Echoes in the Walls 1


I SAT AT my computer desk by the window of my upstairs bedroom facing the front lawn, the walkway, and the crescent driveway to Wyndemere House that exited onto Lakeview Drive. For the past few minutes, I hadn’t had a single thought. The snowfall had hypnotized me. Every ten minutes or so, it fell in larger flakes that looked more like shavings from a bar of soap. From the way the leafless trees swayed, I could see that the December wind had picked up, too, and I knew it had to be very cold, because it blew in over Lake Wyndemere, a five-mile-long lake that our property abutted on the border between New York and Massachusetts.

I heard the familiar and expected growling sound of the Davenports’ tractor. It seemed to vibrate the walls and floors, even in a house as large as this. I gazed down and to my left to see Mr. Stark, the estate manager, come around the left corner of the mansion to plow the driveway. His clothes glistened with the moist flakes that clung to his hat, coat, and pants, causing him to resemble a polar bear at the North Pole. Poking out from under his hat and between his earmuffs, his face was the color of a ripe turnip. Later, I might tease him and call him Rudolph the Red-Nosed Polar Bear.

It had been snowing all morning and now was at its heaviest, fulfilling the weatherman’s weeklong promise of a white Christmas. At this hour, surely seven or eight inches had already accumulated. I could barely distinguish the driveway or Lakeview Drive. The sticky snow, which Mr. Stark called the worst kind because it was so heavy, had already turned the hedges into crouching ghosts and made the leafless trees look like gawking white chalk skeletons. Not a car had gone by during the entire time I had been sitting here watching the storm and studying how the flakes struck my windows and immediately changed into tears zigzagging across and down. To me, it was as if the mansion was having a fresh cry. With its history, it had so many reasons for grieving periodically. Lately, I felt like crying along with it.

“We’re in for it,” Mr. Stark had told me earlier when I saw him having a mug of coffee with my mother in the kitchen. The snow had just begun in earnest. He was leaning against the counter and clutching his mug between his thick fingers as if he was already shivering. He wore a brownish-white cable-knit sweater with its turtleneck collar, which my mother had bought him on his sixtieth birthday. As usual, when he was inside the mansion, he had pushed the sleeves up over his thick, muscular forearms. My mother said he reminded her of one of the Clancy Brothers, her favorite Irish singing group.

“Only he can’t carry a note across the room,” she said in front of him. He wasn’t insulted. Instead, he smiled with delight at being ragged, especially by her. My mother often had the effect of turning him into a little boy again. His eyes would warm, and the sternness in his face would melt and disappear. Years would fall away like red and yellow November leaves.

“Who’d know about that better than your mother?” he asked me, nodding as if he wanted to convince me and keep me from quickly coming to his defense, which I often did. “Someone who herself sings like a canary.”

“And didn’t earn enough to build a canary’s nest doing so, thank you,” she said.

My mother was whipping up pancake batter. She had her raven-black hair, the same color as mine, pinned back with two thick ivory combs, and she wore a plum-colored cardigan, a white blouse, and matching plum slacks. It wasn’t ever possible to catch my mother looking sloppy or half dressed once she had stepped out of her room. She thought that was disrespecting not only yourself but also those who couldn’t avoid seeing you. I saw she had risen earlier to set the table, something I would usually help her and Mrs. Marlene do. I certainly should have been helping this morning.

Mrs. Marlene, who had been in charge of the kitchen and meals for as long as I could remember, was off on holiday visiting relatives, and my mother had assumed all her duties, beginning with preparing today’s breakfast for my father, Dr. Davenport; my half brother, Ryder; my half sister, Samantha; and myself. Mr. Stark would eat before us so he could get to work.

Seeing the bed tray set out on the counter, I knew my mother would bring Ryder his breakfast this morning. Over a month now since his return from the hospital and therapy, it was no longer necessary for her or anyone to do that. He was able to get around the mansion on his own quite well, although he rarely went wandering about these days. But he didn’t need any special nursing care. My mother enjoyed spoiling him, though. She always had.

“In for what?” I asked, yawning and stretching.

I was still in my lavender-pink matching robe and slippers, an early Christmas gift from my mother because she said my old set was “knackered,” which was her British expression for something terribly worn out. She clung to so many expressions like that, expressions that were among the few things that brought a hint of a smile to Dr. Davenport’s face nowadays. His smile would start with a playful light in his sterling-gray eyes, start to ripple down his firmly sculpted cheeks, and then stop and sink back inside to wherever uncompleted smiles lived in frustration. I was sure it was getting crowded there. Even Christmas couldn’t free what depression had chained to his walls of sorrow.

My mother always said “Happy Christmas” rather than “Merry Christmas,” too. It was her way of clinging to her youth, to the life she had left in Guildford, England, when she came to America to become a professional singer, now well over twenty years ago. She had no real traveling money and had to work as a maid on an ocean liner to get “across the pond.” It was a decision that had estranged her from her father, who had forbidden it and had warned that if she left, she would be ostracized by her family.

“Step out of that door and never come back” were words still resonating even after all these years. But she was very determined, defiant, and full of expectations planted in her mind by friends, family, and most influentially her high school music teacher, expectations that wilted even before the blush had left her ambitions.

I often wondered where big dreams for your future went when they died. Was there a cemetery in the sky with big tombs to house Movie Star, Singing Star, Pianist, Baseball Player, Football Player, Doctor or Lawyer, and even Astronaut, all the ambitions people had for themselves, ambitions that never had materialized?

What would be the name on my tomb of dreams? I could sing but not half as well as my mother. I could dance better than most my age, but I didn’t see myself doing it professionally. I didn’t want to be an actor, either. Nothing in the world of entertainment held any promise as it did for so many of my classmates. I tolerated science and math, sometimes enjoyed history, and did love to read. However, right now, I saw no career for myself as a writer or a teacher, a doctor or a lawyer.

I wasn’t supposed to worry too much about it yet. Few my age had specific vocational goals or even seriously thought about it until we were confronted by college plans or post–high school life, but I couldn’t help wondering what was out there for me and why I didn’t care or wasn’t, like some of my friends, full of glorious images of myself splashed on the covers of magazines or visions of myself being rich and living in my own beautiful home. The cover of my magazine, Fern’s Magazine, was stark white, with a big black question mark at the center.

If you had no ambitions, were you like a kite whose string was broken and was now vulnerable to the frivolous wind?

It was certainly how I felt . . . aimlessly gliding through the days, the weeks, the months since it had all happened, that terrible day, that terrible storm that twisted my heart into a knot.

Would it ever unravel?

“Probably a foot or more of snow by evening,” Mr. Stark now predicted, to explain why we were in for it. “And with this wind, drifts that will mount up higher than a twenty-five-hand horse before it’s over.”

“Oh, go on with yourself, frightening the girl with the unbelievable,” my mother said, spinning around on him. She was always protecting me these days, even against horrendous images. “There’s no such horse. Twenty-five hands. Pure poppycock.”

“Yes, there is,” Mr. Stark insisted. “I read about him in the Guinness World Record Book.”

“You were drinking your second or third pint of Guinness, you mean.” She waved the air between them as if she could push his words away. “Nevertheless, after you eat something, you bundle up out there, George Stark,” my mother warned him with her eyes full of reprimand. “That sweater is not enough today.”

Mr. Stark had been working at Wyndemere since long before my mother arrived, and whenever she was in the mood to tell me about her early days and my birth, she admitted she had needed his daughter Cathy’s help caring for me as well as caring for Ryder when I was born nearly three years after him. For over twenty years, Mr. Stark was her “rock-solid tree, never wavering no matter how strong the wind.”

There was almost twenty years’ difference in age between them, but it didn’t matter how old Mr. Stark was. My mother still treated him as if he was one of her wards, and he usually followed her orders. Whenever he didn’t do that, like dressing appropriately for very cold weather, she would bawl him out until he raised his hands in surrender and did whatever she had told him to do. For most of my life, he and Cathy, who had become a nurse working in the hospital where Dr. Davenport was head of cardiology, my mother, and Mrs. Marlene were really the only family I had.

Now, because of the Revelations, Dr. Davenport’s and my mother’s confessions, I finally had a father as well as a half sister and a half brother. That meant Ryder’s and Samantha’s paternal grandparents, long gone, were mine as well. What they had inherited from them, I had inherited. I was a member of the family that owned Wyndemere, the seventeen-bedroom house and the grounds of rolling hills and trees that seemed to go on forever. There was a pool and a tennis court and a barn for equipment. The landscaping was elaborate enough to require a dozen grounds people. I knew many girls my age would be envious of me because of the size of my room, the ballroom, and the game room, but I had good reason to wish the truth of my birth had remained a deeply buried secret.

Who would be better off not knowing how she had come into this world?

Me, that’s who.

I turned from the window of tears when I heard Samantha come into my bedroom. Since Dr. Davenport’s confession that he was indeed my father and since his subsequent divorce of his second wife, Bea, their daughter, Samantha, had drawn much closer to me and dependent on me, even though I knew she was jealous of me as well. I still had a mother, and now I had a father. Everyone, including myself, had yet to openly acknowledge that I had a brother, too, Samantha the most reluctant.

Contrary to what most mothers would want in a divorce settlement regarding their children, Bea requested only holiday visits, and she often missed those, even missed Samantha’s most recent birthday because she was on a fashion-buying excursion in Milan, Italy. We already knew she wasn’t coming on Christmas, and Samantha wouldn’t be joining her to celebrate the holidays. Bea was in London and had sent Samantha’s gifts two weeks ago, probably when it was most convenient for her.

When so many gifts arrived, my mother said, “The woman is trying to buy off her conscience.”

I understood why my mother thought Bea should feel guilty. These were the most important years for a mother and a daughter, years that were supposed to draw them closer, not further apart. Like most girls in the eighth grade, Samantha was quite into boys, and the rippling emotions her hormones were stirring brought a daily crisis of one sort or another. I remembered well when it had happened to me, but at least I had my mother to listen to me and advise me.

Especially these days, the moment Samantha’s eyes opened every morning, she was gasping with questions about herself. Sometimes one would be half formed and put on pause because she had fallen asleep before she had explained fully what she wanted to know. The next day, she’d come into my room to finish her question or remind me of something that had been troubling her like a bad itch.

“Should my breasts ache when I get my period? Do boys pretend not to see you so they can bump into you and touch you on your behind? Do boys really kiss you on the nipples when you make love? Why do they call it an orgasm? It’s such an ‘ugh’ word. Pictures of organs are so ugly.”

She relied on me more and more for insights about sex and relationships, not that I was any sort of expert. I had no special boyfriend and had yet to go on a single date this school year. According to what I heard some of the boys had said about me after I turned two down, I was supposedly too distracted with myself to keep their interest anyway. Later I heard that more than one had said going out with me would be like going out with someone who was deaf and dumb. To kiss me would be like kissing a mannequin. I knew they were embarrassed that they had asked me and been rejected. Their egos were bruised, but what they had said about me wasn’t all that far from the truth. I really wished Samantha wouldn’t come to me with questions about romance and sex. It stirred up my own longings.

I had retreated to my room right after breakfast. Before the snow mounted too high, Mr. Stark was going to drive Dr. Davenport to the hospital in his four-by-four truck, which he claimed could travel through an avalanche. My mother was worried for both of them, but Dr. Davenport said that he had to put a stent in someone’s artery. He hated losing a patient, but “it would be doubly devastating to lose someone close to Christmas.”

Despite that, I knew he was a little nervous about getting to the hospital in this storm. He was unusually quiet at breakfast. It was a winter storm that had taken the life of his first wife. The first snowfall surely revived the terrible memories. It had for every year since.

He had barely acknowledged my mother when she returned from bringing Ryder his breakfast, happy to say that he appeared to have a good appetite this morning. On the other hand, I shouldn’t have been surprised at Dr. Davenport’s lack of a joyful reaction to such good news. Smiles, much less laughter, had become as rare as moon rocks for everyone in Wyndemere, and, I suppose, for good reason.

It had been months since my half brother Ryder’s near drowning in Lake Wyndemere. He and I had been caught in a vicious spring storm when we were in one of the Davenports’ rowboats. We were battling to return to the dock when Ryder fell out. Dr. Davenport’s driver, Parker Thomson, swam to us and brought Ryder up. The storm was still raging. It took a while for Parker to get to him and get him back to the dock to be resuscitated.

Paramedics arrived at the estate as quickly as they could and then took Ryder off in an ambulance to the hospital, where he was given the best follow-up treatment by one of Dr. Davenport’s good friends, Dr. Malisorf, a neurologist. He and his wife had been to dinner at Wyndemere often, and their son was friends with Ryder. I was sure it was like caring for his own child. Ryder received the best possible treatment. No one could blame the aftermath on that.

We all learned that Ryder’s subsequent health problem came about because he had suffered brain hypoxia. Not counting Samantha, I was the last to be told the devastating news. His brain had been denied oxygen a little too long, and some damage had been done. It had affected his memory most of all.

Consequently, although he was physically fine now, he was still very much a stranger in his own home, and I remained quite a stranger to him, even after all this time and continual therapy. I had heard the psychotherapist, Dr. Seymour, who attended him twice a week, compare his condition to Alzheimer’s, but he’d thankfully added that he believed Ryder would enjoy considerable recovery. I wanted so to believe him, but how much recovery Ryder really would enjoy remained, as Shakespeare had written and my mother would often quote, “in the womb of time.”

I had rushed through breakfast this morning and was almost finished before my father, who was mentally already in his operating room. That didn’t matter. When he was like that, it was useless asking him questions. You’d have to repeat them, and his answers were usually incomplete, his thoughts hanging in the air. If I was too insistent, my mother would flash one of her not so subtle looks, warning me not to annoy him. But maybe my father wasn’t thinking about his upcoming cardiac procedure or occupied with thoughts of his patient; maybe he was swimming through his muddled and troubling family history instead, because it was about to be Christmas, and holidays meant you thought most about your family.

Why shouldn’t I believe that was troubling him? No one was haunted in this house as much as my father was. Every corner welcomed the shadow of some sad memory, like the loss of his little sister, Holly, because of a heart problem. My mother said that was probably what most drove him to become the specialist he was.

Ironically, unlike Ryder, who had good reasons to be the exact opposite because of his continuous physical improvements, I didn’t have a good appetite this morning. I ate as little as I could, which was something my mother was constantly criticizing. We were on our holiday break. Joyful tunes were supposed to be floating around us instead of the imagined deep echoes of ghostlike footsteps and doors opening and closing in unoccupied rooms. Surprises in decorative boxes awaited us on Christmas morning beneath the twelve-foot-high Christmas tree Mr. Stark had brought into the living room, with its neoclassical sofas, chairs, and tables.

My mother, Mrs. Marlene, Samantha, and I had decorated it. Ryder had been brought down to watch, but he had fallen asleep in his chair despite Samantha’s incessant chattering, or maybe because of it. We were still hoping to have a holiday dinner; however, as always, anything we did together was totally dependent on Dr. Davenport’s schedule. His patients seemed always to have emergencies. When I voiced my skepticism, my mother quickly reminded me that he was the doctor for life-and-death moments.

Despite that, I was often convinced that he had invented emergencies to justify his frequent absences. Holiday happiness especially was locked up along with most of his happier memories in trunks, cartons, and armoires stored in the attic. Something that had once brought such pride and joy, like a picture of Ryder in his baseball uniform or receiving an academic award, was painful for us all to behold now but far more so for Dr. Davenport. Surely, every time he returned from the hospital, the dark-gray stone-faced house with its louvered vinyl black shutters, towering brick chimneys, and gargoyles replicating those on Notre Dame in Paris reminded him of the tragedy that awaited him within.

I knew that was how I often felt returning from school. Parker drove Samantha and me to and fro when he didn’t have to drive Dr. Davenport anywhere; otherwise, we’d go on the school bus, which we boarded just outside our driveway. Samantha hated that. She’d have to mingle with the less fortunate.

The moment Parker stopped in the driveway, Samantha would burst out of the Davenport limousine and rush to the front door, eager to get up to Ryder’s room first and fill his ears with her school stories, even though it was obvious that they were of little interest to him. I would get out of the car slowly, even reluctantly. Parker would nod, understanding why I was not anxious to face the disturbing reality inside. I hated how Ryder often looked at me with dead eyes.

“What’s happened now, Samantha?” I asked, frowning at the way she had burst in on me this morning, not that my doing so would change her behavior. I looked down at the magazine in my lap to show her I wasn’t really that interested in what she had come to tell me. She could easily exhaust anyone, and sometimes, before her mother had moved out, I didn’t blame Bea for avoiding her every chance she had.

Samantha was much more dramatic at thirteen than I ever was. Everything was a crisis. Her coffee-bean-brown eyes were almost always wide and flooded with some emotion stretched to its breaking point. If she was sad, she was wretched; if she was happy, she was ecstatic. And if she was disappointed, she was sick with frustration. There was no middle ground for my half sister. A boy who smiled at her was either dreamy or disgustingly ugly. Her teachers were usually unfair, resented her for being rich, or thought, as my mother might say, that she was the cat’s meow. I often thought that would have to be an alley cat.

Over time, I had developed immunity to her reactions, taking everything she said with “a grain of salt.” My mother, who could have been a college professor, told me that expression came from the idea that a grain of salt was an antidote for poison. Of course, that wasn’t true, but too often something Samantha said was poison to me.

“Don’t think that if you took a grain of salt, you could swallow arsenic,” my mother jokingly warned, back in the days when everyone would make jokes.

This morning, after breakfast, even though she couldn’t go anywhere because of the snowstorm, Samantha had changed into her new cobalt-blue jumper and leggings with a pair of fur-lined shoe boots so she could parade through the mansion like some tween model in an upscale department store. Yesterday she had gone to her hairstylist and had her dark brown hair trimmed into short sides and a long top pompadour. Two of her girlfriends had the same hairstyle, so she wanted it, and especially these days, whatever Samantha wanted, Samantha got.

She did look older in her new hairdo. Her body was maturing faster than mine had at her age. She had real cleavage and was already a year past her first period. Her legs and her curvy rear end made her look even more mature. She was always talking to me about virginity, curling her lips as if it was a disease when she pronounced the word.

Apparently, there was a group of girls in her class who were titillated with the idea of losing theirs simultaneously, maybe at a special house party. In their way of thinking, it was like an initiation ceremony for adulthood. Something magical would happen, and the mantle of childhood would be lifted away. All their senses would heighten. They especially would see and hear boys differently, and everyone who saw them would immediately stop treating them as adolescents or, worse, as children.

I had done my best to convince her otherwise, explaining that some of the most promiscuous girls I knew in my tenth-grade class, and even juniors and seniors, were quite immature, but she refused to believe it and especially refused to believe that I was still a virgin.

“You’re like most adults,” she accused in a huff. “You lie to keep us from doing what we want to do, what you already have done.”

Sometimes she infuriated me so much that I felt like going into her bathroom when she was taking one of her bubble baths, which her mother had convinced her were important for keeping yourself young and attractive, and pushing her head down under the water until there were no more bubbles. Maybe because of the divorce, Dr. Davenport was reluctant about chastising her or punishing her for almost anything she had done, whether it was being nasty to the servants, especially Mrs. Marlene, or getting into trouble in school.

Whoever had come up with the expression spoiled rotten anticipated Samantha Davenport. The little girl who once daintily followed me about, taking great care not to upset me or my mother so we’d let her tag along, had undergone a makeover since what we called the Revelations had occurred and since her parents’ resulting divorce and Ryder’s troubles.

Occasionally, Dr. Seymour would whisper some excuse for her behavior to me, but I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me why she had changed. When your mother treats you with indifference and your father seems to be more interested in your siblings, you can’t help but rage at everyone and everything and act out for attention. I simply wasn’t in the mood to be sympathetic and understanding, especially today, a day before Christmas, which should have meant as much to Ryder as the rest of us but would be just another empty day to him, another day filled with blank pages on which he surely thought nothing wonderful was promised to be written.

Yes, I understood that under it all, Samantha was angrier than she was hurt, maybe even angrier at the world than I was. I was just far better at hiding it or better at not taking it out on others. I transferred my frustrations into something like a punishing fast walk around a quarter of the lake and back, my heels digging into the earth and gravel, my arms pumping up and down like an oil-rig drill. My whole body would ache when I was done. I didn’t know if it made any sense to rage at nature, but I often ranted at the lake as if it were a living thing and it had betrayed us, betrayed Ryder.

“Ryder just said my name when he saw me,” Samantha said, gloating. “I didn’t have to remind him who I was. He even called me ‘Sam the bird,’ just like he used to. Remember?”

I looked up from the magazine in my lap quickly. Surely, she was just saying that to rile me. Ryder had yet to pronounce my name on his own; he had yet to have that look in his eyes that told me he remembered who I was and what we had once meant to each other. “It’s Fern,” I would tell him whenever he looked at me with that lost expression. He would nod, but there was nothing to indicate my name had opened a closed door or pulled back a dark curtain, and this after countless hours of conversation carefully guided by my father’s and Dr. Seymour’s instructions.

Especially during the first few weeks, we were told exactly what to say and what not to say to Ryder and how to behave with him so as never to cause him to feel frustrated and depressed, but it was frustrating for me and at times depressed me so much that I didn’t want to talk to anyone, even him. I avoided the opportunities.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Ryder had never looked at her with any special recognition and always had to be reminded who she was, something she was more than happy to do.

She smiled and gleefully performed a pirouette as she came farther into my room. She had been given ballet lessons but had quit; she had also been given piano lessons and had quit. She quit her private art lessons as well. She had the attention span of a fruit fly. My mother once told me Samantha would go through the British Museum in London in less than five minutes and claim she had seen everything worth seeing.

Samantha paused and began roughly handling my dolls on my bottom bookshelf. I had never lost or thrown away one of them since I was two. I had only five dolls, but Samantha had thirty or forty scattered about her walk-in closet and some buried in one of her toy chests. She tried to twist the head of one of mine, and I screamed at her to put it down.

“It doesn’t move. You’ll break it!”

“Sorry,” she said, tossing it back onto the shelf indifferently. “I don’t know why you care so much about these silly dolls now. You’re too old for them.”

“Everything I have has some meaning for me. That doesn’t disappear because you get older. They’re special maybe because I didn’t have as much growing up as some people had around here.”

Of course, Samantha had been old enough to know the little I did have, not only compared with her but compared with other girls my age. Before the Revelations, my mother and I lived in what was known as the help’s quarters at the rear of the mansion, where there were two small bedrooms and a small kitchen, all the furniture and appliances looking like they were hastily thrown together from some secondhand thrift shop.

We didn’t start our life at Wyndemere there, but we were eventually relegated to it. After I reached the age when I could be left alone, Samantha’s mother, Bea, discouraged me from being in the main house and specifically forbade me to use the front entrance. The rule about the front entrance was set in stone for my mother as well. When returning to Wyndemere from anywhere, my mother and I had to use the side entrance where deliveries were made. In those days, Dr. Davenport did not put up much resistance to whatever Bea wanted and rarely came to my defense or even my mother’s.

Neither I nor Ryder ever liked Bea. He never missed an opportunity to disrespect her, and our father often chastised him for that whenever Bea complained to him about Ryder’s behavior. How ironic and sad it was now that Ryder couldn’t appreciate Bea’s fury at learning that Dr. Davenport was my real father and then see and appreciate their subsequent divorce months afterward. Ryder was finally rid of her, as was I, but for him, it had come too late. If he couldn’t remember her, he surely wasn’t even aware she was gone. My references to her in his presence were few and far between, as my father had ordered. Actually, I wasn’t even supposed to mention her name. When I looked like that bothered me, my father told Dr. Seymour.

Taking me aside one day after one of his sessions with Ryder, Dr. Seymour told me that when people were battling to regain their memory, they especially avoided unpleasant recollections.

“It’s the mind protecting itself,” he said. “It blocks unpleasant memories. He’ll recall her when he’s ready to recall her, when he can best handle it.”

I wanted to say that might be true for Ryder’s remembrances of his stepmother, but surely that wasn’t true for his memories regarding me. Why wasn’t he remembering me—and fondly, too? He was seeing me daily in the mansion, and he was hearing my voice repeatedly when he was present and I was talking to my mother or Mrs. Marlene. Of course, I didn’t ask that, despite how much I wanted to. What he was saying about Bea made great sense, though. It helped me understand why he had no recollection of his near drowning, either.

When the Revelations occurred almost immediately after Ryder’s near drowning, Dr. Davenport had insisted that my mother and I be moved back into the main house, where she and I had once shared a bedroom. Now, because I was older, I had my own. Dr. Davenport’s willingness finally to accept his full responsibility was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as Mrs. Marlene would say. Because of what had been developing between Ryder and myself, both my mother and Dr. Davenport had decided the truth could no longer be kept hidden under the shadows in Wyndemere. It was time to disclose another Wyndemere secret.

Nevertheless, Bea thought she had been played for a fool. How could he have kept my mother right under her feet all this time? How could he have still employed the woman he had slept with and impregnated, “breathing down my neck and surely hiding her smiles”?

She knew that Dr. Davenport and his first wife, Samantha, had brought my mother here to serve as an in vitro surrogate mother for Ryder. My mother was desperate for the money after failing to earn enough singing. She was tired of being a waitress and accepted the offer rather than head back to England, where her father would gloat. Bea tolerated that fact by putting most of the blame and embarrassment on Dr. Davenport’s first wife, ironically accusing her of being the self-centered one, afraid to get pregnant and spoil “her dainty little figure.” From Bea, I learned that you could be jealous of a dead person.

Bea’s one concession was to agree to name their daughter after Dr. Davenport’s first wife. Perhaps she had realized that was a demand that Dr. Davenport would not give up, along with other memories and pictures of his first, more beautiful wife that he kept in his home office.

However, whenever she could, Bea ridiculed Dr. Davenport’s first wife’s memory in front of Ryder and Dr. Davenport, as well as my mother. She pronounced her own daughter’s name as if it was a profanity, clenching her teeth. I was too young to remember how it had all begun, of course, but my mother explained that before I was born, she had continued to live in the main house after Samantha’s tragic car accident one winter day. When Ryder was just four years old, Dr. Davenport remarried, having chosen Bea, who my mother said was selected more for social and professional reasons than romantic ones. So my mother remained as his nanny.

And then, when Bea gave birth to Samantha, my mother was kept on as a nanny for both Davenport children, but as soon as Bea decided that Samantha no longer needed my mother day and night, we were ordered to move into the help’s quarters, and my mother became officially the house manager more than anything else. That way, Bea could blame her for anything that went wrong.

Now, Samantha said, “I’m not lying. He knew who I was. I just came from Ryder’s room.” She was determined to get one up on me. “I was going to bring his breakfast tray down.”

“Sure you were,” I said. “You don’t even pick up after yourself in your own room. One of the maids told my mother that when she cleaned your room last week, she found a plate with some cookies on it under your bed, where you probably kicked it a week ago. There were ants or roaches or something crawling everywhere.”

“There were not!” she cried, grimacing. She thought a moment and then, stamping her foot, added, “I want a new bed now.”

That made me laugh. “The doctor bought you all new furniture two months ago because you said your furniture was too babyish.”

“It was. I was embarrassed to invite anyone over.”

She looked around my room, never sure if she should be jealous or not. Everything in it was as it had been here for decades, except for the mattress, which had been replaced just before I was moved back to the main house. I had no complaints. The classic old set was a dark oak Churchill five-piece poster bedroom set that Dr. Davenport’s mother had bought. It was a valuable antique now. The furniture in most of the mansion’s seventeen bedrooms hardly had been used. Overnight guests were never frequent. Compared with the much smaller spartan bedroom I had in the help’s quarters, my room looked as if it had been created for a princess, at least to me.

Whenever I told Samantha that, she gazed around, wondering what she was missing, what I had that she didn’t. Surely, there was something. She thought that way because she took everything she had for granted and always thought she was a princess.

“We’ll see what happens when I tell my father about the bugs,” Samantha said. “Emma should have told me about the creepy-crawlers.”

“I’ve told you many times, Samantha. You call her my mother or you call her Ms. Corey. It’s not respectful for you to call her Emma.”

She shrugged. “She never complains when I do.” She ran her finger over the bottom right post on my bed and then looked at the tip of it as if she expected to see dust. “Some of my friends think it’s funny that my half sister’s mother is my maid.”

“She’s far more than your maid, Samantha. Most of your life, she’s been more of your mother than your own self-centered real mother. That’s what you should tell your snobby friends, and if I ever hear them say something like that . . .”

“You won’t, you won’t. Don’t have heart failure,” she said quickly.

Her expression of fear changed quickly to a sly smile. I never liked it, because whenever she had that expression on her face, I was reminded of Bea pouncing on me for one thing or another. It was gleeful and full of “wicked sauce,” as Mrs. Marlene might say.

“I have a secret,” she said, “but you have to swear not to tell your mother or my father.”

“People who swear to things like that usually get themselves into trouble,” I replied, and looked at my magazine to turn a page. Samantha had no tolerance for being ignored. I knew she was fuming, with bees buzzing madly in her stomach.

“You’ll get Ryder in trouble, too,” she warned.

There wasn’t anything better she could say to get my interest.

“Why?”

“I have to be sure you don’t tell. I don’t want to get into trouble.” She focused her eyes sharply on me. It was like playing poker. Who would give in first?

“Why should you?”

She looked away, thinking.

I held my cards.

“I did a sneaky thing,” she confessed.

“Did it hurt someone?”

“No,” she said.

I shrugged. “So there’s probably nothing to tell anyone.”

I looked down again, but I wasn’t reading anything. I was waiting.

“When everyone’s downstairs, I peek in on Ryder sometimes.”

“What does ‘peek in’ mean?”

“I open his door a little more so I can see him. He doesn’t know I’m there. I’m very good at it,” she added, as if that really was an accomplishment.

“And? So what?”

“I saw him doing things.”

Now I was holding my breath. The little demon, I thought. “What sort of things?”

“He was completely undressed, and he was fondling himself. He did it until something happened,” she added. “You know what I mean,” she said with her licentious little smile.

I felt like I had been slapped sharply across my face.

“That’s disgusting!” I screamed, and threw the magazine at her. “Spying like that on your own brother who can’t help himself. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve heard. If you ever do that again . . .”

“I won’t,” she moaned, and started to back away, really frightened of me.

I stood up and took a step toward her. I did feel like pummeling her. “If I even smell that you’ve told one of your nympho friends any of that, I’ll break your neck and dump your body in the lake at night, and no one will know,” I said in my most threatening tone. I had my mother’s violet eyes, and I could look forbidding whenever I had to.

Samantha paled as if she was seconds away from fainting. Backing up faster and close to tears, she said, “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Why would I want to know that?”

“Because when he was doing it, he had that picture of you in the silver frame in his other hand,” she said.

Then she turned and ran out of my room.

I thought she had taken all the air out with her.