The Winters(71)

Dani turned around, holding her cigarette aloft, acting like a bored actress. But it was a facade; her face, like mine, was stained with tears. “I guess they really have you where they want you, don’t they?”

Louisa knocked, tried the handle. She called our names. We both ignored her.

“Why would you do this to me?” I cried, holding a fistful of lace. “Why? Answer me.”

“Yup. You’ve been turned.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dani. All I know is you tricked me into wearing this . . . her dress, for some insane reason. Why would you humiliate me like this? To get back at your father? For what? For falling in love with someone so disappointing to you? For trying to move on with his life? We were getting along so well. What is wrong with you?”

“Oh, there’s a lot wrong with me, I know that. But I didn’t do this.” She blew out a long stretch of smoke and took a step closer. “Mr. Winter is a bad man. My mother didn’t make it out alive. I don’t think you will, either.”

“How can you say that about a man who saved you from—”

“Saved me from what?”

She came closer still, studying my face, sensing a secret lodge inside like a dog at a foxhole. I scrambled to change the subject. “Nothing, I was going to say . . . that I’m only trying to find my place here.”

“Well, you did, didn’t you? In my father’s bed. So congratulations. From lowly boat girl to the mistress of Asherley in a few months. Damn. The sex must be good because frankly I’m not seeing it here,” she said, circling my face with her cigarette. “And you were right about the dress. It looks like shit on you.”

Suddenly I felt very tired of her, of her childishness, her threats and dramas. Even my tears had evaporated by then. Rebekah’s dress felt like nothing against my skin; I forgot I was wearing it. And if Dani was a product of Rebekah’s mothering, even Rebekah ceased to be my antagonist. They may not have been related by blood, but fifteen-year-old girls don’t learn this particular brand of toxicity, the insults, the shaming, the trickery, from men. They learn it from other women.

I was reminded in that moment of every superhero movie I’d ever seen, when the cartoon idols acquire their particular power, usually while staring defeat in the face, or death. I felt flooded now with something new. It didn’t come from outside of me; it wasn’t otherworldly. It felt familiar, always there, radiating from within and now coating me like a protective shield. I could only describe it as a warm sense of myself, something that had been placed there by people who loved me. Dani could never win because she had no idea what this feeling was or even what this fight was really about.

“Dani, I know you think I’m an awful little gold digger, an evil stepmonster who’s only marrying your father for his money. But you don’t know anything about me, or my life, or the things I’ve had to endure up until now. You’ve never been left alone to fend for yourself, treated like a dog, ordered around, used, disrespected, all day, every day. You’ve never been poor or hungry or worried about where you’d live if you left a job that was killing you, after it killed your last remaining parent. You’ve never worked twelve hours a day under a hot sun, then six more serving drunk men who might or might not make a move on you just for the fun of it. And you have to let them because you need the job so you can eat. You wouldn’t last a minute in my old life. Your first callus would send you crying to your daddy. So don’t talk to me about who you think I am, or what I did before I met your father, who, by the way, was the first man since my own father died to show me some respect and decency and kindness. When I laid eyes on Asherley I didn’t think that I’d hit some jackpot. I just . . . I felt safe for the first time in a long time. You know nothing about why I’m here or how I love. Because I bet in your brief, trite little life you’ve never done one goddamn thing for another human being if there wasn’t something in it for you.”

She just stood there, no rebuttal percolating, her triumphant sneer gone, makeup cried off, hair a wilted mess, cigarette ash freckling the carpet. I reached around the back of Rebekah’s wedding dress, unzipped it, and let it fall in a pile around my ankles. Then I gathered it up in my fist and threw it at Dani before turning to walk back to my room wearing only my bra, stockings, and heels.





TWENTY-FIVE


That rainy April afternoon, I married Max Winter in the great hall at Asherley, wearing a forgettable dress Louisa had brought to wear to the reception. The Times photographer was sent home with apologies, agreeing with Max that the ceremony had turned too dark to document, going so far as to erase the photos so they’d never resurface to embarrass us, especially Dani. It began to thunder just as we were told by the officiant to kiss, punctuating the day so perfectly that there was nothing left to do but laugh.

The way Max looked at me that night, the admiration I felt, his pride, his deep amity, sustained me through the worst of it. I did my best to move from couple to couple, all of whom I was meeting for the first time, under the worst and best circumstances of my life. But towards the end of the evening, when the first of the guests announced they were leaving, it opened up a floodgate of departures. Valets brought a dozen big black SUVs around. One by one the guests fled down the drive like a high-speed funeral procession, tires spinning up great walls of puddle water. Katya cleaned up, having never really ceded the job to the caterers anyway. Max sent her home with slabs of food to drop at a local shelter and instructions not to come in for a few days, a reprieve for which she was grateful.