“He was cold to her. Cruel, even. She wrote in her journal that she wanted to leave, but by that point she knew him well enough to be scared of what he might do. And then she found out she was pregnant.
“At the same time, my uncle Ruben came back to San Francisco. He’d burned through his money and was beginning to see the value of a place in my father’s firm. My father gave him a job immediately.
“My uncle was clever and could work hard when he wanted to. In fact, he was doing so well that my father promoted him again and again, until he was the acting VP, second only to my father.
“That wouldn’t have been a problem, except that my father now had an heir. At one point, Ruben might have believed that he would inherit the company, or receive equal shares in it. I was a complicating factor. Very much in his way. Especially after my mother died.”
I feel Mara stir against my side. I know what she wants to ask me, but she hesitates, knowing instinctively that this is the one wound inside of me, never healing, always raw.
I promised to answer her question, and this is a part of it.
“It’s alright,” I tell her. “You can ask.”
“What happened to your mother?”
Why is it still so hard to say the words out loud?
I hate that it hurts me. I hate that I care.
“She hung herself,” I say.
Mara winces. She takes my hand, squeezing it tight.
I look down at her hand, wondering why that feels so good. Why it comforts me.
Maybe because no one knows better than Mara what it feels like to be young, frightened, and deeply alone.
“I felt like an orphan. I had no warmth or connection from my father. Ruben terrified me. He was already showing his aggression, as much as he could get away with. He tripped me on the stairs. I broke my arm. He said it was an accident, and I was too young for my father to believe anything else. Later, he tried to drown me on the beach below the house. He kept pushing me under the waves, over and over again, laughing like it was a joke. All I could see was his teeth and the wild look in his eyes, and then he’d shove me under again, before I could get any air.
“That time my father saw it. He hauled me out. It was the first time I saw him truly angry at Ruben. Ruben was more careful after that. But I knew he hated me. He was jealous when my father gave me attention. He sabotaged me any chance he got.”
Mara rises from the couch to inspect the photograph once more. She brushes the glass out of the frame, frowning at Ruben’s handsome face, clear and uncovered.
“It was around that time I started to draw. I had always liked tinkering with machinery, working with my hands. My father encouraged that because he could see the use of it. He didn’t like me sketching. He didn’t care for the arts at all. He only donated to them because he knew philanthropy was part of empire-building.”
“What made you start drawing?” Mara asks me.
“At first I was sketching designs of machinery I wanted to build. The designs became more experimental, more aesthetic. Sculptures instead of machines.” I pause, because this makes me curious in turn. “What was the first thing you drew?”
Mara blushes. “The girls at school had coloring books. I didn’t have one, but I could get my hands on paper and pencils. I made my own coloring pages—mostly princesses in dresses, because that’s what they had. I realized I could draw any dress I could think of. Then I drew other things I wanted. Roller skates, unicorns, a bed with a canopy, ice cream sundaes …”
She trails off as if realizing that, to her, roller skates had seemed as unobtainable as unicorns.
“Anyway,” she says, shaking her head. “Keep going …”
I lost the thread, distracted by thoughts of Mara as a child. I want to know all her secrets. She keeps them buried deep. I’ll have to be the first one to break out a shovel.
Taking a breath, I continue, “I was having conflict with my father. I wanted to go to art school. He was, of course, opposed, expecting me to take over his company. He already knew by then that he was sick.”
“What about Ruben?” Mara asks.
“Well, that was the contrarian in my father. If I had wanted the business and Ruben didn’t, then he probably would have given it to Ruben. Ruben was acting up, pissing him off. I was playing hard to get—or at least, that’s how he saw it. The more I turned away from him, the more determined he became to mold me in his image. But I had already decided he was a fucking hypocrite.”
“Why?”
“Because he thought he was this ruthless titan of industry. He taught me to avoid emotional entanglements—only family deserved loyalty. But he never gave a damn about my mother, and she was the one who should have been his family. He loved Ruben, while Ruben would have cut the heart out of my father’s chest and eaten it raw if it suited him.”
“Ruben didn’t care about anyone,” Mara says.
“That’s right.” I nod. “And that’s what we truly had in common. I looked like Ruben, more than my own father. Sounded like him, even. Most of all, I understood him. I knew he was stone cold inside, because I was too. He didn’t only hate me because he was jealous—he hated me because I saw what he really was.”
“Was he still trying to hurt you?”
“Worse. He convinced my father to make him my guardian. I was sixteen. My father was getting sicker all the time. If he died, the money, the house, the company, all of it would fall under Ruben’s control. I’d be fucked.”
Mara looks down at the framed photograph clutched in her hands, lifted off the wall. She glances between Ruben’s face and mine, equally handsome, equally cruel. She understands the havoc he could wreak, in the two years before my eighteenth birthday.
“What did you do?”
“I organized a hunting trip for the three of us, knowing my father would be too ill to come with us. Ruben knew it, too. I think he anticipated what I planned—or at least, he thought he did.”
Mara returns to the sofa, but she’s stiff with apprehension, unable to sit back against the ruined cushions.
“Then why did he go?” she asks me.
“He thought he’d turn the tables on me. And I let him think it. We went out into the woods of northern Montana, just the two of us. It was the coldest week of January. That forest is thick and wild. I had been there before, and so had Ruben, but not together. You have to leave long before sunrise to hunt mountain lions, tramping through snow up to your knees.”
Mara rubs her palms against her upper arms as if she can feel the chill.
“I was a teenager, skinny, half-grown. He was twenty-eight, bigger than me, stronger. He thought he was smarter, too. I let him load my gun with blanks, pretending not to notice. I let him walk behind me in the woods. I could hear his breath slowing, his steps pausing. I could feel him lifting his rifle, pointing it at my back …”
Mara has her fingers pressed against her mouth. I know she desperately wants to bite her nails, but she refrains for my sake.
“I heard the rifle blast and I thought I’d timed it wrong, I was dead. Then I turned around and saw the hole in the ground. He’d walked across the deadfall just as I hoped. The rifle shot went up in the sky, and he plunged down twenty feet into the pit.”
Mara lets out the breath she’s been holding, her sigh caressing my forearm.