Family Storms (33 page)

I wasn't familiar with it, and apparently, neither was Kiera. He went on to tell us practically the whole story.

“Oh, Daddy!” Kiera cried when he described the ending. “That sounds like so much fun.”

“It was. It is. In fact, your school should do it. At least, you guys should read it or maybe get the movie.”

Mrs. March moved her dish to the side and said, “We have had that movie in our theater, Donald, and Kiera was bored and left.”

He looked stunned for a moment, thought, and then nodded. “Yeah, I do remember that. Right.”

“I was younger then,” Kiera said quickly. “Besides,
you never told me you were in the play when you were in high school, Daddy. I would have paid more attention and watched it to the end.”

“He did tell you that, Kiera,” Mrs. March said softly, “right before we began watching it.”

“Well, I don't remember.” She looked at me before firing back at her, “You're always finding something wrong with me.”

“I'm just …”

“Just jumping on every opportunity you can to make me look bad in front of Sasha,” Kiera added, and leaped to her feet. “I don't know why I'm still in therapy. I go there, make some progress, and then come home to have you ruin it,” she moaned, and left the dining room.

The silence that followed was as deafening as that right after a bomb.

“Donald,” Mrs. March finally said, “she can't …”

He put up his hand for silence. “Let's just finish our meal in peace,” he said, and that was how we ate it, the three of us performing a show of simple gestures, passing dishes, salt and pepper and butter, as if we all were deaf.

When I went upstairs, I heard Kiera sobbing in her suite and knocked softly on her door.

“If that's you, Mother, go away.”

“It's Sasha,” I said.

She opened the door and then turned away quickly and returned to throw herself on her bed.

“You see? You see why my therapist is right? You were there!” she cried, and pounded the mattress. “No matter what I do or say, she's ready to destroy me.” She turned to
face me. “How can anyone be a better person in this house? Tell me that, will you? You were there. You saw it. You heard her.”

She waited for my response. I didn't want to take sides, but I nodded.

“Well, we just have to stick together more,” she said, sitting up. “Next time she's critical of me, something I do or say, you might come to my defense, say something.”

“What could I say?”

“Say … ‘Kiera's trying.' Just say that. My father will pick up on it. I can see he likes you. Maybe then my mother will get off both our backs.”

I didn't think she was really on my back, but I didn't disagree.

Kiera smiled and reached for my hands. “Thanks for stopping by to see how I am, Sasha. That's very sweet of you. I don't deserve it, of course. I don't deserve even your being civil to me, but I plan on deserving it someday. Now, go practice the clarinet. I know it's important to you and you want to do well. Besides, I like hearing it through the wall.”

I started toward the door.

“You can leave my door open a little,” she said. “And yours, too. That way, I'll hear you better.”

“Okay, but I'm not that good yet.”

“You're better than me, not that that says much.”

“Didn't you ever play an instrument?”

“The heart,” she said.

“You mean the harp?”

“No. The heart,” she said, and laughed.

For a moment, I thought she did look like Alena, innocent, young, and vulnerable.

Downstairs, you became deaf,
a voice of warning inside me said.
Up here, you became blind.

I practiced for more than an hour before getting ready for bed and reading ahead in my English textbook. I had forgotten that I had left my door open. Before she said anything, Mrs. March must have been standing in my doorway a while just looking in at me. I finally sensed someone and lowered my textbook.

She smiled. “Seeing you lying there like that, reading, reminded me so much of Alena. She was a voracious reader, unlike Kiera. She read all of those books you see on the shelves here, every single one. I know, because she would spend hours telling me the stories or talking about the characters. She always got so involved. She'd talk about her books with anyone who would listen.”

She stepped in.

“It used to break my heart when she tried describing a story to Kiera, and Kiera would brush her off, tell her it was silly or a waste of time. I know Kiera can be a very exciting young woman, Sasha. She is beautiful, and boys trail after her like ants following honey, but she hasn't quite reached the level of maturity and responsibility she should, and I worry about her. Now I have to worry about you, as well. Please be careful,” she said. “I know how easy it is to fall into traps when you're the age you are. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“No. I'm fine, Mrs. March.”

“I hope someday you'll be able to call me Mother. Not
that I want to replace your mother,” she quickly added. “I just want us to be closer.”

“That's still difficult for me to do right now, Mrs. March,” I said.

I saw how hard she took my answer. For a moment, she looked like she might burst into tears, but then she managed a smile. “Of course. Everything has its proper time and place.”

She gazed around, smiled again, and said good night, closing the door softly behind her. Less than a minute later, the door opened again. I thought she had forgotten something, but it was Kiera.

“You left my door open a bit, remember?”

“Yes.”

“I heard everything she said. I don't read. I wouldn't listen to Alena. I'm not mature and responsible. See what I was saying? That was a lie. I always listened to Alena. She would sit on the floor next to me and tell me her stories while I sat there filing my nails or doing my hair. Why, she'd even come in while I was soaking in the tub and sit on the bathroom floor and recite them.”

Now she was the one who looked as if she might burst into tears.

“I hope you never call her Mother,” she said. Then she turned and rushed out, closing the door sharply behind her.

It sounded so ridiculous, even outright funny to say it, but I muttered to myself, “Maybe I was better off in the streets.”

26
The VA Club

I
was nervous from the moment I got into Kiera's car the next morning and never stopped being nervous all day. I did well enough in instrumental class to avoid any looks or words of dissatisfaction from Mr. Denacio, and I got an eighty-eight on a vocabulary test in English, but all through the day, I would have these moments when my heart would race and I would have a shortness of breath. I knew that this was because I was attending Kiera's secret VA club meeting and because of our lying to Mrs. March about a school play audition. If and when she found out, she would be very upset that I had gone along with it, but I felt that if I changed my mind, Kiera would return to the way she had been when I had first arrived.

I was good at keeping it all to myself. Ricky was the only one who sensed anything different about me. Kiera and her other friends were their usual buoyant selves, laughing, gossiping about other girls and boys in their classes and teachers as well. No one noticed that I was especially quiet.
It wasn't until the very end of lunch period that anyone said anything about the VA club. Deidre came up beside me as we were all leaving for class and said, “We're all looking forward to you coming today.”

Before I could say anything, she walked away and left me with Ricky, who now looked even more suspicious.

“What was she whispering about? What are you she-devils up to today?” he asked.

The first thing that came to my mind was that if I said anything that even suggested we were meeting after school, he would mention it, and Kiera and the other girls would think I had already betrayed them.

“Nothing very important,” I said. “Girlie stuff.”

“Well, that's no fun,” he replied, and walked the rest of the way wearing an impish grin. Kiera never mentioned any boys knowing about or going to the VA club. Was that one of the surprises that awaited me?

When the final bell rang to end classes, my heart felt like a yo-yo. Kiera was at my classroom door before I got to it myself. She must have run all the way from her wing of the building the second the bell rang. She had told me that sometimes she faked a desperate need to go to the bathroom just to get a head start on leaving.

“C'mon,” she said. “We can't stay at Deidre's longer than we would have stayed for a play audition, remember.”

I followed her out as quickly as I could. I hated it when she or someone else made me move so quickly that my limp became more pronounced. I knew there were students, even in my own classes, who ridiculed me. I didn't see any of the other girls in Kiera's group of friends when
we reached the parking lot. When I asked about them, she told me they had already left. Deidre had actually feigned an excuse to leave before the last period.

“They always get excited when we agree on a possible new candidate for the club,” she said as we got into her car. “There are lots of girls who would love to join, but we're very particular. Usually, we don't ever consider a new student to the school, but since I vouched for you and all of them except Deidre believe you're my cousin, they agreed. Excited?”

“I don't know. I still don't know or understand what the club does.”

“Oh, you will before today's meeting ends.” She stopped the car as we reached the driveway to the parking lot and turned to me, her face tightened into a look of seriousness and intensity I had not seen. “Nothing we can do together, nothing we say or promise each other, will ever bring us closer together than you being in the VA,” she said. “I can assure you. We're closer than real sisters, and every girl in the club would rather tell her most secret thoughts and things to one of us than she would to her own real sister.”

She drove out. I sat back, impressed. Never had I dreamed I'd be close friends with girls older than I was and in a new school, too. Now, according to Kiera, I would be even more special. I felt as if I had stepped onto a rocket ship, and it wasn't only because of Kiera's driving, either. Trips to Disneyland, parties, boat trips, all of it lay before me like some promised land filled with delight and pleasure.
Months from now,
I thought,
I won't even remember living on the streets.

Deidre's house was in a gated community. The guard
checked off Kiera and opened the gate for us. All of the houses were big and beautiful, but none was even half the size of the March mansion. That didn't mean Deidre's family's home wasn't a big, beautiful house in Pacific Palisades, too. As we approached, Kiera told me more about her. First, she explained that none of them talked about each other much with anyone who wasn't a member of the VA club.

“We hold each other's trust sacred,” she said. “Any of us gossiping about any one of us would be considered worse than being a serial killer, but I can tell you more about Deidre now. Deidre, as you know, is an only child. I became friendlier with her than I was with the other girls because I frankly felt like an only child, especially after Alena came along. I think you're beginning to understand why.

“As I told you, Deidre's father is an important business attorney with beautiful offices in Century City. Her mother works with her father. She's his personal secretary. I think she became that because most men hire beautiful women to become their personal secretaries and then have affairs with them.

“Look, everyone's here already,” she said, nodding at the three cars parked in the driveway. We pulled in behind the one on the right and got out.

Deidre's house was a sprawling Spanish-style hacienda with a large courtyard. It didn't have views of the ocean because of the tree line on the west side, but it was high enough to capture the sprawling vistas and the lights of sections of Los Angeles on the east side. Deidre opened the arched front door before we reached it.