When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  “My kids are going to call you Unicorn?” asked Joey.

  “Unicorn it will be.” Scott kissed Bea’s cheek. “I can hardly believe the whole gang’s together again.” Scott’s phone buzzed on the table. He checked it briefly and turned it over. “Well, minus a few players…”

  “And plus one,” said Grant in a breezy way.

  “The plus one is the most important one.” Scott walked back over to the grill.

  “The plus one is definitely the most important one,” whispered Joey into his ear. She watched Leo watch them. She glanced down at the burger her father now put before her.

  “To Grant.” Leo raised his beer. “To Grant and my old friend Joey. I’m honored to be here for your wedding.”

  “We’re honored to have you here, Leo.” Scott finished doling out the burgers. “Now tell us everything that’s happened the last fifteen years, son.”

  * * *

  “A son!” said Scott. “You have a son, Leo. I can hardly believe it.”

  Leo showed a picture on his phone of a kid with floppy blond hair, bright-blue eyes, and a toothy smile.

  “He’s so cute, Leo, wow.” Scott flipped through the photos. “A lot of Rand, eh?”

  “His eyes.” Leo zoomed in. “The eyes are pure Rand.”

  “The eyes…” It was so obvious to Joey now. The eyes were pure Lily too. Everyone always said Bea, but their mother’s were almond, clear, without nuance. The wider shape, the murkier quality—that was all Rand. That they could look at this picture of Arthur and still skirt around it revolted her. She was glad it was all going to come out soon. Joey felt Bea watch her with trepidation.

  “The hair is Maisy,” said Scott. “But much lighter even.”

  “The hair is actually his mother’s,” said Leo. “His mother has very blond hair.”

  It was a new fact about Grown Leo. Grown Leo liked women who had very blond hair.

  Bea looked up from her planner open on her lap. “JoJo, we still have so much to do this week.”

  “Do we? Because I don’t really have time. The painting for Edith is my top priority.”

  “What Joey means is, her painting is her top priority, after getting married.” Grant propped a loafer on his knee.

  “Of course, that’s what I meant.” Joey squeezed his hand. “I don’t care about the details. Give me a sunny day with no rain, and beyond that, Grant and I don’t care.”

  “What Joey means is, she cares very much, but not about the minutiae. And by the way, babe, forecast says eighty-four and partly sunny with only a seventeen percent chance of rain.”

  “I don’t like that seventeen percent. Do you—”

  “Well, Joey, I don’t care that you don’t care about the minutiae,” said Bea. “I’d like you to care about it for five minutes.”

  “Fine,” Joey said. “Just…fine.”

  Bea sighed so heavily that her outfit fluttered around her, giving her the appearance of a peacock on the precipice of flight. “So, just to clarify,” said Bea, standing and stretching in such a way that her abs peeped out to say hello, which Joey was sure was the entire point, “you’ve made the Hot Tamale and Sour Patch Kid bags, and that is about the extent of your contribution to this wedding?”

  “I wanted to elope, Mom,” said Joey. “You were the one who said you’d plan the whole thing.”

  “Joey,” said Scott, “show a bit of gratitude to your mother. She’s running herself ragged.”

  Joey appraised her mother. She did not look one iota of ragged. For all Joey knew, her mother was going to show up on Saturday in her own wedding gown. Her second coming. The viciousness of her thoughts swelled Joey to a height from which she swiftly plummeted. She wished she wasn’t so damn angry.

  “Sorry, Dad,” she started to say, as her father stood up. Scott didn’t anger quickly. She hated to be the one hurting him.

  “Everyone, please excuse me. I have to run a very quick errand,” Scott said.

  “You have to go now? I said I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be back in a jiff, Joey.” He gave a half smile. “Now don’t anyone move a muscle, okay?”

  The screen door closed, and Bea slumped her shoulders. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this charade.”

  “Stop. Dad could come back any moment.”

  “Oh, I know where he went, Joey.” Bea flicked the pages of her list and then with her fist smacked it onto the table. “He has some surprise for you. Some big surprise photo book thing, which I’m sure you’ll appreciate to the nines and lavish attention on him because he’s your perfect father and I’m just the mother who birthed you without an epidural and planned ninety-nine point nine percent of your wedding.”

  “We’re really grateful,” said Grant at the same time as Joey said, “This isn’t a fair contest at this stage, Mom. Dad’s not the one who had an affair.”

  “Let’s not go there today.” Leo set down his phone. Arthur and his blue eyes lit up on the screensaver.

  “We haven’t really gone there yet,” said Joey. “That’s the problem.”

  “Jonesey…”

  “What, Leo? Lily’s going to be home later, you know. Your sister, Lily. Your sister is going to walk through that door in some outlandish outfit with those same blue eyes. With Rand’s blue eyes. With Arthur’s blue eyes. And you’re going to have to keep quiet yet again. You’re going to have to look at your sister and give her back to us because she doesn’t know she belongs to you too. Doesn’t that just kill you?”

  “Your sister, Lily?”

  Joey swiveled to the voice, to Lily standing in the sliding door in a majestic floral headdress. She had a hand on her didgeridoo. Her blue eyes were soft, contemplative, like an adult helping a child finish an easy puzzle. Joey watched those blue eyes melt from curiosity to confusion.

  “Your sister, Lily? But…?”

  Joey died in the span of the poison reaching Lily’s brain.

  When no one spoke, Lily slammed the didgeridoo into the ground. But then all of her seemed to deflate, and Lily’s hand released the didgeridoo. It fell to the ground with a clang. She whispered very softly, “Please will someone tell me what that means.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  “What do you mean I’m Leo’s sister? So…Leo is my brother?” Lily’s headdress slipped crookedly on her head. Still, no one spoke.

  “It’s over.” Joey placed a hand over her wild heart. She could hardly believe it had been expelled into the world.

  “Holy…” said Grant.

  “So you’re not my mother?” Lily asked a white-faced Bea.

  Joey got up and put an arm around her sister. “Come here, Lil. Sit.”

  “I don’t wanna sit, Joey.” Lily threw her off. “I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  “Please, Lil,” said Bea. “Calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me what to fucking do.” Lily sank into the chair Grant shifted beneath her. “I just found out I have a brother. Him!” Lily’s eyes fixed on Leo’s for the first time. “Wait, Leo is my brother? I don’t get it.” That was the thing about those Winn eyes. You could see everything in them. “So you’re not my mom?”

  “Mom is your mom, Lil…” Joey stood on her tiptoes and stroked the fuzzy strawberry hair on the perimeter of Lily’s forehead that poked out from under her headdress.

  “Get off me, Joey!” Lily shoved her off and grabbed ahold of the didgeridoo. “So then, what? Daddy’s not my daddy?”

  “Oh, Lil.”

  Lily held the didgeridoo to her chest. “I want you all to tell me the truth.”

  “Daddy’s not your biological dad.” Bea took a tentative step toward Lily. “But he’s your father in every way that counts. I’m so sorry you’re finding out this way. I’m so sorry, baby. Lily Pad, come here. I’ll explain it, and maybe you can understand—”

  “Understand what? That you’ve been lying to me my entire life?” B
ea’s head jerked like she’d been slapped. “That you had an affair with—wait a minute—Leo’s father?”

  “Lily,” said Grant. “You have to know—”

  “Shut up!” screamed Lily. She clapped her hands over her ears. “Shut up, shut up! You’re not even family. Shut the hell up.”

  “Lily!” said Joey. “That’s so rude! And he is family!”

  “You all knew?” Lily glanced from person to person. “All of you? Leo?”

  Joey watched all of their frozen faces reflected in the glass door.

  “Lily, I…” Leo closed his eyes.

  “Even Daddy?” asked Lily in a heartbreakingly weak lilt. Joey berated herself for anytime in the past week she’d subconsciously blamed Lily for this. This wasn’t Lily’s fault. Lily was the casualty.

  “Dad doesn’t know.” Bea’s lips were chapped and pursed. “Dad doesn’t know, baby.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true,” said a voice from the side of the house.

  Joey saw his white legs before she saw his face. Those skinny white legs in khaki shorts such a pale shade of beige they practically melded with his skin tone. He must have come from the gravel path that began at the driveway and ended at the steps on the far side of the patio.

  The words weren’t comporting for Joey. Joey’s eyes traveled to her father’s face. It was devoid of surprise, not gelling with the magnitude of the shock waves.

  “I actually do know,” whispered Scott, and as he hung his head, Joey’s world tipped off its axis.

  * * *

  “You know?” said Bea. “How could you know?”

  “What do you mean, you know?” said Joey.

  “Scott?” said Leo.

  “Daddy,” whispered Lily.

  Scott closed his eyes and made a humming sound.

  It was Tuesday. Tuesday was the worst day of the week. That’s what the old woman had told Joey all that time ago in Corfu, when she’d stood outside the synagogue waiting for her father. Then her last day with Leo was a Tuesday. Then her grandfather died on a Tuesday. Joey dug in her purse for her evil eye charm. Out came a peach lip gloss. Out came an empty Tic Tac container and a bunch of receipts she removed with her napkin because she’d read somewhere that touching them was basically akin to licking the floor of a Monsanto plant.

  Where the hell was her evil eye charm? In fury, Joey threw her empty purse. She intended it to go far. At least to the potted cactus by the steps. Instead, the purse crumpled in unceremonious fashion to the ground by Joey’s feet.

  “Oh, you’re upset, Joey?” said Lily. “Oh, really, you’re the one who gets to throw a tantrum?”

  “You all get to tantrum.” Grant put a hand on Joey’s shoulder.

  Her father continued to hum with his eyes shut, rocking back and forth like a crazy person.

  “Scott.” Bea’s mouth opened and then closed. “Scott, I don’t—”

  For a very long time, Joey watched her father with no pity, no pity at all.

  “Someone needs to tell me what is going on!” said Lily.

  As Scott buried his face in his hands, Bea walked Lily through the highlights. Meeting Rand in the early eighties. Harry Berry. The letters G hid. The reunion in Monterey. The Corfu plan. The feigned spontaneous meeting in the building on Delvinioti Street. The families becoming family. Lily’s Place. The day Bea realized she was pregnant. An education on fertility windows. Welcome to the world, Lily Pad. Those blue eyes. Those blue eyes locked on your father—on Scott—and fell in love. I—we—couldn’t take him from you. Leo found out. We stopped going to Corfu. Joey found out last week. The End.

  “I can’t believe it.” Lily crunched down on her lip. “I just…”

  Joey forced the word out: “Dad?”

  Her father coughed a few times. Finally, he said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t get it, Dad. You knew?”

  “I knew.” Her father sat down on the lawn, even though it had rained earlier. He began plucking up clumps of wet grass.

  “You knew how, Scott?” said Bea. “You figured it out what, when we stopped going to Corfu?”

  Crickets. Then “Earlier.”

  “When Lily was born? You knew when Lily was born, and you didn’t say?”

  The moon materialized, like a wedge of peach with a mushy center. The mosquitoes converged on Joey’s right foot. She scratched her ankle so violently that it began to bleed.

  “Before Lily was born.” Her father’s voice was barely audible.

  Joey’s eyes suddenly caught on the vase of sunflowers on the table. It smacked her: the night she was eleven.

  “I heard voices,” she said, and everyone looked at her.

  “Babe.” Grant patted her shoulder like she was a delicate mental patient. “Babe.”

  She shoved him off. “No, stop. Listen. I really heard voices. When I was eleven. I’d had a nightmare and went to the terrace. I don’t remember what I saw. I just remember being back in bed. You tucked me back in, Dad. You said to imagine a field of sunflowers. You said I didn’t see anything.”

  “Scott!” Bea’s eyes widened.

  “Don’t Scott me!” he shouted, and instinctively, Joey covered her eyes.

  “It wasn’t you,” Joey said, it all dawning. “I remembered it the last summer we were on Corfu, that time when I was eleven. I think I briefly wondered if you and Maisy were having an affair. But I guess I forgot about it.”

  “Me and Maisy?” Scott shook his head. “Oh, honey.”

  “But it wasn’t you and Maisy.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Bea.

  “I don’t understand!” said Lily.

  “The voices I must have heard on the terrace were Mom and Rand. Seriously, Mom? In plain view?”

  “We never did anything on the terrace,” said Bea. “Give me a little credit, Joey.”

  “You deserve no credit. Zero credit. Ahhhhhhhhh.” Lily let out a banshee scream. Then she gave the didgeridoo a long blast. Eventually Lily removed her mouth from the lip and propped it against the table.

  “They were just talking,” said Scott. He’d now torn up a sizable patch of lawn. “But they thought we were asleep, me and Maisy. So the talking wasn’t normal talking. It was lovers talking—”

  “Scott, that was nine years before our last summer. I don’t—”

  “It was lovers talking, Bea, and I didn’t want Joey to catch on. She was such a perceptive kid. I walked you back, JoJo, and there were sunflowers on the kitchen table, so I guess I blabbered something about them—”

  “I’ve hated sunflowers ever since,” said Joey. “I don’t get it, Dad.”

  “I don’t either, Dad,” said Lily. Then her face changed. She tore off her headdress. “He’s not even my dad. Fuck, he’s not even my dad.”

  “I am your dad. Please, Lily. I am your dad.”

  “When did you know?” asked Bea.

  Scott exhaled deeply through his mouth. It was a long exhale, like blowing out birthday candles. Like huffing and puffing to blow the whole house down.

  “I knew before we were married,” he whispered. “I knew about Harry Berry.”

  Bea looked at Scott like she’d never seen him before. “But I never talked about Rand. Not to you or anyone. And definitely not about Harry Berry.”

  “You did,” said Scott. “You were skating around the neighborhood with that girlfriend you had. Remember her? Her name was—”

  “Veronica.” Still Bea looked blank. “Right. With the great legs.”

  “Yes, Veronica. You’d just gotten back from Corfu. You wore these tiny jean shorts to roller-skate around the neighborhood. I was studying outside on a blanket on the lawn. I don’t even think you noticed me. You girls stopped in front of the mailbox. You were looking for a letter—”

  “Harry Berry…”

  “You told the whole story to Veronica. How you’d fallen in love. How he was going to write to you in code. You weren’t surprised there was no letter yet. You’d just gotten
back that week.”

  “No.” Bea put a hand to her mouth.

  “It’s the least proud moment of my life,” he choked. “I’ve loved you since I could remember, Bea. You were this gangly girl dancing in the sprinklers. I loved you when my father died and you brought me a canvas and paintbrushes and told me painting helped when you were lost. Do you remember that? You sat beside me and did your own sketching, and I painted only black on that canvas. You looked at my terrible painting and said, I’m really sorry.

  “That was the year before, Bea. I was lost that year. My mom went to pieces, and I moved home to take care of her. Otherwise, she did things like forget to shower for two weeks. That’s why I was studying for the bar at home. That’s why I was there when you got back from Corfu. We talked a bit then. I thought maybe you were even flirting with me. When you said the whole Harry Berry thing—”

  “No!”

  “Well, it’s certainly the thing I’m most ashamed of in my whole life. You were at classes that summer. Your dad was working. Your mother hardly went outside. Just at—”

  “Four in the afternoon,” said Bea slowly.

  Scott nodded. “To get the mail. But the mailman came around two. A few times, I went to your mailbox. I peeked inside. I told myself I was just curious. You remember, your mailbox was right next to mine.”

  “Yes.” Bea put a hand to her throat.

  “Oh my God,” said Joey.

  “A few days later there was a letter.”

  “Harry Berry,” said Bea.

  “Fuck this Harry Berry,” said Lily. “Can we get to the part where we talk about what shitty people you both are? Where we talk about how you deceived me my whole life?”

  “I want to hear this part,” said Joey. “Go on, Dad.”

  “Well, you can figure out the rest. I took the letter back to my room. It was just temporary, I told myself. I’d read it and see what was so great about this Harry Berry guy. What he had that I didn’t. Then I’d put it back. But I couldn’t bring myself to read the letter—”

  “Well, isn’t that saintly?” Bea almost laughed.