The Reluctant Heiress

A New Life

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, my throat working hard over the words.

“Home, of course.” He spoke to me as though I were eight and not eighteen.

Pushing himself out of the chair, my father wiped himself down with a monogrammed handkerchief that he pulled out of his breast pocket. Shame filled me again.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“A misguided notion you will soon be relieved of, I assure you.”

A small hand, too big to be Teddy’s or Andrew’s, gripped the beltloop below the small of my back. Reaching behind me, I ran my fingers through Junior’s hair in what I hoped was a soothing motion.

“Are you really going?” Came his small voice.

Before I could answer, a cold, long-fingered hand lunged towards my face and held it fast. My father turned my face this way and that, looking for the best light. I tried to squirm away from his scrutiny, delivered from upon high atop his aquiline nose. Fingers digging into my jaw, I had no choice but to stay still; as docile as a prize heifer who was being measured and weighed for quality.

There was no doubt he could feel my struggles beneath his smooth, never-done-an-honest-day-of-work fingers.

I stared back at him, noting the way he hummed in his throat. Whether it was displeasure, I couldn’t begin to guess.

The truth of my mother’s words – ‘this is your father’ – snapped into place as I studied him with similar intensity. Unfortunately for me, the family resemblance was plainly obvious. I looked like this trespasser more than I ever had my mother or my siblings. I didn’t have his nose but I had his cheekbones, the firelight through brandy eyes, and the short and willowy frame. But it was the wild, dark curls – his were fighting the restraints of his pomade as they curled around his crisp shirt collar – that sealed the deal.

What little doubt lived in the corners of my mind dissolved away to nothing.

He was my father.

“So,” I said, brows furrowing as I injected as much coolness into my voice as I could, “am I blue ribbon material?”

My father snorted, squeezing my chin harder in warning. “It’s a relief to see that someone in this hov- house has a modicum of spirit. Do hold onto it, you’ll be needing it soon enough.”

Ripping my face out of his grip, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The spots where his fingers had speared into my jaw felt odd and dented, throbbing in phantom memory.

“Being a Hawthorne is not without its challenges.” He looked at the window and then down to his stupid, fancy watch. “You have five minutes to retrieve your belongings. If they’re as meagre as I suspect they are, I doubt you’ll need even that long. And do say your goodbyes, you won’t be coming back.”

“But—”

“Everything else you require will be provided to you once you’re settled in at the Park. Consider it a new life.”

I didn’t move an inch, my battered trainers rooted deep in the nicotine yellow carpet. The carpet between him and my family.

“Well? What are you waiting for?” One perfectly manicured brow made for my father’s still full hairline.

Keeping my stare baleful, I spat my vitriol at him like a snake. “I already told you I wasn’t going anywhere with you.”

“Pardon?”

“You can’t do this,” I argued, my fists clenched and shaking at my sides. “You can’t just take me away! I won’t let you.”

“Says who, girl? You?” His dark, unsettling eyes – my eyes in another’s face– darted over my shoulder, his smile turning feral. “Your family?”

His tone was too casual to be anything but a threat. The fingers still loosed through my beltloop tightened in understanding just as another hand wrapped around my bicep.

“Darling. You should do as he says.” My mother’s voice was as tentative as her grip on me, entreating and almost sweet. It was the same voice she used when she was trying to talk Johnathon down from going off on her; her last line of defence before his violence ripped through the house.

“Darling?” I asked stiffly, shaking off her too-gentle, almost loving touch. “Don’t you dare-” I couldn’t get the words out fast enough or clean enough, they were jumbled in my head and knotted in my mouth. “-don’t pretend you care.”

“Maggie…” She tried again.

When she reached for me, I stepped aside. Looking at her hands as though they were poisoned. The boys shuffled with me, picking up on my mood and following – just like they’d been taught to do when Johnathon was in one of those moods. My mother looked at us all, her eyes shiny and childlike as she wrapped her empty arms around her middle.

How dare she act like she was the one whose life had been turned upside down. It was her who had lied to me, her who was letting me be taken away without a fight. Instead, she was telling me to behave and do as I was told…

“How much?” I asked her flatly, looking at the chipping wall just above her head.

“What?”

“How much did he offer you this time?” I scoffed, reaching up to run my hands through my hair. The guilt was plain on her beautiful face. “I should have known. This isn’t the first time, is it?”

“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lying, she was lying. Unable to look at me, she gestured for the boys. But they stayed crowded around my hips and legs, Teddy looking too big in n a long list of bad nights, this one still stood out. Coming back from a late study session at my work, I’d found the house in shambles, the air thick with the stench of vomit and shame. How drunk she had been, just stupid and sick drunk. With her head down the toilet bowl, barely breathing between bouts of retching.

But it wasn’t the sick-sweet smell or the noise I remembered best. It was my mother’s eyes, bloodshot and dry, looking at me with such bitter hatred. Hatred that now lived rent free in my head. Even so, I’d held her hair back and fetched her water, only leaving her side to ask the neighbour if the boys could stay with her for the night. She always said yes, her kind smile tinged with pity.

“It wasn’t like that,” my mother insisted, quickly changing her tune.

But it was like that, wasn’t it? I wanted to remind her of her hurtful words, the ones that played in my head after every bad day, every poor exam result…or whenever I watched the bruises bloom on my skin after a fight with Johnathon.

“I should have gotten rid of you the moment I had that money.”

I’d ignored it at the time, and tried not to linger on it afterwards because it left me tight-chested and unable to get out of bed. Maybe the money had come from my dead father, or his parents. I didn’t know and I didn’t ask.

I should have asked.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

For what? For handing me over to this man without an ounce of fight, without a single word of protest? It hurt to know that if it was any of the boys, she’d have already sent him back, nails bloodied and cracked if need be. But I wasn’t the boys. She’d never loved me like that, like them.

Was it because she looked at me and saw Richard Hawthorne? Was I a constant reminder of her folly, her choice to give birth to his bastard?

I’d wanted to hate them, my brothers. I had during my mother’s first pregnancy, where I’d spent the latter months stomping around the house and pouting. I’d despised the baby talk to her stomach, Johnathon’s moony face and sickly smile. How in love they were, how they were going to be the perfect little family. But mostly I’d hated how I’d never been called over with that saccharine smile to feel junior kick, to share in their love. They had so little for me, and here was this little parasite to take it from me.

But the moment I’d set my young eyes on junior’s squashed, alien face, I’d fallen utterly in love.

“Don’t go!” Andrew wailed as if he knew the tangent of my thoughts, clinging almost desperately to my jacket.

“Such sweet boys,” my father drawled, tugging on his shirt sleeve. “It would be such a shame if something were—”

“I’ll go.” I blurted out, hating the way he was smiling at my brothers. It showed far too many of his perfect teeth. “I’ll go with you.”

“Good girl. You have three minutes.”

I tenderly extracted myself from the tangle of bony elbows and chubby fingers, ruffling junior’s hair before I trudged up the stairs. The panic that simmered in the depths of my bowels began to roil, to rise up and fill my throat.

Doing my best not to think about it, lest the bitterness sitting in the back of my throat got the better of me, I gathered up my meagre belongings, tossing them into an old rucksack I’d once used for school. Between the spare jeans and t-shirt, as well as a few knick-knacks the boys had made me over the years, there wasn’t much space.

Now there was nothing left to do but take stock of my shoebox room, the pale blue walls looking like a stranger’s. It was the one thing that was all my own, even though it meant that the boys had to share. I wondered who would get my room. Junior, maybe? He was the eldest. But Teddy could move straight out from his cot in my mother’s room.

It was likely I’d never know.

Tears welled in my eyes and I swiped at them. How would I live without them? They were my everything; my reason to go on when I was convinced that I would rather die. Who would calm Andrew down after he had a nightmare and change his bed when he wet it? Would Johnathon make sure that junior wore his helmet now that he’d proudly taken the stabilisers off his second-hand bike? I doubted it.

Stumbling to my feet, I reached for the latch in my window, only for my father’s vague threat to still my fingers before I could flip it open. My bedroom was just above the porch, the window leading right out onto the red brick shingles. It would be a straight shot down the drainpipe, I knew. But it wasn’t to be. My budding hopes of escape were dashed by the sight of a large black car in the street. Impossibly shiny, it barely fit into the small residential road.

I had to go. What other choice did I have?

I had to go…but I didn’t have go to without giving my family something.

Wiping my eyes again, I lay down on the floor and shimmied under my bed till only my legs were sticking out. It took some wriggling and a lot of running my blunt nails over the floorboards to find what I was looking for.

The loose board gave easily once I found it, the cash underneath cool to the touch. I knew from experience that they’d smell of damp too. I’d been saving for the better part of two years – squirreling away the money I got cash in hand from the owner of the small coffee shop I worked part-time in.

The handful of tens and fives were more than just money to me. It was the ability to get the heat back on when Johnathon had ‘forgotten’ to pay it; it was being able to sneak the boys a chocolate bar when they were well behaved; or buy myself a coffee from work when I’d been studying in the staff room for hours and hours.

But they were also so much more than just those practical things. They were all my dreams and hopes for the future tied up neatly with a strained elastic band.

I thought so often about that quiet little flat on the outskirts of the city, the one I planned to have one day. It would have a view of a nearby park and lots of light. And it wouldn’t smell of damp or canned spaghetti. There would be a spare room for the boys to stay whenever they wanted. And there would be plants everywhere: a hanging planter with gently curling ivy that brushed my head when I passed, a cactus that flowered every year without fail, and a fern that grew wild and out of control.

Mine, all mine; earned and owned. The money in my hands was that flat…

And now it was gone. Fizzled out like a bad firework on a soggy November night, where the smell of smoke is the only proof that there was ever a promise of light.

What was in store for me? Being a Hawthorne, as my father said. What did that even mean? To me? It meant nothing, nothing more than a surname that separated me further from my family of Smiths.

Slinging my pack over my shoulder, I slouched for the stairs. He was already waiting for me by the door, his smile growing tighter by the second.

If – no – when I walked through that door, I’d never come back here. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did, deep in the marrow of my bones. But I’d do it. I’d do it for the boys. Hopefully, I’d been worth quite the sum. Enough to keep them fed and clothed for a while.

I thought about that china set again and prayed that my mother was wiser this time around.

“Just one last thing,” I said, stepping past my father and back into our front room.

“Please don’t go!” I was assaulted by the boys as soon as I crossed the threshold, their faces tracked with dirty tear stains. “We’ll be good. We promise. Just don’t—”

“Shh,” I soothed Andrew, my middle sibling, combing my fingers through his ashen hair. “It’ll be okay.”

“No, it won’t.” Sniffing, junior stepped back, looking away.

I knew what he meant. He meant Johnathon and his temper and all that included. I reached out to him, putting the money into his hands. He looked at the mound – a few thousand at least – with round, wide eyes.

Ten was too young, too young for me to ask this of him. But what choice did I have?

“You’re in charge now, okay?” He sniffed again and nodded, checking to see whether my mother had noticed the money. She hadn’t…she wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t do anything except cling to Teddy, her youthful face buried in his cherubic curls. “You’re the best big brother, don’t forget it.”

Throwing his arms around me, Junior shuddered. “I’ll do my best.”

And he would. He’d take care of them, just as I had.

I kissed each of them in turn, taking a minute to breathe in Teddy’s toddler sweetness. As though that was the only thing that would keep me going.

So many times, I’d imagined this moment…but never like this. I’d always planned to wait until the boys were older – if Jonathon even let me stay – before I dared to say goodbye.

Mostly, I imagined the first taste of true freedom from my mother and Jonathon. It would be sweet and heady and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself…but it would be the best thing ever. I belonged somewhere, I knew that. Wanted it with a desperation that often robbed me of breath.

Even with all of that, I’d carved a space out here, amongst the chaos of our family. It wasn’t always kind, and it certainly wasn’t comfortable, but I’d belonged to it. Just as it had belonged to me.

For the first time ever, I didn’t want to go.

I peered at my mother, my withered, pretty mother, and waited. Wouldn’t she say anything to me? And what could I say to her that wasn’t full of hurt or angry resignation? Goodbye was so formal, and see you later too nothing…not to mention a lie. I couldn’t even bring myself to snap at her for selling me out.

I wouldn’t leave things like that between us. Not for her sake, but for mine.

I love you. I mean, it wasn’t a lie exactly, but it wasn’t the entire truth either. The thing between my mother and I was strange at best. It had kept us together this long, hadn’t it? Mostly whole and healthy. Didn’t that stand for something?

Would she miss what I had tried so desperately to give her: the model student; the free and uncomplaining babysitter; the obliging cook and cleaner.

“Take care of yourself, okay? And the boys too.” It was the best I could do. Turning to the boys, I gave them one last smile, one last hug. “Be good while I’m gone, yeah?”

That got me a chorus of soggy ‘we promise.’

“I’m still waiting,” my father snapped, his silken voice still managing to crack like a whip in the dull hush of my departure.

Eyes fluttering closed, I turned to follow that voice. Would my new life be as bad as I feared? By some miracle I managed to keep my s**t together as I headed for the door, my suppressed tears gouging out the lining of my throat as I ignored my father’s grouchy ‘finally!’

And with those parting words, he opened the door with his handkerchief and led me towards his stupidly glossy car. To my new life.