of my succeeding in having something of a normal relationship so great that she would take the risk just to get me to destroy that relationship?

Where was the truth sleeping among all these lies, and if I found it, would I be able to wake it up? Did I want to? I didn’t know where to put my loyalty at this moment. With Buddy? With myself? With Daddy? The house felt full of sticky cobwebs. Spiders and snakes crawled over everything. Never before had I felt as if I was living in a nest of vipers the way I did at that moment.

The moment I heard them drive up, I rose and looked out the window. They emerged from Ava’s car, laughing the way they had been laughing when they had come home from school the day before. They looked closer than ever, real sisters hugging each other, bumping shoulders softly. I felt completely alienated from them.

Panic set in as a silence fell over the house. I felt a fluttering in my chest and a trembling in my legs. I took deep breaths and returned to my bed. The minutes that passed seemed more like hours to me. How well would Ava hold up in the cross-examination, even if she wanted to support the story? Would Mrs. Fennel frighten and threaten her until she told the truth? Would my bedroom door open and all four of them be standing out there looking in at me as if I was the biggest traitor the family had ever known, their eyes gaping, their faces distorted with rage?