“Um, I was wasted?”
Still I hesitated. “I can’t wear a lot with my features,” I warned.
“I know. Just let me. I’m really good at it.”
I slumped forward, eyes closed, chin turned up, surrendering to her ministrations. The brushes tickled now and again, but her hand was confident. Perhaps it was her proximity, or the fact that I could feel her breath on my skin, but I felt emboldened.
“You seem more like yourself.”
“Hold still. This lash is a bitch.”
“Sorry.” I adjusted my body. “Did you and Claire make up?”
She stopped what she was doing. I opened my eyes, a fake lash dangling perilously off my left lid.
“Why is everyone so concerned about me and Claire? No, we did not make up. Claire did a cunty thing and I never want to speak to her again. Now close your eyes. I don’t want to talk about anything negative right now. Let’s focus on the positive.”
“Is she the one who’s been posting those weird comments on your Instagram?”
This time she took a step back, her arms crossed. She wasn’t angry. She seemed impressed that I had the courage to just blurt that out, to admit I knew.
“Well, now. You do lurk.”
“I couldn’t help it. I was worried about you. Adele said your mood dipped whenever you checked your phone, so I . . . I poked around.”
“You talked to Adele, too? Did you, like, pick up a book about being Super Stepmom or something?”
“I just care.”
“Well, I don’t care. It stopped anyway.”
“So it was Claire?”
“No. It was my dead mother,” she said. “Now close your eyes. I’m almost done.”
While I shut them, I heard the fizz of a glass of champagne being poured.
“Dani.”
“Come on. It’s a special occasion. I can handle a mouthful.”
She drank more than a mouthful, then tipped the glass to my mouth, offering me a careful, fortifying gulp.
“Mm. Thank you.” Our eyes met. “Thank you for everything. Especially today.”
She shrugged.
“I couldn’t have done this without you. I would have had a meltdown over this dress. I wouldn’t have recovered.”
“Crazy how well it fits.”
I peeked at the mantel clock. A wave of nausea washed over me.
“Don’t move,” said Dani, still fidgeting with a lash. “Almost there. And . . . done.”
She held up a mirror, and I blinked a couple of times to get used to the weight on my lids. My face looked like my face, but dramatically alive.
“You are good at this. I mean it. This might be your calling.”
“Tell Daddy that and he’ll have a heart attack. If I don’t go to an Ivy League college, he’ll be even more disappointed in me than he already is.”
I slapped the mirror down on the dressing table. “Listen to me. I’ll tell you this until you believe it. You are loved exactly as you are. By your father, by your whole family. And by me.”
She smiled, then yanked me to my feet. “Let’s get that dress on and get you married. I’m sick of you two living in sin. It’s fucking disgusting.”
Zipped back up into the dress, sash secured, matching lipstick dabbed on my mouth, I waited in the room while Dani checked on everyone downstairs.
I looked at myself in her full-length mirror. Before Asherley I didn’t covet beauty, not this kind, heightened and illusory. But today of all days I wanted to look exactly like this, to be thought of as beautiful, and if not as beautiful as Rebekah, then at least worthy of Max’s attentions, his love, this home, Dani’s esteem, this dress.
She ran back into the room, flush with excitement. “It’s time.”
I fetched my bouquet from the bathroom, where it rested on the cool marble vanity, a simple bundle of white wildflowers, the first to bloom at Asherley. At the top of the stairs I could hear the guests now gathered in the greenhouse. The small band cued up the “Wedding March.”
“See you on the other side,” Dani said, and headed down.
“Wait. Walk with me.”
“What?”
“Be my maid of honor,” I said. “I can’t do this alone.”
She hesitated.
“Please? Nothing would make me happier.”
She climbed back up the stairs and lifted her elbow to me. I slid my arm through hers.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
Now I was overcome.
“Oh God. Don’t cry now, dummy. You’ll fuck up my makeup job.”
She led the way, my legs useless. We inched down the stairs, past the painted eyes of ancestors unrelated to both of us, whose stories we’d inherit and pass down to our own children. As we crossed the foyer, I could hear the train of this stranger’s dress swishing across the marble tiles. The greenhouse chatter stopped as we reached the kitchen. Then the musicians landed on the part of the tune that indicated the march begins. Won’t Max be so happy to see us like this, I thought, former enemies and now possibly friends? Maybe not enemies. Perhaps we’d been rivals, but over what had we been fighting? For Max’s attention? For primacy at Asherley? A kitten? How stupid it all seemed now, the petty spats, my fear of her. She was just an angry teenage girl resisting her father’s new love. It was natural, an age-old story. Yet ours would have a happy ending. I squeezed her arm again and we kept marching through the kitchen and down the pantry hall, lit on either side by a hundred dancing tea candles, the luminous greenhouse waiting for us at the end.
The music got louder. The flowers stuffing the greenhouse came into view, then the backs of the chairs, each festooned with white ribbons, the tables arranged behind the bridal arch. We kept marching. At the threshold Dani gave me one last squeeze and went to break for her seat. I tugged her closer.
“Take me all the way down.”
I wanted her to bring me up to my spot where Max stood, the smile on his face clear from the back of the bright white room. I wanted to run to him, but I also wanted him to really take this in, the two us, a team. At the reception, when he would gush at how beautiful I looked, I couldn’t wait to tell him it was Dani, it was all Dani’s doing. She averted disaster, buoyed my spirits, gave me the courage to put on this accident of a dress.
One by one, faces turned to look at me, at us, their oohs and aahs drowning out the sound of the Times photographer’s clicking as he discreetly orbited us with his camera. But then a strange chill seemed to ripple through the room, starting at the back and undulating over the small crowd to the front, where Louisa slowly, oddly, rose to her feet. I’d felt this before, in the middle of the Caribbean, when a beautiful sky darkens in an instant and it’s time to race the boat back to the marina. Dani felt it, too. Time slowed. Our bodies tensed. We pulled each other in a little closer. My eyes darted around the room, noting how familiar smiles seemed to melt into horror, Jonah’s then Elias’s, their mouths dropping open. I looked at Dani, followed her gaze to Max’s face, where his initial joy had been replaced by something dead-eyed and angry, aimed directly at Dani. What was happening?
“Why?” he asked Dani, his voice raspy.
Louisa’s hand was now over her heart, taking in the whole of my dress, from top to bottom.
“What a thing to do,” she whispered, sounding almost impressed.
I let go of Dani’s arm and rushed to Max, shook him to jar the frightening expression from his face. “Max, what is it?” I said, afraid to look around.
He wouldn’t stop glaring at Dani.
Finally, thankfully, Louisa spoke to the confused guests, a stiff smile on her face. “Everybody, I’m so sorry, but would you all please meet us in the great hall? We’re just going to be a little bit delayed.” She signaled a throat cut to the photographer.
Guests, complete strangers
to me, shot pained expressions in my direction before fleeing. Dani looked cornered by a pack of wolves. Then, over her face came the strangest of expressions, the kind you get when you slowly, finally come to a deep realization.
“Oh,” she said. “I think I know what’s happening here.”
Max looked at me. “I believe you’ve been the victim of a vile prank,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“That dress you are wearing,” he said, spitting out each word, “that is . . . Rebekah’s wedding dress.”
I remember the feeling of my knees giving way, of other people’s hands guiding me down to a chair. I heard Jonah say, “Max, calm down,” and Louisa add, “Let me take her upstairs and put something else on her,” their voices thick, mingling under dark water. I saw Max pacing, driving his hands through his hair, just like that hot day he’d pulled up in front of my shabby townhouse, desperately trying to come up with a plan that could keep us together. This was his plan. Come to Asherley with me, he said. You’ll be happy here.
My eyes sought Dani’s. “Did you do this to me?”
She gave me the slightest of shrugs. “Would you even believe me if I said no?”
Max spoke with a ferocious calm. “Dani, go upstairs. To your room. Shut your bedroom door. And stay there until the guests leave. Then I will decide what to do with you.”
“Why? What did I do, Daddy?” she asked. “I want you to tell me what I did. Say it out loud.”
“Don’t play with me right now.”
“You think I did this? You think I put her in Mum’s wedding dress?”
“I can’t even look at you,” he said.
She turned to me. “Don’t you see what’s happening? They’re doing this!” She looked at Louisa, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Even you.”
Louisa was so stricken by this accusation, Jonah had to steady her down to a chair next to me.
“Dani!” Max yelled. “I’m telling you—”
“They’re trying to make me seem crazy so they can put me away again—”
“Dani!”
“—this time for good, so he can take charge of the money and start a family with you, the pure and innocent new wife who’ll obey him like a good little Winter girl.”
“Dani, upstairs!”
“You’re just jealous of me. You’ve always resented me because she only loved me, not you.”
I leapt up and grabbed Max’s arm, afraid he might lunge at Dani, who stood there clutching at her own dress, leaving sweaty, star-shaped handprints on the black satin.
“Please believe me. I told you he’s never loved me. Only she loved me.” She burst into tears, throwing her head back like an anguished toddler, sinking to her knees in front of me, a human being coming apart at my feet. “Please believe me,” she wailed, lurching towards the hem of my dress, Rebekah’s dress. When I flinched from her, her expression was that of a puppy that had just taken a rolled-up newspaper to the nose.
Louisa rushed to lift her off the ground, and Dani shoved her violently.
“Get away from me, you bitch!”
Louisa turned to stone.
“Dani, leave,” Max seethed.
She stood up, smoothed down her dress, and used both hands to flick the tears off her cheeks. “Oh, don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll leave. And when I do, I’ll tell everyone what you did. I might be crazy but I’m not stupid. I remember what happened in here that night!” she yelled on her way out of the greenhouse. “I saw!”
I’ll never forget Max’s face in that moment. He looked defeated, like a king watching the slaughter of his army from a high hill. My skin suddenly flushed, my whole body in mutiny against this horror of a dress. It was suffocating me, squeezing the air out of me. I wanted to rip it off and run screaming into the cold bay. Now I, too, fled from the room in tears, not caring who saw me in the kitchen, an obstacle course of caterers and milling guests, eyes widening as I passed. By then the dress felt as though it would burst into flames were I in it a second longer. Louisa called after me as I took to the stairs in twos, but I kept running. I didn’t want anyone to touch me or even look at me.
I went one flight up and then another, carried by a wave of anger so potent I understood how murder can be a crime of passion. I slapped open the door at the top of the turret, then locked it behind me. I knew I’d find her there, against her father’s orders, standing with her back to me, blowing smoke out an open window, and yes, it crossed my mind to push her. It was at least five stories high with only concrete below. Do it, I heard myself say. Why don’t you? Tell Max she jumped before you could save her. Who would dispute her instability? Think how happy you’d be if she were gone from here forever. What stopped me wasn’t my moral code, I’m ashamed to say, but rather fear that the fall wouldn’t kill her, and that I’d be the one leaving Asherley in handcuffs.
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 worrie
d 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.
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