Daughter of Darkness (2 page)

Mrs. Fennel didn’t have to raise her voice above a whisper to indicate her displeasure, either, and that indication was enough to move a herd of elephants. It was as if the air were filled with static and your ears were drowning in heartbeats that resembled the sound of thundering wild beasts.

Marla didn’t dare protest or even appear upset when Mrs. Fennel came looking for her in my room. She avoided Mrs. Fennel’s eyes just the way any of us would
and hurried to her room, chanting, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It was as if she were trying to memorize it.

Mrs. Fennel hated that word. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” she would say. “Sorry doesn’t mend fences well. Something broken, something ruined, can’t be restored to what it was with an ‘I’m sorry.’”

I certainly wasn’t going to say “I’m sorry” to Ava. I had just inserted my iPod into the player, speaker, and charger, and it had barely begun to play. I had it so low I didn’t think I needed to listen on my earphones, so I was genuinely surprised when she burst in on me. She frightened me, but as soon as I settled down, I was more annoyed than afraid. She looked half-asleep, even though it was nearly noon. Of course, I knew why.

Almost always, whenever Ava slept this late or took naps, so did Daddy. My recollections of my oldest sister, Brianna, were the same. Anyone would wonder how she could have heard anything through our walls when she fell into that comalike sleep, but what amazed me about both my sisters and my father was the sensitivity of their hearing. I really believed my father and my sisters when they were older could hear a pin drop, even when they slept deeply. It was as if they had a sixth sense, especially for danger. Would I inherit the same power? I hadn’t yet.

In movies and on television, when someone’s dog suddenly growls or barks, the person pauses to listen and doesn’t hear anything but always in a dire whisper asks the dog, “What is it, boy? What’s out there?” Usually, it turns out to be something evil.

I had seen Daddy do that many times. He would suddenly stop reading or looking at something and listen
harder. His ears didn’t go up, and he didn’t growl, but his face changed into a dark, concerned expression. His eyes grew beady, and he moved his nostrils as though he were sniffing for some threatening scent. It was not fear, exactly. I had never seen him afraid of anything. I suppose it was more like suddenly being extra cautious.

Once, even though none of us was saying anything, he held up his hand and said, “Quiet.” It was as if we were thinking too loudly.

My heart began to pound. Brianna’s face mimicked his, and everyone froze. After a moment or so, Daddy nodded, relieved and satisfied, and returned to what he was reading. Brianna looked relieved and satisfied, too. I looked at Ava to see if she wanted an explanation as much as I did, but she didn’t, or if she did, she was too frightened to ask. Ava was seven then, and I was four. Marla had not yet been born and brought to live with us.

If I asked what was wrong, why everyone looked so worried, Ava and Brianna would glance at me and then look to Daddy, who would simply shake his head and return to what he was reading.

Even at that young age, being so in the dark at times when it concerned my family made me feel like a total outsider, a visitor rather than another daughter. Eventually, I realized that something or someone was always pursuing us. I didn’t know what or who it was yet, but, like all the information I was given, it would come when Daddy thought I was ready for it to come.

There were secrets sleeping in every shadow, secrets cloaked in whispers, and secrets implied in glances. Sometimes I thought they were like mold in the walls.
Not that we celebrated it, but I dreamed of a Christmas with packages of secrets under the tree, all addressed to me. All I had to do was open each one, and I’d learn the answers.

“Creepers, Ava,” I said now in a mild protest, “I can barely hear the music.”

“Stop thinking of only yourself,” she snapped. Her eyes suddenly came alive, lost their sleepiness, and were luminous. It was as if matches had ignited behind them. Even her cheeks turned crimson. Ava could never be ugly, but more and more lately, I saw movements and incremental changes in her features that made them harder whenever she was upset.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. I don’t know why no one else sees how selfish you can be. I was never that selfish when I was your age. You don’t think of our family first. You think of yourself first.”

I shook my head. Tears filled my eyes. In this house, there was no greater sin than selfishness. “That’s not true!” I protested loudly.

Her eyes widened again. “Quiet, you fool. If you wake Daddy…”

“Okay, okay,” I said, and shut off the iPod. I never had woken Daddy. None of us had, but the threat of his and Mrs. Fennel’s anger should I do so was quite enough to make me tremble.

Daddy would have to sleep nearly the entire day at least once a month. Most of the time on those days, he didn’t even come to dinner. When I was much younger and asked Mrs. Fennel about it, my nanny cryptically
replied, “Digestion.” She would say nothing more, and one look from her told me not to ask any more questions about it. She hated my questions anyway.

One time, she snapped at me and said, “Your questions buzz around my ears like annoying flies.” She waved her hand near her head as if they were really there.

Brianna would be just as disturbed with my questions and either ignore me or say, “Stop pestering me. You’ll know when you know. Try to be more like Ava. Be patient.”

Despite how much Brianna watched over me when I was very young, I never had a close relationship with her. I thought I was closer to Ava, although getting close to her wasn’t easy, either. With Brianna, at least I could blame it on age. She was too many years older than I was.

One day, she simply was no longer home. The way Mrs. Fennel, Daddy, and Ava behaved led me to believe there was nothing bad about her leaving even though it was so sudden, at least for me. On the contrary, they were pleased, happy for her. Of course, I wondered where she had gone and when she would return.

“She won’t return. She has gone to fulfill her destiny,” Mrs. Fennel told me.

When I asked Daddy why Brianna wouldn’t return, he said, “Mrs. Fennel has already told you, Lorelei. There is nothing more for you to know right now. Just be as happy for her as we are.”

How could I be happy for her if I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing? What did that mean, “fulfill her destiny”? Would I have the same destiny to
fulfill? And at the same age? Would Ava? Where Brianna was remained a mystery even to this day and, like other questions, was still not to be pursued, even though it was always on the tip of my tongue to ask. Less than a year later, Marla was brought to live with us, and I had a little sister to help watch, but my curiosity about Brianna’s whereabouts never stopped. I wondered aloud about her often in front of Mrs. Fennel, who simply glared silently at me.

“You nag Mrs. Fennel at your own peril,” Ava once said. “She has the patience of a trapped rattlesnake.”

Right now, Ava herself resembled some sort of angry snake glaring back at me from the doorway, her head poised like a cobra’s ready to strike. I sat back and folded my arms under my breasts. I was what anyone would call a late bloomer. My figure didn’t really fill out until I was sixteen. Before that, I looked more like a twelve-year-old. I knew that was why most boys in my classes had barely given me a glance, that and the boring grandma clothes I was made to wear, mostly loose-fitting, in drab colors, with the ugliest shoes. I was sure I wobbled when I walked.

Strangely, enough, boys, and girls as well, assumed I came from a fanatically religious family, a family of Puritans. This was why I wore such clothes and no makeup and no earrings or bracelets. In their minds, it explained why I didn’t participate in clubs and games or go to dances. Surely, they thought trying to be friends with me would be a total waste of time. I could see it in their faces. To them, my whole life was a waste of time.

Recently, however, I had become very aware of
my figure. Just as I had been told to give some of my clothes to Marla, Ava was now told to give some of her newer outfits to me, and these outfits revealed how I had blossomed. Lately, especially in the past week, I was even more self-conscious because of it, especially when boys now had that
Hello, what have you been hiding beneath those grandma outfits?
look. One boy, Tommy Holmes, asked me if I had been drinking our gardener’s Miracle-Gro.

“Maybe it’s plastic surgery,” Ruta Lee suggested coyly, her face ripe with envy. If anyone needed plastic surgery, she did, with her long, pointed nose and doggy ears.

I said nothing, so she went ahead to spread the rumor like creamy peanut butter through the school. I could see the story smeared over the faces of my classmates. Ironically, it enhanced the interest some boys had in me. Had I had breast enhancement, something done to make my buttocks more curvaceous, my waist so small? Almost overnight, my baby face had morphed into a stunning cover girl’s face, including a magazine model’s complexion. Ruta began to regret her mocking. She would glare angrily at me in the hallways and classroom but had nowhere near the fire in her eyes that burned in Ava’s right now.

“What is it, Ava? What else do you want from me?” I was sure she could stare down a charging tiger. “I turned it off!”

She smirked and then relaxed and brushed her silky black hair away from her face. It was shoulder length and never looked dull or dirty. My dark brown hair always felt coarse compared with hers, and I thought
it was too curly. Maybe I felt that way because Daddy enjoyed stroking Ava’s hair and rarely stroked mine. Lately, when I complained about my hair to Mrs. Fennel, she threatened to take out the ironing board and iron every strand.

“If you keep moaning about it, I swear I will do it when you sleep,” she warned, “and if I burn some of it and you become bald, that will be on your head. Literally.”

And that was that.

Mrs. Fennel, who had been with my father for centuries, it seemed, always spoke with staccato efficiency. When someone said, “That woman doesn’t waste her breath,” he or she was surely referring to Mrs. Fennel. Often she went all day without saying more than a dozen words, but she could speak pages with a look, an expression. Even as a toddler, I always knew when my questions were foolish to her and not worth her answering. Ava said Mrs. Fennel was a surgeon. She could cut the waste out of any day. She never said or did anything without purpose or meaning. She had the best IWPB—important words per breath—of anyone.

“You should be grateful she has been your nanny,” Ava told me once after I complained about something Mrs. Fennel had said to me. “I’m grateful she has been mine.”

“I am!” I claimed, even though in my heart, I didn’t mean it. I dreamed instead of having a real mother.

“Spoiled,” Ava muttered, under her breath but loudly enough for me to hear. “She lets you get away with too much. She never let me get away with that much.”

I tried to be grateful, to appreciate all Mrs. Fennel did for me, but it was never easy. As an infant, I was forbidden to cry too much or too long, and I quickly realized that crying didn’t get me anything anyway. Mrs. Fennel was never physically rough with me. She never struck me or spanked me; she didn’t have to do that. Her stern looks, with those gold-tinted black eyes that were like laser beams cutting through me, were far more than enough to get me to swallow back a wail or a sob.

Tall and thin, with a hardness in her arms and body that had me believing she was made of iron until I saw her naked once, Mrs. Fennel radiated a firmness and confidence that gave me, Marla, Ava, and, I’m sure, Brianna, a sense of security. As long as she was there, nothing could harm us. Even germs feared her. No one ever got sick.

And yet she was so feminine at times, so concerned about our appearance, our looks, that I felt as if she had the power to sculpt us into beauties. She had bath oils (her own mixtures) that kept our skin smooth and soft, shampoos with one of her magical ingredients that, despite my unhappiness with my own hair, really did keep it soft and healthy compared with the hair of the other girls in my classes, and of course, she cooked and prepared the healthiest things for us to eat, which were mostly from her own herbal recipes. To this day, I don’t know what she gave me to eat as baby food, but whatever it was, it was homemade. There was always a gentle tug of war between her and Daddy, who tried to give us something sweet or decadent from time to time when we were younger.

“Don’t corrupt them. There’s time enough for that,” Mrs. Fennel might say, and that was that. Daddy would back off. Someday, I thought, I would know why Mrs. Fennel, who was supposedly our housekeeper and nanny, had such power over Daddy, who was supposedly her employer. Either jokingly or maybe because she knew more than I did, Ava once said, “She’s Daddy’s mother. He got his good looks from her.”

Despite her hard, sculptured features, Mrs. Fennel did look as if she might have been beautiful once. Her gray hair was still long and soft. She didn’t have any of those age spots elderly people develop, and her wrinkles weren’t deep or long. Sometimes they seemed to be gone anyway. It was as if she could have days of returning to her twenties or her teen years. It gave me pause to wonder about her past. Until now, at least, she especially didn’t like me or Marla asking her too many personal questions, and she wasn’t one to volunteer personal information. Maybe she really was Daddy’s mother and he had inherited his good looks from her. In our house, beauty seemed to be a fruit you could pluck when it was time to pluck it.

Ava was very attractive and very sexy. She could suck the eyes out of admiring men, young or old. I could hear them practically panting as we walked by, Ava seemingly floating, her head up, her eyes forward. She looked oblivious, as indifferent as some goddess might be, even though she was far from it. She always gave me the impression that she expected nothing less than admiration, even idolization. Walking with her was almost a sexual experience because of the way she flaunted herself. In
their virtual-reality worlds, the men who saw her were already in the throes of heavy lovemaking.