Cloudburst (4 page)

“Donald left already,” Jordan told me as we started to descend the curved stairway. “He's going to Boston for four days,” she added.

I didn't sense sadness in her voice as much as a note of defeat and acceptance. Donald had been traveling more and more and had been away from home for longer and longer periods of time. For as long as I'd been here, he always took business trips, but they did seem more spaced out back then and never for as many days. Jordan had begun to complain about it often at dinner, but he either didn't respond or said it couldn't be helped. He told her that they were busier than ever and it would be foolish to pass up big opportunities.

“Besides,” he said once, “you always knew what it would be like for us when we were married. You knew how I was about the things that I did. There should be no real surprises.”

I remember looking at her and wondering if she really had known. My mother hadn't known what it would eventually be like when she got married to my father. I was sure that, like Jordan, she had had other dreams and visions for their marriage. It wasn't fair for Donald to say that to Jordan, I thought. It made it sound as though she were partly to blame and should not complain. After all, didn't he know who she was? Didn't he realize how alone and lost she might feel?

“I'm going to a dinner tonight,” Jordan added as we continued down the stairway. “I'm sorry you have to eat alone. If you want, you can invite one of your friends over, but be sure you get your homework done, okay? Not that I have to remind you,” she said. “It's just a habit I got into whenever I spoke to Kiera.”

I nodded but immediately began to think about whom I
would choose. I knew it was very immodest of me to say it, but whomever I chose would be the object of envy for the other girls in my class with whom I was friendly. It wasn't only because they would be coming to this extraordinary house with its game room and theater, its indoor and outdoor pools and tennis courts. I was far from oblivious when it came to how popular I had become at school for other reasons. In the beginning, it surprised me and even made me feel a little uncomfortable, but over time, I grew used to other girls vying for the seat next to mine or winning my friendship and approval. My phone was ringing too often, not only for Mrs. Duval and Jordan but for me as well. I hated gossip and backstabbing, especially when it came to girl bullying, but I would be a liar if I denied that being so important to them made me feel good.

Of course, I wasn't receiving phone calls and attention only from girls, but until now, I hadn't settled on any one boy. Nothing seemed to annoy them more than my dating someone one weekend and then another the following one. I hadn't dated anyone for weeks now. Despite what Kiera and her friends had ended up doing to me, I was impressed with how they all avoided long-term relationships. Long-term for them was two weeks. “Playing the field,” Kiera used to say, “is a lot more fun. Besides, our parents are right. We're too young to get so serious.”

Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought I saw looks of envy and regret on the faces of the girls who were going steady. Their time was so dominated by their boyfriends they didn't spend much of it with us.

“Girls who go steady so young are insecure,” Kiera told me. “They don't have confidence in themselves. They're terrified that no one will ask them out.” She laughed and added, “Like Mrs. Caro is fond of saying, ‘A bird in hand is grand.' But that's not for me. I'd probably squeeze it to death.”

How stupid it would sound to anyone if I told them that Kiera's words were still important to me. “Look at what she did to you, getting you to believe in a club called Virgins Anonymous and literally having you raped on that boat ride to Catalina Island. Why would you think anything someone like that had said was important or significant?” he or she would surely ask.

Because despite all that, I would tell them, I was still in her world, and no one knew better what rules to play by in that world than Kiera March. You have to give the devil her due. Besides, don't forget, coming here from where I had been and what I had gone through was like landing on another planet for me.

In the beginning, I was terrified that the other students would learn the truth about me, discover that I had been homeless and lived on the streets. I thought their parents surely would warn them to stay away from me. They would tell them that I could be diseased or something. Despite living in the Marches' home, I would be like a leper.

Ironically, at least in the beginning, Kiera was afraid that her friends would learn the truth about me, too, but of course, not for the same reasons. More students would know what she had done, and then she would be tainted not only by that crime but also by living beside a girl like
me. To her, that was akin to some subtle punishment. So she went along with the story that I was her cousin who had moved in with her and her parents because my parents had been killed in a car accident. That was why I limped when I first arrived, why I had been injured, too.

When everything was eventually revealed, thanks to Kiera's nearly killing herself with a drug known on the street as G, the truth about me emerged. By then, everyone had accepted me in the school. I was doing very well in my classes and had become a lead clarinet player in the orchestra. To my surprise, after all was known, I became something of a heroine. Instead of the truth chasing my classmates away from me, it drew them to me. Everyone wanted to know more about me. Suddenly, being poor and downtrodden was romantic.

Did I exploit all of this? Probably, but whom did I hurt? It felt good to take advantage of other girls and boys who had enjoyed so much, anyway. They weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They were born with a gold one. If it was all reversed and they could, they wouldn't hesitate to take advantage of me, I thought.

Did I lead the other girls to believe that I was far more sophisticated and worldly when it came to sex and boys than I really was? Yes, but I enjoyed the way they looked up to me, spoke to me, competed for my attention. After all, I had not only survived what had been done to me here, but I had also survived the streets. I had been to hell and back. Who could claim the same or similar experiences? They made me feel like a local celebrity, a sort of Pygmalion, Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady,
educated and washed until
she could no longer be distinguished from the blue bloods.

All of that reverence and respect never ended. In fact, it was happening more than ever, and I couldn't help but smile at the irony. I sat where Kiera had sat, walked where she had walked, and held court just the way she had. I was the queen now, and I wasn't about to give up my throne over a pang of conscience. I told myself there wasn't anything I could do to any of them in this school, anyway, that she or he couldn't survive, not with their support systems.

Enjoy yourself, Sasha,
I told myself. As Mrs. Caro had said many times, “She deserves to be a little spoiled.”

Mrs. Caro had my breakfast ready seconds after I sat at the table in what the Marches called their breakfast nook. Rarely did we have breakfast in the dining room since Kiera had gone off to college. The nook had bay windows that looked out on the beautiful gardens, the rolling lawn where the Marches had some statuary and stone benches. It looked like a private park. There was so much to maintain that they had more than a dozen employees for Alberto to supervise. For me, it was still too much to believe that one family had all this. What they spent on maintenance could probably feed all of the homeless people I had met and known. Kiera always took it all for granted. No matter what my response to something wonderful here was, she always said, “What's the big deal? If we didn't have it, someone else would, and why should they have it and not us?”

Live where I have lived, be who I have been, and you'll understand why it is a big deal,
I thought, and then I thought,
Well, maybe not you.

“Just coffee for me and a piece of toast,” Jordan told
Mrs. Caro. “I'm having a big lunch out today,” she added before Mrs. Caro could ask after her health.

She's going out to lunch and dinner,
I thought. Lately, both she and Donald seemed to want to get away from their beautiful house and estate. Perhaps the memories of Alena were haunting them even more than ever with Kiera away. I was sure I didn't fill the caverns in their hearts. Jordan had tried by having me wear Alena's things, sleep in her room, and learn to play the clarinet. I was even using her clarinet. Even though it all distracted her from her sorrow for a while, it didn't end it. Nothing would, just as nothing would end my mourning my mother's terrible death.

“Has Kiera been writing to you? I haven't heard from her for more than two weeks,” Jordan said. I knew she suspected I had been reading something from Kiera on the computer.

Although it was painful to tell her that yes, Kiera was communicating with me far more than she was with her, I didn't want to lie to her again.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, has she said any more about this young man from England? Donald asked me last night, and I could tell him nothing.”

“She's still seeing him. She sounds happy about it, too.”

“Um. I feel sorry for him,” she said. Mrs. Caro served her some coffee. She glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, and returned to the kitchen to get Jordan her toast.

“She tells me he's a proper Englishman,” I said.

“Yes, I heard about that. She said his father was knighted. It's hard to believe she would be with anyone
proper,” she replied, and sipped her coffee. “I don't enjoy speaking about her like this, but I am not one of those mothers who refuses to see her child's flaws, especially this child.”

I looked down and continued to eat my eggs.

“I'm not saying I'm not happy that you and she have developed a friendlier relationship. If anything, I think that's wonderful of you. The way you treated her with so much kindness after she did that stupid drug thing and all the other things to you impressed both Donald and me, but always be careful. You're too sweet and trusting, just the way Alena was and would be today. You both have too much angel in you.”

“I'll be careful,” I promised. Lately, I wasn't feeling anything angelic about myself. I was feeling more guilt because of the way Jordan often compared me to Alena.

Mrs. Caro brought her the toast. She nibbled on it like a small rabbit and stared ahead.

When I was in the hospital after the accident and Jackie Knee urged me to accept Jordan's offer and take what I could from her and her family, she was surely envisioning what she thought was a pretty close to perfect world, a world in which everything you wanted was at your fingertips. She was right about it to a certain extent. What could I ask for now that I didn't have materially?

But as I looked at Jordan lost in her own sad thoughts for a moment, I thought this was far from a perfect world. Sadness was a permanent guest here. It crawled about through the shadows, walked freely during the night, visiting both Jordan and Donald and even me. Outside, the
grass couldn't be greener, the flowers brighter, the fountains more luscious and crystal clear, but despite the pleasures I was enjoying and the comfort I experienced, in the back of my mind, I knew it was wrong to begin here by standing in a dead girl's shoes. I could feel the dread. Something sometime in the near future would make me regret the Marches' generosity in ways I couldn't imagine. It was coming. Like Mrs. Caro, I could sense things others could not, and deep down, I was afraid.

“Oh, you'd better get a move on,” Jordan said. “Remember, no speeding. I don't know what I would do if something happened to you, too.”

“I'm okay. I have plenty of time,” I said, but wiped my mouth and rose. I was going to bring the plates into the kitchen, but Mrs. Caro, as usual, was right on the mark, as if she had been hovering behind the door listening and waiting for her cue, as if we were all in a play.

I thanked her again, gave Jordan a kiss on the cheek as I had started doing recently, and headed out. My schoolbag was in the entryway on the eighteenth-century wood bench Jordan had bought at an auction in France. I had gotten into the habit of putting it there after I had done my homework. If there was anything the teachers at my school hated, it was a student forgetting his or her books. On more than one occasion, my classmates would call home for something they had forgotten, and their parents would either bring it or send it along in a taxicab or limousine. It wasn't so strange to see a uniformed chauffeur bring something into the school.

I stepped out into another very warm late October morning with a sky as blue as a summer sky. Mrs. Caro
always talked about the weather. Donald didn't believe there was a man-made climate change, but she would always shake her head and mutter, “Somethin's not right, and it's not nature's fault.”

I walked to the garage. It wasn't far, but lately it was practically the only walking outside of the school that I was doing. When we were homeless, Mama and I seemed to walk forever some days. Even when I had a new pair of sneakers, my feet would blister, and hers began to look like the feet of someone who walked on a bed of nails.

Just before I reached the garage, my cell phone vibrated, and I paused to answer.

“Hi,” I heard. “Have you left for school yet?”

“Who's this?” I asked, even though I knew full well who it was.

Shayne Peters was a starting guard on the basketball team, six feet two, with a shock of rich golden brown hair. His father was a famous criminal attorney who had recently defended a congressman accused of murdering his wife. He had gotten him acquitted.

Shayne had been going with Sydney Woods, but they recently had broken up. The rumor mill blamed it on me. The story was that he had a big crush on me, and Sydney, finally disgusted with him, gave his class ring back to him. I don't know how that had all started. I had done little to encourage him.