Liv Constantine - The Last Mrs. Parrish

“Your best friend? You may as well say Margarita’s your best friend. She’s a nothing.”

I corrected myself. “Of course, you’re right. That’s not what I meant. I meant she’s the one person who understands what I’ve been through. I feel like I owe her something. Besides, she always says how welcome you make her feel and how much she admires you.”

That mollified him. For a man so smart, you’d think he would have seen through it. But that was the thing with Jackson: he always wanted to believe that everyone adored him.

So she’d come, and it was nice to have a friend. To watch Jackson interact with her, you would never know how he truly felt. When she arrived, he gave her a big smile and embrace.

“Welcome. So glad you could come.”

She smiled shyly and murmured a thank-you.

“Let me get you a drink. What’ll you have?”

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“Come on, Amber. You’re going to need it to get through the day.” He gave her a dazzling smile. “You like Cabs, right?”

She nodded.

“Be right back.”

“Where can I put my gift?” she asked me.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s just a little something I thought she would like.”

Later, when Tallulah was opening her gifts, I watched with interest as she came to Amber’s present. It was a book on the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Tallulah looked over and gave her a subdued thank-you.

“I remembered you were reading his stories that day in New York,” Amber called over to her.

“Isn’t she a bit young for Poe?” my mother asked within Amber’s earshot, never one to hold back.

“Tallulah’s very advanced for her age. She’s reading at an eighth-grade level,” I said.

“There’s a difference between intellectual development and emotional development,” my mother pointed out.

Amber said nothing, merely looked at the ground, and I felt torn between defending her and validating my mother’s concerns.

“I’ll look it over, and if you’re right, I’ll put it aside until she’s older.” I smiled at my mother.

I looked up to see Surrey running to retrieve some presents that were scattered on the floor.

“Good heavens, what is going on?” my mother asked.

“Bella threw them from the pile,” Amber said.

“What?” I ran over to see what had happened.

Bella was standing in front of the table, hands on her hips, her bottom lip stuck out as far as it would go.

“Bella, what’s wrong?”

“It’s not fair. She gets all these presents, and no one brought me anything.”

“It’s not your birthday. You had your birthday six months ago.”

She stomped her foot. “I don’t care. I didn’t get this many presents. And I didn’t have ponies.” She raised her little fist and smashed it down on the corner of the cake.

I didn’t need this today. “Surrey, would you please take Bella inside until she calms down?” I pointed at the cake. “See if you can fix that.”

Surrey tried to get Bella to go with her, but Bella refused, running in the other direction. I was glad that none of the other children’s mothers were around to witness it. I didn’t have the energy to go after her. At least she wasn’t bothering anyone now.

When I walked back to Amber and my mother, I was fixed with a disapproving look from the latter.

“That child is spoiled rotten.”

The blood pounded in my ears. “Mother, she just has a hard time managing her emotions.”

“She’s overindulged. Maybe if you didn’t leave the parenting to the nannies, she’d be better behaved.”

Amber gave me a sympathetic look, and I took a deep breath, afraid of saying something I’d regret.

“I would appreciate it if you kept your parenting opinions to yourself. Bella is my daughter, not yours.”

“No kidding. If she were mine, she wouldn’t act like that.”

I jumped up and ran into the house. Who was she to judge me? She had no idea what my life was like. And whose fault is that? a little voice asked. I wished she was a bigger part of my life, that she understood my reasons for the way I parented. But right now her disapproval and critical comments were just one more voice in a sea of accusations that I lived with daily.

I grabbed a Valium from my purse and downed it dry. Amber walked into the kitchen, came over, and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Mothers,” she said.

I blinked back the tears and said nothing.

“Don’t let her get to you. She means well. You’re a terrific mother.”

“I try to be. I know Bella’s a handful, but she has a good heart. Do you think I’m too easy on her?”

She shook her head. “Of course not. She’s a darling. Just impetuous, but she’ll grow out of it. What she needs is understanding and nurturing.”

“I don’t know.”

I couldn’t blame my mother. It did look like I turned a blind eye to Bella’s misbehavior. What my mother didn’t know was that Bella cried herself to sleep more nights than not. Jackson may have been the doting father in public, but in private, he knew just the right things to say to pit the girls against each other and to make Bella feel inferior to her older sister. Bella struggled with her reading and was behind her schoolmates. First grade was almost over, and she was not even close to reading. When Tallulah finished first grade, she was reading at a fifth-grade level. Jackson was quick to remind Bella of that. Poor Bella was lucky if she could get through the primers. Her teacher strongly recommended testing, but Jackson refused. We’d had an argument about it in the car on the way home from the conference.

“She may have a learning disability. It’s not so uncommon.”

He kept his eyes straight ahead and answered me through clenched teeth. “She’s just lazy. That child does what she wants to when she wants to.”

I felt frustration well up. “That’s not true. She tries so hard. She’s in tears every night trying to get through a page or two. I really think she needs help.”

He slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “Damn it, we’re not having her labeled as dyslexic or whatever. That will follow her forever, and she’ll never get into Charterhouse. We’ll hire a private tutor, and I don’t care if she has to work five hours a day, she will learn to read.”

I’d closed my eyes in resignation. There was no use in arguing with him. When the girls reached high school, he planned to send them away to Charterhouse, an exclusive boarding school in England. But I knew in my heart that before that day ever came, I would find a way for us to escape. In the meantime, I pretended to go along.

I’d hired a tutor with a background in special education. Without Jackson or Bella realizing it, she had evaluated her and suspected dyslexia. How was Bella going to get through school without any accommodations, without anyone knowing the way she learned? I knew she was in the wrong place. St. Luke’s didn’t have the resources to provide her with what she needed, but Jackson refused to discuss moving her anywhere else.

The poor child went to school all day and then came home to more lessons with the tutor just to keep up. They worked together for hours, Bella’s progress torturously slow and further impeded by her resistance to more desk time. She wanted to go play, and she should have been able to. But every night at dinner, Jackson would insist she read to us. When she stumbled over a word or took too long to sound something out, he’d drum his fingers on the table until she began to stutter even more. The ironic thing was, he didn’t understand how his impatience was having the opposite of its intended effect. He actually thought he was doing the right thing, being on top of her schooling — or at least that’s what he claimed. We all began to dread family dinners. And Bella, poor thing, was exhausted all the time, overwrought and beset with self-doubt.