Scare Crow (22 page)

“Don’t worry, niña. Everyone’s okay. But it looks like that one might be hungry.”
She pointed at Meatball, who was salivating a puddle on the kitchen f
loor.

“He’s always hungry.” We had that in common la
tely.

When I went to find a paper towel to wipe the saliva off the floor, I received nasty
glares from the young staff. They were sweating over stoves; I was in their way, and
I was distracting Maria, their fish gu
tter.

“I’ll go find my mother,” I suggested with a bit of a growl to my v
oice.

Maria smiled without argument and rushed back to her station. I wasn’t dumb enough
to think that Lansing and Darlene, two loyal employees, had left voluntarily. They
were either fired or forced out for whatever re
ason.

I pulled Meatball away and headed through the halls into the main house. It appeared
as though the Christmas spirit had oozed into the house. My mom had had the place
professionally staged to make it feel warm, happy, and un-Sheppard-like. Clearly,
she was planning a big p
arty.

Meatball stayed close as we checked the rooms, looking for my parents, who I feared
might have been eaten up by all this happiness. In the dining room, a tuxedoed waiter
was setting up a table for eight, even though there was enough food in the kitchen
to feed all of New York State. Economy had never been in my parents’ vocabu
lary.

It wasn’t too hard figuring out where in the house my parents were. Their screaming
voices were enough to wake all four seasons at
once.

I thought about turning around and heading back to my very quiet Christmas with Meatball.
But I was curious, so I treaded into my parents’ quar
ters.

They had their part of the h
ouse.

And I had a whole other part that I used to share with Bill. This part was on the
opposite side of the house—as far away as possible from the adult area, like a contagion
antechamber. Though I wasn’t sure which side was more dise
ased.

As I approached the master suite, the reproachful words were sharp, each one enough
to leave a mark. I was about to knock on the door, holding my knuckle an inch away
from the wood. Then I caught a glimpse of Meatball. His ears were so flat against
his skull that they almost disappeared into the fur. He was right. Going into the
war zone would be like two hyenas fighting over a pig carcass, until a buffalo with
a broken leg limps in between them. They would eat me a
live.

I slid to the bench in the vestibule and Meatball crawled under, his head popping
between my
legs.

“I don’t know how much more I can take of these evenings. It’s one thing to be forced
to stay put and play hostess to these never-ending evenings. It’s another to have
to beg and plead these people to help us. It’s degra
ding.”

My mother was screaming in French, but my father responded in English. He never needed
to scream—even at its coolest, his officious tone was enough to change the earth’s
rota
tion.

“You need to get off your French high horse and start pulling your weight. We need
their support, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to ensure that this hap
pens.”

“How far? How far will this have to go before you realize that it’s enough? Last night,
Mr. Greyson dropped a shrimp in my cleavage and used his fat fingers to fish it out.
And you watched. And you laughed. And you offered him another drink. What else do
I have to do, Burt? Pull my dress up so that he can stuff money in my undergarm
ents?”

“That would be rather helpful,” my father said without any trace of hilarity in his
voice. “He’s our largest financier, dear. If he wants to pinch your ass, dress you
up as a French maid, and make you clean his lavatory, then you d
o it.”

“Lavatory,” I sneered to myself using my father’s self-important tone. Only my parents
could snob up something as simple as a bath
room.

“Is that what I’ve been reduced to? Prostitution?” my mother wondered shr
illy.

“I didn’t marry you for your ability to think,
dear.”

“And I didn’t marry a man who is willing to do anything for a
buck.”

“Ah, but you did, my love. Who pays for the mansions, the cars, the trips, the extravagant
lifestyle you love so dearly? Just smile and look pretty. You’ll be
fine.”

“What lifestyle? I’m stuck here, with you, playing little miss hostess to people who
would like nothing better than to see us sink. We have to pretend that everything
is all sunshine and rainbows when I’ve had to let almost all of our staff go and I’m
running to my family for money when they’re barely keeping afloat as i
t is.”

“This reminds me,” he said. “Have you called your brother, as I asked you to do yeste
rday?”

“Henri just had a heart attack, Burt. Because of all the stress that you’ve been causing
him. If I bother him with any more of this ugly business, it might just be enough
to kill
him.”

“
Bother
him?” my father said as though he had swallowed a handful of sand. “If you don’t
bother
your mindless, spineless brother, we will lose everything. If they decide to sell
Chappelle de Marseille, it will send our backers running, with their m
oney.”

“But if my family doesn’t pull out, they will lose what little they have
left.”

“Tonight. Call him ton
ight.”

My mother paused, her voice hushed. “I’ve already asked them for so much. They’re
barely taking my calls anymore. This will be the last straw. I’ll never be able to
convince my brother, and my family will disow
n me.”

“You could convince the pope to lend you his dirtiest underwear. You can convince
your dimwitted bro
ther.”

“I can’t. Burt, I just c
an’t.”

There was a long, dramatic sigh. “I knew I ought to have never married into your dirty
family m
oney.”

“My
dirty
family money saved your perfect, old, bankrupt family. Do you even realize the mess
you made? Do you see what people are saying about you in the papers? Cheat. Fraudster.
Thief. No one wants to get anywhere near you, and you call
my
family
d
irty
?”

I had never spent much time with my mother’s family. A vague memory of a cousin in
France with leaves stuck in her hair and muddy feet was all I knew of my mother’s
family. As for my father’s family, they hadn’t hidden their disapproval of my mother
and me. Mostly me (my mother had apparently proven to be a little useful). It seemed
I didn’t turn out the way anyone thought I would or sh
ould.

Growing up, I was taught to keep quiet and listen to what I was told to hear. Apart
from Bill, I knew almost nothing of my family members, even my own parents. There
was never a time when I was lying in front of a sparkling fire, chin cupped in hands,
listening with my heart open as my parents told the story of the day they met and
fell in love. Perhaps they had been in love, once upon a time. But I had never seen
this. I was rarely in the same vicinity with either of my parents for longer than
a few minutes at a time, let alone with both of them together in one place. And certainly
not long enough to hear a When Harry Met Sally s
tory.

It wasn’t until my father’s face started appearing in the news that I really got to
know my parents. The Sheppards had come to hard times in the eighties, when my father
quickly divorced Bill’s mom and miraculously fell for breathtaking Isabelle Tremblay,
heir to the Chappelle de Marseille empire. It was a bit of so-called luck given that
my mother’s company had recently bloomed and was ripe for a Sheppard take
over.

I remember sitting around a table the size of a soccer field as my grandmother, the
first Emily Sheppard, called the Tremblay family a bunch of hippies whenever she could,
whenever my mother was within earshot. My father, her one and only precious child,
would chortle. My mother would keep smiling and order me to sit up stra
ight.

When my father strolled out of the quarters he shared with my mother, he saw me sitting
on the bench a few feet away from him. There was barely a pause before he kept his
pace all the way out into the hall until he disappe
ared.

Sometimes I wondered if my father would recognize me if we happened to be passing
each other on the street. Probably
not.

When I found my mother in her room, she was sitting in front of her mirror, dabbing
at the tear stream that had dug a path through her foundation, one straight line down
each cheek. Even her tears were calculated—enough to get a point across, not enough
to completely ruin her makeup. Her eyes unflappably peered to my appearance in her
mirror before going back to her own reflection. She had her lilac silk bathrobe on
over a midnight-blue evening gown that went to her elfin shoeless feet. Her hair was
pulled back into a tight bun, with a waterfall of curls gushing through the middle
of the
knot.

I waited behind her, waited like a soldier would for a dormitory inspection. I was
suddenly conscious of my to-be-deemed disagreeable appearance. I was wearing the only
oversize cotton sweatshirt that fit me, under which an unbuttoned pair of jeans was
hidden. My hair was in what had once been a ponytail. Now it was just an elastic band
hanging on
edge.

When my mother finally finished working on herself, she turned around to examine what
had become of me. The smirk that spread thin on her lips warned me that she wasn’t
thrilled. She let her silk robe slide over her bare shoulders and fall to the back
of her chair. She pulled her chin up and glided off the chair towar
d me.

I stood still, too spellbound to be scared. She stood in front of me and cupped my
chin under her long fingers. And then she pinched the skin under my chin, hard enough
that I let out a
yelp.

“Is this what they call the college weight gain?” she sneered in a heavily French-accented
English before releasing her pinch but not her s
tare.

It was actually called the freshman fifteen, but I didn’t correct her because there
was no point. It always seemed that she purposefully blundered English expressions,
in a mocking sort of tone. Her undertone mutiny against my father’s heritage, I gue
ssed.

I wanted to say something, perhaps defend myself and come back with something witty
to insult her with. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, which should have been
enough time for me to at least have some one-liners ready and waiting. But I was still
too entranced to say anything. Being under my parents’ roof, in my mother’s snare,
I felt like I was back to being the little girl whose pigtails had to be tight enough
to withstand tornado w
inds.

My mother’s gaze left my fattened face and my double chin to find Meatball. I pulled
him close, as though I could protect him from
her.

I could hear her teeth grinding. “This is new,” she said. “Y
ours?”

“Mine,” I said resolutely, feeling as though my feet had just steadied to the gr
ound.

“Well, you can tie him up in the garage while you’re
here.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen. He goes where
I go.”

My mother’s eyes jumped back to my face, clearly taken aback. I rested my hand on
Meatball’s head, and he pressed against it as a show of unified stre
ngth.

Isabelle glided back to her mirror and picked out a pair of diamond earr
ings.

“Why are you here?” I asked her before she could demand the same fro
m me.

“Your father can’t leave the country.” She said this with triumph, as though my father
heard her, as though her words could embarrass a man like him. “And now I get to play
good wife while your father talks his way into getting fa
vors.”

She pricked an earring into her lobe and stretched a smile into the mirror. “If I’d
thought you would come, I would have let you know that we would be
here.”

I smiled back. We both knew what she was really saying and what I was really thinking:
sorry to ruin your Christmas a
lone.

The young security guard came in to announce the guests’ arr
ival.

My mother glanced at him, thanked him, and smiled until he
left.

“We have a long week of guests coming here and events to attend,” she tol
d me.

“You don’t need to change your plans,” I said. “We’ll only be here for a few
days.”

She stood erect, taking one last disapproving look at my frumpy disposition and my
hairy
dog.

I understood. I was to stay hi
dden.

“You’ll hardly know I’m even here,” I reassured
her.

My mother stepped into her heels and walked
out.

When the chatter noise from the guests downstairs dissipated out from the foyer into
somewhere out back, I felt secure enough to walk across the mezzanine without being
seen. The last thing I wanted was to embarrass my poor distraught mo
ther.

As ornate as the main-floor rooms were, the east wing—the children’s wing—was undressed.
Plastic-wrapped furniture, paintings leaning against the marble walls, bubble-wrapped
statues, boxes stacked up. This wing was being cleared out and was certainly not to
be seen by the important guests. My parents’ reality was sinking in. They were broke,
selling their possessions and perhaps eventually the Hamptons estate. I didn’t know
how to feel about this. I never really thought about any place as my home, but if
I had, this was the closest place I had to it. This was where I had been cooped up
most of my child
hood.