Roxy’s Story (37 page)

I made arrangements for Mama to have a private-duty nurse when she was home. I had
no false hope or any illusions about it and tried to get M to understand, but she
resisted right up to the day Mama had to return to the hospital. We were literally
in countdown now. I made M go to school, but the hardest thing I had to do since I
had left our home was to go there and get her the day Mama died.

Uncle Alain had flown over and was with us. Our aunt Lucy and uncle Orman descended
like vultures to scoop M up and bring her back to their home. I could see what that
was going to be like for her. She would be in an even worse situation than I had been
in, because she had no ally, no one like Mama to be a buffer between her and our military
uncle and our insensitive aunt. In the end, I couldn’t let it happen. I went to see
Mrs. Brittany. I was ready to quit, and she knew it.

“I want to be my younger sister’s guardian,” I told her. “I want her to move in with
me.”

“Do you know what you’re proposing? That’s ridiculous.”

“I do. She’ll live with me either at the Beaux-Arts or someplace else, Mrs. Brittany,”
I replied, with my eyes as steely as hers could be.

“It won’t work. Do you actually want to expose a girl that young to our world?”

“I wasn’t much older when Mr. Bob brought me to you,” I said.

She shook her head and looked at Mrs. Pratt, who was in the office, too.

“She’ll have to live by our rules,” Mrs. Brittany said, showing me she was relenting.

“She will.”

“I’ll be there to make that clear myself.”

“Good.”

What I really wanted to say was that I wanted what was left of my family back. I wanted
to be the older sister I never could be. Just as she had tried to hold on to some
semblance of family through Sheena, I would through Emmie. But I didn’t mention any
of that. I knew she would see it only as weakness and another portent of disaster.

In the beginning, I thought I actually would enjoy being M’s older sister, mother,
and father wrapped up into one. I went to the school and met with the principal, who
clearly wasn’t happy about M coming to live with me at the Beaux-Arts. It was clear
that the rumor mill had been running full-time at the school, but I thought we could
endure it, or at least she could. I tried to be as stern and unyielding as Papa at
times, insisting that M keep up with her schoolwork. On the other hand, I also enjoyed
being her older sister, showing her how to look prettier, fixing her hair, teaching
her about makeup, and buying her more attractive clothes. Little did I know that everything
I did only made things harder for her at school. Dirty rumors were circulated more
openly because of the things I had done for her. They were saying that I was turning
my sister into another prostitute.

I didn’t understand at first how this happened so quickly, and then M confessed and
told me that before Papa’s death, she and one of her girlfriends had been spying on
me. Her girlfriend knew too much and, out of jealousy or just plain meanness, began
to spread rumors about her after she had moved in with me. It all came to a head when
Mrs. Brittany arrived one day to reveal that somehow her telephone service was getting
nuisance calls. She was furious about it, and I knew that my days as a Brittany girl
were numbered as long as M remained with me.

We might have survived for quite a while, nevertheless, if it weren’t for a nightmare
of mine coming to fruition. M was home, had just taken a shower, and, being upset
with herself and everything else, poured herself a drink at my bar. She was sitting
there in her robe when the door buzzer sounded, and unfortunately, she greeted a first-time
client of mine who had arrived quite early. Things got out of hand, and he went after
her, thinking she was another Brittany girl. She had locked herself in her bedroom
by the time I arrived.

I managed to distract him, but he turned out to be my first and only vicious and despicable
man. When I refused to bring my sister out for his sexual fantasy
ménage à trois
, he hit me. It was the only time any man had ever been violent, but it took only
that one time to drive home the reality of what I was, what I was doing with my life,
and where I would eventually end up.

Nothing reinforced my understanding more than
Mrs. Brittany’s lack of sympathy or compassion. She blamed it all on me, of course,
for taking M into my life in the first place, and then had the audacity to suggest
that maybe I could turn it into an advantage. Her intentions were clear. She wanted
me to develop M as a younger version of myself.

“You’ve exposed her to it. It’s the only way to solve the situation. I know she must
look up to you now. She sees how well you live and must realize she could live just
as well.”

I pretended to consider it, but I felt as if my father had returned from the dead,
gotten into Mrs. Brittany, and wreaked his final revenge. I asked her for a little
time off to think things over, and she gave me a few weeks. I told M we were going
to have a vacation in Paris and called Uncle Alain immediately. He understood exactly
what I was intending and was more than willing to take on the responsibility.

Ironically, M and I had never been closer than we were during those days in Paris.
She loved Uncle Alain and his partner, Maurice, and they took to her immediately,
too. I saw how comfortable she was with them and felt encouraged. I could leave her
there and feel I had done the right thing. I didn’t tell her my plan. I really didn’t
know how I would finally arrange it, but thankfully Uncle Alain was way ahead of me
about it all, proposing a new school for her.

I had been back to Paris many times since I had begun working for Mrs. Brittany, but
it never touched me or opened itself to me as much as it did when M and I toured it
together, sat in cafés, listened to music,
or just walked along the Seine. She tried many times to get me to give her more details
about what my life was like. I held her off with promises to reveal more in time,
but my intention was never to tell her any of it if I could help it.

I knew that when it came time for me to reveal what Uncle Alain had agreed to do—become
M’s guardian and take her in for her final high school years—she would resist and
refuse. I really didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, except that I would
not return to Mrs. Brittany.

And then, late one afternoon, when I was alone at a café, musing about my future and
all that had happened in my life, I felt his presence before I turned to look up and
see him standing there.

“
Bonjour
,” he said.

I was speechless for a moment. “How did you find me?” I asked him.

“You think your Mrs. Brittany is the only one with powerful friends?”

I kept looking at him, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming. He laughed
and sat next to me, ordering a café au lait and then taking my hand.

“Norbert,” I said, nodding and realizing what had happened. “He must have had something
to do with this.”

“
Mais oui
. What are good friends for?”

“Do you have business here in Paris?” I asked him.

“Always, but that’s not what brought me this time.”

“Ah,” I said. “Another free weekend?”

“All my weekends are free now.”

“What are you saying?”

“The merger has dissolved,” he replied with a smile. “The marriage one, I mean. Do
you think there is any chance for us to pick up where we left off, to pretend that
only a day or so has passed?”

“But you know it’s been far more than that, Paul, and you know where I’ve been,” I
said.

The waiter brought his café au lait. He sipped some and nodded. “And I also know that
if I had had any courage back then, you wouldn’t have been where you’ve been and be
where you are now. I don’t blame you. I blame myself.”

I smiled. “Okay. Then I’ll blame you, too,” I said, and he laughed before taking on
the most serious expression I had seen on his face.

“Good, Roxy. That way, we’ll both be able to live with it and go on.” He reached for
my hand, but I held it back.

“All my life, I’ve avoided illusions and fantasies, Paul,” I said.

“Yes, but this isn’t going to be an illusion, and this isn’t a fantasy. This is us
for real. I love you, Roxy. It was the epitome of stupidity to believe I could ignore
it. And I hope it’s the same for you.”

I felt those stubborn tears come into my eyes, tears I had driven back so many different
times for so many different reasons. But I couldn’t hold them back now.

Now I would cry for my father, finally.

And for my mother.

And for myself.

He leaned over to wipe my cheeks and then kiss me.

I gave him my hand.

Paris was lighting up. It was almost as if the whole city had been listening in on
our conversation and wanted to congratulate us and wish us well.

“I have to return to New York,” I said. “And bring a few things to a conclusion.”

“My plane is at your disposal,” he said. “That way, I know you’ll return.”

“I’ll return,” I promised.

Afterward, we walked together on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I recalled my mother
describing her life in Paris when she was a little girl and how she simply loved walking
the streets, watching the people, listening to the laughter and the music that poured
out of cafés or was played by street musicians.

She had said it all made up the heart of what she was.

“In the end,” she’d told me as she brushed my hair and kissed my forehead, “you can’t
deny who you are. You can only embrace it, Roxy. I’m afraid it will take you longer
to realize that, but I have faith that you will.”

“Yes,” I whispered as I held tightly to Paul’s arm and then laid my head against it.

We moved in and out of shadows, but our silence wasn’t born out of fear of our future.
It was born out of hope and love and the knowledge that in the end, you will always
come home and be forever with the people you love if you just stop to listen to the
music in your heart.

Pocket Books
proudly presents

The
Unwelcomed
Child

V.C. Andrews
^®

Available February 2014 from Pocket Books

Turn the page for a preview of
The Unwelcomed Child . . .

Religious icons in gold with dark red backgrounds or in silver and pewter hung on
almost every wall in my grandparents’ modest two-story Queen Anne home just outside
the hamlet of Hurley Lake, New York. They were especially prominent in my small bedroom
at the rear of the house. Almost every year, my grandmother added another one on my
walls, pounding the small nails to hang them on as if she thought she was pounding
them into my very soul.

I wouldn’t have complained, even if I could. Almost anything dressed up the room,
especially anything with any color. It had dull gray-brown walls in desperate need
of a new paint job or wallpaper, a saucer-shaped ceiling light fixture with a weak
bulb to save on electricity, and a standing lamp on a brass pole with an anemic yellowing
white shade that I had to use for my desk lamp. The floor was charcoal-painted cement
with a six-by-eight well-worn olive-green area rug vacuumed to the point where the
floor showed through in some places. The rug had been in the living room when my grandparents
first bought the house, now close to thirty-five years ago.

It was easy to see that my room was not meant to be a bedroom. There was no window.
The only fresh air came from a vent near the ceiling and the open doorway. The door
had been removed fifteen years ago so that my grandmother could look in to see what
I was doing anytime she wanted. The room was originally designed to be a storage room.
The holes in the walls where the shelves were once attached were still there. The
room confirmed the view I had of myself. I always felt as if I had been placed in
storage in this house.

However, regardless of what it was and what it had been, the room had to be kept as
immaculate as any other. My grandmother was fully convinced that cleanliness was next
to godliness and was fond of chanting it at me whenever she ordered me to polish or
wash anything. She had that as one of her needlework sayings framed and hung on the
hallway wall just outside my room. When I was much younger and we walked past it together,
she would frequently pause in front of it, touch it, and recite it, getting me to
repeat it. It was also all right for me to touch the religious icons as long as when
I touched them, I did so with reverence and said a silent prayer for my own troubled
soul. If I left even the smallest smudge, I was sent to my room without dinner. From
an early age, I realized that the dirt I left was somehow dirtier than any my grandparents
left.

As soon as I was able to handle a mop and a rag, mix soap and water properly, and
put some muscle behind scrubbing, I was made to clean my own room
first thing every morning. I never cleaned it well enough for my grandmother’s liking.
She had eagle eyes when it came to a spot of dirt or a new stain and pounced on it
with as much glee as a hawk has when it pounces on a baby squirrel. She made me feel
as if I was deliberately missing the spot, as if being dirty was part of my very nature.