Back to the 80s novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Daughter
Lorna wakes in 1985 being pinned into her runaway sister's wedding dress, catches her mother's wrist before a second slap, agrees to the marriage as her way out, and finds an $11 million hole in her father's ledger.
I woke up with a stranger's hands pulling pins out of my hair.
Then someone jabbed one into my scalp, and I said a word my mother would have washed my mouth out for.
"Stand still, Lorna."
The voice was cold and very close.
I stood still because I had no idea where I was.
The last thing I remembered was headlights on the Merritt Parkway at two in the morning.
I had been driving home from the last day of a bank exam.
A truck had drifted into my lane.
Now I was standing on a footstool in a pink-papered room, wearing a wedding dress.
The dress had huge puffed sleeves and a lace collar that scratched my neck.
A calendar on the dresser said September 1985.
I thought, that is a very detailed dream.
Then a woman in a gray silk suit knelt in front of me and stuck another pin through the hem.
Her pearls swung against my knee, and I knew her.
I didn't know her from my life.
I knew her the way you know a word in a language you have never studied.
Margaret Ellacombe.
My mother.
My adoptive mother, the memory said, the one who took me from the nuns at four.
I was twenty-two years old and my name was Lorna.
I was also twenty-nine and my name was Lorna, and I examined banks for a living.
Both of those things were true, and neither one of them was mine to argue with.
"The waist is still loose on you," Margaret said, without looking up.
"Vivian is smaller through the ribs."
"Who is Vivian?" I asked.
The room went quiet.
Margaret stood up very slowly.
Her face did not change at all.
Her hand did.
It came across my cheek with a crack that rang off the pink walls.
"Don't be clever with me this week."
"Your sister ran off with a drummer on Sunday night, and the church is booked for Saturday."
My cheek burned.
Somewhere inside me, a quiet girl who had been slapped for eighteen years went small and said sorry.
The other woman inside me, the one who had been hit by a truck, did not say sorry to anyone.
Margaret raised her hand again.
I caught her wrist.
It was thin, and cold, and much weaker than the hand that had struck me.
"Not twice," I said.
Margaret stared at my fingers.
Down the hall, a door opened, and a man cleared his throat.
She pulled her arm free and smoothed her sleeve.
"You will marry Mr. Dunleavy at St. Michael's at eleven o'clock on Saturday, in your sister's dress."
"You will be Mrs. Russell Dunleavy, and you will be grateful."
"Because?"
"Because we fed you for eighteen years."
"Because your father made a promise to a man who has money, and Vivian can't keep a promise past breakfast."
"And I'm the spare," I said.
"You are what you've always been," Margaret said.
"Useful."
She swept out.
I stood on the footstool with a burning face and a mouth full of blood from my own cheek.
I should have been terrified.
Instead I was looking at the long mirror on the closet door.
The girl in it had brown hair, gray eyes and a small crescent mole behind her left ear.
She was young and tall and strong in the shoulders, and she had never once been allowed to leave this house.
I understood the whole deal in about ten seconds.
If I refused, I stayed here, in this pink room, with that hand.
If I said yes, I got out the front door in a wedding dress and into a stranger's house.
A widower, the memory said.
Thirty-eight.
Two children.
Everybody in this house thought I was being sold.
They were right, and I could work with that.
"Fine," I said to the empty room.
"I'll wear the dress."
I waited until I heard Margaret's heels go down the front stairs.
Then I stepped off the footstool, stepped out of the dress and put on a skirt from the closet.
I walked down the hall in my slip and my stocking feet.
Her father's study was at the end, door half open, the radio playing a baseball game.
Nobody was in it.
The big mahogany desk had a drawer that didn't quite close.
I know a drawer that doesn't close.
In my other life I had found a hundred of them, and every one of them was hiding something.
I slid it open.
Under a box of cigars lay a green ledger with a rubber band around it.
I opened it to the last page.
It was in his own handwriting, the neat tidy hand of a man who believed nobody would ever read it.
Ellacombe Savings, loans carried off the books.
I ran my finger down the column.
I did the sum twice.
Eleven million, four hundred thousand dollars.
They weren't selling me to a man with money.
They were selling me to a man who would pay for the funeral.
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