When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  “This is where you meet Rand,” said Joey, recognizing the beats of a story.

  “Yes, Rand was with two friends. They’d graduated from Michigan and were traveling the Greek islands. They were only supposed to stay two days but wound up extending to ten.” Bea studied her lemon-yellow fingernails. “I suppose it would be cliché to say it was love at first sight.”

  Joey felt herself getting riled. “It would be. Let me save you the trouble. Rand couldn’t take his eyes off your bikini. He said something suave and Rand-ish. He wined and dined you, and when Grandfather was sleeping, you sneaked off.”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay.” Joey twined her fingers together. “So then what?”

  “Well, Grandfather wasn’t an idiot. Eventually, I had to introduce him to Rand, and he gathered immediately that Rand wasn’t Jewish. Now, Grandfather wasn’t particularly bothered by this, but his allegiance was clearly to G. He told her on the phone.”

  “And?”

  “And what do you think? G said things like extremely disappointed and this is what they died at Auschwitz for. She ordered us directly home. Grandfather did one thing for me though. He said, I’m going to sleep, and he kissed my forehead. It was six P.M. He gave me one last night. Our flight was the next day. I’ve never been so upset.”

  “Upset,” Joey whispered. “You’ve never been so upset? Do you remember when Leo broke up with me? It was all because of you. To save you and Rand from your lies. You ruined our lives, but who cares about us kids, right?”

  “Oh, honey.” Bea stared at her hands. “I can’t believe…I didn’t know that was why Leo broke up with you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Really, I didn’t. Not at the time, at least. I didn’t realize Leo had seen us at Salto. Rand only told me later. And it was the year Grandfather died. I was a mess. I didn’t know what I could possibly do to fix things for you.”

  “That’s why you guys never went back to Corfu, then?” Joey said, rolling the thought around in her head. “I thought it was in solidarity with me, that because I didn’t want to go back, you and Dad didn’t either. But—”

  “It was Leo’s condition to Rand, for keeping our secret. Yes. I told your father it was time for a change of pace. That he was missing far too much of our time in Corfu. We—”

  “You started going to Vermont for a couple of weeks in the summer.” They’d tried to convince her to join, suddenly all presidents of the Vermont Tourism Department. But Joey had been on a mission then, her quest to get into law school becoming her singular life purpose. Her dad had been so proud when she’d announced she wanted to try following in his footsteps.

  “Oh, Joey, I’m so sorry for all of this. I can’t believe…oh God.”

  Joey bit her lip. “Go back to the Rand story. I still don’t understand how it happened.”

  Bea’s eyes went away somewhere. “Well, when we had to split that summer we met, Rand and I were a mess. We had to figure out a way to be together. We knew Rand couldn’t call. I was living at home then, going to Nova, so we decided he’d write and use a code name. Harry Berry.”

  “Harry Berry,” Joey said, processing it.

  “Yes, well, I never received a letter from Harry Berry. Every day, I came from summer session and looked through the mail on the table, and my mother said, Nothing for you, dear. I believed her. Well, what reason did I have not to? I didn’t hear from Rand. I didn’t hear from Harry Berry. I stopped eating.”

  “You stopped eating.” The venom in Joey’s voice scared her.

  “I tried writing him too. After all, who said men got God’s gift of initiating things? But no response. I thought of going to Michigan. We’d made promises. We said it had never been this way before. But what would happen, huh? I’d catch him with another girl? I’d be made a fool? He didn’t want me—clear as day.

  “Every day I used to roller-skate around the neighborhood. It was sort of the way I’d get out my sadness. And, well, your dad lived next door. I used to see him, and we’d catch up, casual, really. He’d just finished law school and was studying for the bar. G and Grandfather adored him. He’d asked me out over the years. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, but just, he seemed like the boy you’d be serious about, not the boy you’d have fun with.”

  “Well, it seems like you got to have a lot of fun,” Joey said, but even as it came out she was wincing at her cruelty.

  Her mother gazed at her nails again. “Not long after I got home, a few weeks maybe, a month, with no word from Rand, I was roller-skating and bumped into your father. He said he’d gotten two tickets to an art show at the Miami Art Museum. You know your father. He only goes to art shows to appease me.”

  “Dad was pulling out the stops.” Joey had heard this version of the story before. “I know where we’re headed now—unexpected pregnancy. Me.”

  “Yes, well, so you know then.”

  “No, I don’t know! I don’t know, Mom.” A sob caught in her throat. “I don’t know how our adulterous family vacations originated.”

  “Well…that part was unexpected.”

  “Unexpected.” Joey grimaced. An ice cream truck outside began to chime.

  “When you were nine,” her mother said, “I gave a few guest lectures at a college in Carmel. They paid to fly me out, even hosted me at a gallery opening. It was really flattering at a point in my career when I felt I was floundering. It felt like I was just this, well, mother…. I was at this tiny airport in Monterey. I was eating cheese fries of all things when I saw Rand. I felt, well, my heart stopped. I considered not saying anything—”

  “That would have been the right answer.”

  “I can’t reinvent history now, darling, can I?” Bea said it almost wistfully. “I said his name, and he broke into the biggest smile. I felt so happy. He’d been in San Francisco for a real estate conference and had driven down the coast to check out a property. The first thing he said was how sad he’d been that I never answered his letters.

  “I never answered your letters? I said. I waited for those letters every day. And I sent you my own too. You see.” Her mother got a vacant look in her eyes. “That was the day I began to hate my mother. I understood it then. She’d known me too well. She’d known about Rand, and she’d had to thwart him. Nothing for you today, dear. He wrote at least five times before he gave up. And G must have deliberately taken my letters out of the mailbox, as well.”

  Bea tucked her feet under her hip. “There were storms that evening. Our flights were delayed. We sat there wondering if they’d be canceled. Hoping maybe. Ultimately, our flights weren’t canceled, but we decided to tell Scott and Maisy they were. We got a hotel room. It was…well…magic.”

  “Magic.” Joey was going to be sick.

  “But you have to know, Joey, how conflicted I was. I was so ashamed I had done it. The next day, you and Dad were all I thought about on my way home. I did love my life. I do love my life.”

  “You have an interesting way of showing it. Making us both the backdrop of your affair. Making us…I don’t know…footnotes.”

  Her mother sighed. “Corfu. It was never supposed to be like that.”

  “Like what? The incestuous Brady Bunch?”

  “It snowballed. It snowballed, and we snowballed. JoJo, have you ever had two things you loved so desperately?”

  “No.” A thought floated toward her, though, that she quickly flicked away. “I haven’t.”

  “No, I suppose you haven’t.”

  Joey fiddled with her thin gold bangle that she never took off, that she’d bought in Bali and had stamped with the words SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD SO SHE DID. “So finish the story.”

  “It was Rand’s idea. He wanted us to get away together after Monterey, but I didn’t see how that could be possible. We both had families. I loved your father. I did. I mean, I do. I really, really love your father. You know I do. Just differently from the all-consuming way I loved Rand…”

  That she threw aroun
d her love for Rand so casually was a sucker punch. Joey endured another swell of nausea. Her foot nudged a piece of cracker in the couch. She dug it out from under the cushion.

  “Rand said, We have kids the same age. They could play. Just this one time. We’ll spend the summer together, and when Scott’s back in Florida or Maisy is under the weather…” Her mother made air quotes. “I know how terrible that sounds.”

  Joey set the cracker on a side table. “Not how terrible it sounds, Mom,” she said quietly. “How terrible it is.”

  “I agree, Joey. I don’t know, maybe part of us wanted to get caught that first summer. Wanted to make it so we could be together. But it seemed so impossible. We both had lives we liked. Rand and Maisy got on less so, but he’d also met her right after me. They’d also gotten pregnant soon and built his business. She was loyal, as far as I knew. This was supposed to be our summer in the place where we fell in love.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we couldn’t fall out of love. And then our families grew to love each other. Your father and Rand had a genuine friendship. Me and Maisy too.”

  “Come on, Mom? Genuine? You were sleeping with her husband.”

  “I know. It was awful.” Her mother put a hand to her chest. Her hand had prominent veins and little brown age spots Joey had never noticed before.

  Suddenly Joey thought of something. “And did you meet during the year too? Did you rendezvous while I was in school and Dad was at work?”

  Bea went back to staring at her nails again. “We did a couple of times after that first summer, but to be honest, there was something wrong about it. We decided we could only be a summer thing.”

  Joey’s jaw clenched. “Let me get this straight. There was something wrong about cheating on Dad when he was far away, but not when he was sitting across the table?”

  “Oh, Joey.” Her mother wrapped her fingers in the fringe dangling off a throw pillow. “All I can tell you is that Rand and I met a few weekends outside the summer, and it just felt so deceptive.”

  “But you liked the adventure. It almost sounds like…like you wanted to get caught.”

  “I don’t know, Joey,” her mother whispered. “Maybe sometimes you have to risk hurting people you love in order to be happy.”

  “Hurting me, you mean. Hurting Dad. But I don’t get one thing.” Joey forced herself to say the word. “Lily.”

  Her mother buried her head in her knees. “You were never supposed to find out about Lily.”

  “I think it’s a miracle no one found out sooner. Well, Leo.” Joey took a deep breath. “Did you always know Lily wasn’t Dad’s?”

  After some time, Bea lifted her head back up, her eyes smeared in mascara. “I was pretty sure. I stayed later on Corfu that summer. We had sex once, your dad and I, before he took you back to Florida to start school, but I wasn’t ovulating then.

  “I hoped, I prayed, it was your dad’s. I had nightmares all that year that the baby would come out Rand’s twin. I thought about aborting it, but I wanted her. I just…I wanted her. Lucky for me, she came out Lily. Just herself. But I knew immediately. She’s mostly me, of course. But Rand’s eyes. His smile.”

  “Rand knew too.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Rand knew too.”

  “And he just gave her to Dad? Like that?”

  “It wasn’t as easy as that, JoJo. Look, Rand’s a good person. He knew I loved your dad and what a good dad your father is. And Rand has a lot of strengths, but maybe fatherhood isn’t his top. He didn’t want to start again. And what were we going to do? Break up our families and raise Lily in some dysfunctional mash-up? You weren’t even out of high school yet. I didn’t want to do that to you.”

  “Oh, thank you so much for that consideration.”

  Her mother’s hand went to her throat, her face stricken. “Please don’t tell your father. Please, JoJo. It would break him. It would tear up Lily’s life. Please, JoJo. I know it’s not a fair request. I know what I’ve done is unforgivable. But after Grandfather died and we left Corfu, I never saw Rand again. We put a stop to it fifteen years ago.”

  “Because that was Leo’s condition! Because Leo forced your hand.”

  “Well, either way, we listened. We tried to do the right thing.”

  “For Lily,” said Joey very softly. “Listen, Mom, I’ll let you know what Leo and I decide to do about all this. But I’ll tell you one thing. Whatever we decide, I just…I don’t know if I can ever forgive you. And at my wedding…” A fresh pain sucker-punched Joey. Her wedding. It felt inconceivable to fast-forward a week or so, to imagine being happy and carefree.

  “At my wedding, I’m sure I’ll hug you and enjoy with you and you’ll think this is over. But this isn’t over. This can never be over. You made it that way. We can’t come back from this, Mom.”

  Joey stood, thinking how that was the most unfair part of all—that life didn’t give rewinds, even when you really deserved one.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  Another call. Was there no end?

  Eighteen-year-old Lily had been stalking Joey, intensifying her calls in the last hour. She was in the don’t-let-up camp of communication, her persistence likely why she now stood on first-name footing with Anna Wintour.

  A heavy dread shuddered through Joey. She silenced her little sister and propped herself up on her pillow, now covered in dried tear splotches.

  After having it out with her mother, Joey had flung herself into her bed and prayed for sleep. But sleep had been like, Ha ha ha. It was hard to conceive that only ten hours prior she’d sat with Leo on the beach, entirely oblivious to the Swiss cheese foundation of her life. Joey had to protect Lily, and she would. But first she had to process things herself. However in the world she was supposed to do that?

  Joey scrolled to Siya’s contact. She hovered over the number, imagining her best friend’s shock (disapproval?) that Joey had agreed to meet Leo, and then of course Siya’s disgust at Leo’s revelations. She’d start to dash off opinions—Siya had endless, strong, well-meaning opinions—and no doubt she’d want to pick things apart with forensic scrutiny. She came by it honestly; her father was a detective and had raised Siya to believe she was a legitimate Nancy Drew. But Joey didn’t want to pick things apart even more. She needed to forget for a while. To the extent possible, distract.

  Joey threw off her covers and went to the second bedroom that she used as her art den. She sat on a stool before the canvas propped upon her easel. She’d spontaneously grabbed the canvas from her parents’ house before leaving that afternoon. The canvas was a sketch of green eyes.

  Lily kept calling. With each call, Joey’s charge between pencil and canvas fizzled. The phone rang again, and Joey considered flinging it at the wall. Now the screen read KATRINA—Lily’s assistant, older than Lily by a decade and perennially kind.

  “Hey, Kat.”

  “Finally,” came the soft, authoritative voice of Joey’s little sister.

  Joey’s pencil slipped from her fingertips. Her throat felt like a clogged drain. Lily was Rand’s daughter, arguably the biggest victim of their mother’s lies—it was still so inconceivable to absorb. Joey imagined Lily, in her prime in the spotlight of their father’s affection. How could Bea have done it? Joey imagined her devastation if it were her in Lily’s place, how it would cast questions across her entire life. But Joey also couldn’t shake the tiny, mean voice inside her, saying that if not for Lily, Leo wouldn’t have broken up with Joey and sent her on a downward spiral all those years prior.

  “Oh. Hi, Lil.” Joey closed her eyes. “Sorry, I was sketching.”

  “It’s okay. But I hope you don’t wait this long to respond to your clients.”

  “My clients don’t leave thirty seconds between calls.” And I have no clients at the moment.

  “Sorry, that wasn’t fair.” Lily prided herself on being fair. Fair was her favorite buzzword. Next to femi
nist. And ethical fashion. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” Joey said and almost laughed. Good. “How are you?”

  “Oh, good too. Busy. Listen, I have a business proposition. You know Edith?”

  “The older lady?” Joey brushed pencil shavings from her thigh. She conjured a vague image of Lily with her hair teased into a purple beehive beside a woman seventy years her senior sporting the same ’do. Something about friends straddling generations. The Saviors of Feminism. It had been in one of those big magazines.

  “Yeah. So listen, Edith moved into a huge place on the Intracoastal. I was there the other day for kombucha. We’re hosting a party together, for the launch of this jewelry made by rural Sri Lankan women. The design of the collection is amazing—all types of lariats made from cord. Anyway, Guy Lazant’s heading up the art. He’s got her some major pieces, but Edith has this huge foyer. It’s a grotto vibe, and there’s this blank wall, and none of Guy’s suggestions are important enough.”

  “Wait, back up. Who’s Guy?”

  “The art cultivator. So I showed Edith your evil eye stuff from Bali. Edith was intrigued. She’s interested in having you do an evil eye wall. Something striking. The party’s next Thursday so you’d have to get on it fast.”

  “Next Thursday! Have you forgotten I’m getting married next Saturday?”

  “The timing sucks.” Lily sounded genuinely remorseful. “But Joey, she’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars. And Vogue is sending a photographer.”

  “Seriously, Lil?”

  “I’m always serious,” her sister reminded her, and it was true. Lily Abrams was serious, indeed. Tackling fashion and feminism on her Instagram and YouTube with an authenticity that had earned her millions in social media followers. By age fourteen, inclusion in 30 under 30 in the Media category in Forbes. At fifteen, anointed by Time as one of the world’s most influential teens. At sixteen, photographed beside her new friend Anna Wintour at New York Fashion Week. And at seventeen, designed a well-received fashion line at Kohl’s “for the teen who aspires to a Parisian wardrobe with a croissant budget.”