“Does Uncle Paul know?”
“He knows,” said Jonathan grimly. “Dad said it was a good thing Tom wasn’t going to prison because that meant he could go to rehab instead, and that if the state didn’t revoke his license, he would.”
“Oh! What does Tom say to that?”
“Not much. He’s still in pain from his back and his jaw. Plus he’s kind of confused. His short-term memory’s pretty much come back, but it’s like parts of his long-term memory just got erased! The last couple years, in fact. When Marcy showed up, he didn’t know who she was.”
“Poor Marcy!” Imagine the boyfriend you lived with not even recognizing you! “Did he still…like her?”
“I think she grew on him when she offered to spike his milkshake with rum.” Jonathan rolled his eyes. “His jaw is fractured,” he explained. “They’ve wired it shut. He can only do food through a straw.”
“Poor, poor, stupid Tom! And stupid Marcy, offering him alcohol! Didn’t she learn anything? Oh, Jonathan—I wish I could be there. Everyone must be so exhausted and stressed out. Look at you. But I’m glad you took the trouble to come and see me. Be sure to tell Uncle Paul that if I can—help—in any way—”
To my dismay, Jonathan sagged forward, covering his face with his hands. “I have other news, Frannie. It gets worse.”
Worse? My mind ran through a dozen worst-case scenarios that didn’t involve Tom’s death. Was he paralyzed? From the waist down? The neck down? But then how would he have back pain? Plucking at Jonathan’s shirt I realized his shoulders had begun to shake, and my alarm grew. It was bad. It was really bad, if Jonathan was—crying.
For a second time I tore my thighs off the plastic chair, rocketing to my feet. “Robbie—Jamie—time to dry off and go inside. You can watch TV.”
“It’s hot inside!” protested Robbie.
“Then turn on the fan and have a Push-Up. Mom bought a new box.”
“Can we have a Coke after our Push-Up?” pressed Jamie, sensing weakness.
“Yes. Fine. Just go. Go on.”
From their gleeful exchanged glances, I suspected they took my urgent desire to get rid of them as carte blanche where the junk food was concerned, but I didn’t care. I marched over and shut the hose off, waiting for the sliding glass door to shut behind my siblings. Then I stole back to my chair, my hand pausing over Jonathan. For the shortest fraction of a second I let it fall on his arm, and he seized it instantly in his own.
“Jonathan, what’s the matter? You’re scaring me. Is—is Tom paralyzed or something?”
He took a deep, unsteady breath and swallowed hard, still hanging on to my hand, gripping it so hard my bones protested, but I said nothing. “Frannie—it’s not Tom. I mean—it is—but—it’s that everyone’s gone crazy!” His blue eyes, anguished, met mine. After another moment, my fear and incomprehension must have registered because he apologized, made an effort to control himself. His hold slackened. I felt the blood resume flowing but I left my hand where it was.
“Tell me everything,” I said. “Please—I’ll listen. Just say it all.”
In answer he squeezed my hand again. We sat for some time—I don’t know how long. I remember thinking Robbie and Jamie were awfully quiet inside and were probably doing heaven-only-knew what, in which case Mom was going to light into me for not keeping an eye on them, but the Dawes’ house could have burned to the ground before I moved.
At last Jonathan spoke.
“Caroline left me.”
I nodded. “I know. She’s in New York with Eric. It must be hard to have her gone at such a time.”
“No. She’s back from New York. But not with me. She moved out.”
This made absolutely no sense. She what? I followed his gaze to the end of the Slip ʼn Slide, as if that might clarify things. It didn’t. I saw only that the plastic mat was wrinkled and needed smoothing out.
“She didn’t just go to New York to keep Eric company and get in some sightseeing,” Jonathan went on heavily. “She met someone there. One of the Hastings students she’s gotten to know over the last several months. His name is Rob Newman.”
“I met him!” I squeaked. “At your place. Caroline said he would be governor one day.”
I regretted my tactlessness instantly when I saw Jonathan wince. “Yes, him. I see you remember. Apparently he makes quite the impression on women.”
Realizations were catching up to my kneejerk reaction. Caroline met Rob Newman in New York? That “friend” she referred to was actually her—was actually the guy she was running around with, behind Jonathan’s back? For how long? When I saw him that one time, was that the beginning of it all? No wonder she never mentioned his name in her letter! Careful, careful, like her brother. She knew I had met him. But in her eagerness she couldn’t resist the temptation to write about him, however obliquely. Maybe she even smiled as she did it and thought, Poor adoring Frannie. This will be a blow when it comes.
Anger radiated through me. Caroline cheated on Jonathan? Caroline left Jonathan? Cheated on, and left, the very best man in the world? She was a tramp! And a fool. And it was exactly what a person like her would do and she never deserved Jonathan and this just proved it!
My cousin watched the parade of emotions across my face. “You didn’t know then, Frannie? She never—in all those times you hung out—or in her letters—”
I could hardly answer, my breath was coming so fast. “Know? Of course I didn’t know. The—she—how could she?” As fast as the rage came, it yielded to a desire to comfort him. “But Jonathan—you know how impulsive she is—she’ll come back, of course. After she gets this out of her system.”
He looked weary. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I hope so at this point. There are things—things that were hard. We’d been having some problems.”
“I’m sorry.” There was nothing else an inexperienced eighteen-year-old could say. It didn’t seem my place to ask probing questions, but there was no need. He had been bottling this up for a long time and found relief in speaking.
“You know what I hoped when I married her, Frannie—she’s so light, so joyous. And she loved me. It was enough—more than enough—for a while. We were so happy. At least—I was. And I think she was, too, in the beginning. It took time for the problems to start. You guessed one of them, I’m sure. Caroline didn’t want to go to church. Not just that—I realized spiritual questions never entered her mind. She wasn’t hostile; she just didn’t care. She humored me, when we were dating. That was all. And once we were married, she didn’t want to bother with it anymore. I could do all the ‘worrying and fussing about God for both of us,’ she said. She looked on faith as a silly habit from my childhood that she could tolerate, like I could tolerate the few times a year we saw her father. But we were always doing things—God got crowded out. We had weekends in the City or a late night Saturday night or a brunch to go to with friends on Sunday. I didn’t think about it much, even though, when we got married, the idea always was that, after a few years I’d go to seminary. We stopped talking about it. The few times I actually remembered God and made an effort to be in worship, Caroline refused to come. It was either go without her or don’t go. So I went less and less, just stuffing down my doubts and regrets to be dealt with later.” Grimacing, he released my hand to run his own through his hair. It was hot, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of his thoughts to offer him water, even if I dared to go inside and check on Robbie and Jamie.
“It all came to a head when she decided she wanted to go to law school,” Jonathan went on. “She assumed I’d lost interest in seminary, but, even so, she didn’t even tell me she was applying. I found the application in a kitchen drawer, and when I asked her about it, she laughed it off and said she sent for it on a whim, more to see if she could get in, than anything. I took her at her word, but it became pretty obvious pretty fast she was dead serious about it. Frannie—it was like one of those movies where the guy wakes up and doesn’t know where he is, or h
ow he got there. I had to do some serious soul-searching—was I okay giving up my dream so that Caroline could follow hers? It was like the part of me that dreamed that dream had died from neglect. At the very least it was in a coma and on life support. But even though I’d ignored it for a couple years, I wasn’t quite ready to pull the plug, and I sure as hell wasn’t ready for her to pull it without even consulting me. We got in some huge fights. I accused her of going back on our agreement. She accused me of being childish—she would never have considered going to law school if she honestly thought I still cherished bizarre notions of becoming a pastor. It was ugly. We had never, ever fought before, to that point in our marriage, and I think it shocked us both. ‘What kind of pastor would you be?’ she said, ‘dragging along your atheist lawyer wife? And no way am I gonna wear a flower-print dress and teach Sunday school and pretend to be something I’m not. You married me like I am.’ It was bitter, but she was right. When I married her, I knew she didn’t believe. I thought she was more open than she was, but the bottom line was the same. Because I loved her, I took that gamble. And since our marriage, she couldn’t be blamed if she thought I’d come around to her way of thinking. My behavior would convince any reasonable person”—he gave me a rueful smile—“that I’d forgotten all about God, the church, calls, dreams.”
“That day we had a fight—” I murmured.
“Your birthday, you mean,” corrected Jonathan, “—yeah, that was a bad one. I came straight from one with Caroline, where we went round and round in circles, just to get into another fight where I least expected it.”
“I’m so sorry! So, so sorry! I didn’t have any idea—I would never have—”
“Shhh…Frannie, stop. I know you didn’t, and even if you had, you didn’t say a single thing that wasn’t true. Not a single thing I hadn’t said to myself at one point. We’ve already worked through this, and I wasn’t bringing it up again to make you feel bad. You actually helped me clarify that day: Caroline was my wife, and my role as her husband was to love and support her, not to make her give up her thing for something I was so half-assed about. That was Decision #1. Decision #2 was that I would, in fact, stop being half-assed. I would get serious again and figure out if, when law school was finished, I would quit Core-Pro and pursue my original goal. You helped, Frannie.”
“Then why, Jonathan? If she got what she wanted, and you were okay with it, why didn’t everything get better?” What did she still want with Rob Newman? was what I meant.
He understood. “We’d been through such a rough patch I knew it would take time to heal. It’s hard to have your spouse’s least-promising attributes thrust in your face and forget all about it. I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not have faith in common with my wife for years, if ever. I could only love her and do right by her and follow God myself. The rest wasn’t up to me. And she—well, she had to deal with finding out her husband’s religious zeal had only been dormant, not dead. And that, worse yet, it was coming back to life.” Rubbing the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, he sighed. “It seemed like we stopped really talking when we stopped fighting. We were friendly, civil, but it was like she was pulling away. And the more I tried to draw near, the further away she went. I knew she wasn’t thrilled about me going to church and ‘cutting our weekend in half,’ but I kept going. And when I joined Eric’s Bible study…I guess she found a way to fill her time.”
He fell silent.
Gingerly, I peeled my legs from the plastic chair again, pulling it into the spotty shade of the lone backyard tree. Jonathan followed me automatically, his mind far away. A part of my brain registered the voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle floating out to us—the same part that registered relief because that meant Robbie and Jamie were parked in front of the television and not injuring themselves or each other.
To give him more space to think, I wandered over to the hose, picking up Jamie’s Holly Hobby watering can along the way. The hose water was warm, and the rusting container lent it a metallic flavor that reminded me of blood, but water was water. I didn’t want either of us adding heatstroke to heartbreak.
I looked over to find him watching me, an anxious furrow to his brow. When I held out the can, he took a long drink, thanking me, before placing it on the ground and gesturing for me to sit down again.
“There’s something else I need to tell you, Frannie. I probably should have led off with it, since it had more to do with you, but the temptation to spill my guts was too great. Thank you for listening, by the way.”
I felt my heart speed. Had Uncle Paul relented toward me?
“It’s about Eric.”
“Eric Grant? What about him?”
My cousin’s blue eyes sought mine, and I felt a blush rising. Why, I couldn’t have said—out of mixed feelings toward Eric or out of suspicion that everyone expected me to have feelings of some kind—
I cleared my throat. “I saw him just a couple weeks ago. I didn’t invite him to visit, but he came anyhow.”
“Frannie—I don’t know how this will hit you. If my head wasn’t so full of my marriage problems, this would’ve been enough by itself. As it is, I think I’m already so numbed I can’t even get my mind around it.”
“For God’s sake—what? Tell me, Jonathan!”
“Eric and Caroline were in New York, you know—along with dear Rob Newman. While they were there, they went to see Rachel.”
“I know,” I interrupted hurriedly. “Caroline said so in her letter.”
He nodded. “Did she—did she tell you how the visit went?”
“No. She wrote before it happened, and I didn’t hear from her again. Did Rachel and Eric get in a fight or something?” I knew they hadn’t, even as I framed the question. Greg Perkins’ odd behavior came back to me—did I know where Rachel was? All of a sudden, my face felt hotter than the Loveland sun could make it.
“Rachel—she’s in California now,” said Jonathan. “We actually didn’t know about it for a while, and Caroline said nothing. But Rachel is—staying with Eric. In his apartment.”
Something funny was happening to me. Jonathan’s voice receded as if I were walking away from him down a tunnel and there was a rush and thump that I didn’t recognize at first as my own blood and heartbeat.
“Frannie!” He grabbed my upper arm before I could slide out of the chair. “Good Lord—are you all right? Here—drink some more water.”
The Holly Hobby watering can swam into view but I pushed it away. No.
“Damn him!” my cousin swore. “I was afraid of this. Leading you on like that! You were right all along. He hadn’t changed, deep down. It was bad enough, to think he betrayed our trust and that Rachel would so lose her head—but I was clinging to the hope that you wouldn’t care—that all this time your indifference to him was God’s way of protecting your heart.” While he said this, he squeezed my shoulder with one hand and fanned me ineffectually with the other. “I’m sorry, Frannie. I’m sorry he hurt you and sorry that we all encouraged you to care for him.”
“I don’t care for him!” I protested, infuriated by how feeble I sounded and by the weight that settled on my chest. Shaking Jonathan off, I fought a childish urge to scream. I don’t care about him—I hate him! I hate every Grant I’ve ever met!
Only, I didn’t anymore.
I hated Caroline for hurting Jonathan (and I assumed it was temporary because I could hardly envision a world where someone would prefer a Rob Newman to a Jonathan Beresford long-term), but I was equally aware that she had hurt me. As unlike as we were, she was the closest thing I had to a sister. She had said so, too! I had spent far more alone time with her than I ever had with Rachel or Julie. She had written me the most since I went away, and when I had initiated our friendship of sorts, she had never refused me. I thought we shared our love of Jonathan, if nothing else. Of course she saw me first as Jonathan’s cousin, then as a quasi-friend-sister—I knew that—but I was aware of a stab of pain and loss to realize
she never shared with me what was really occupying her. And that maybe she never would. When would I see her again, and how would we overcome the awkwardness?
As convoluted as my feelings for Caroline were, they were clear-cut compared to the thicket of emotion Eric Grant plunged me into. I was eighteen—he was the first young man who ever showed interest in me, beyond a few snickering, pimpled boys at my high school who made me feel like something chopped to order at the butcher counter. It was true I disliked him at first—for years—but I had begun slowly to believe in his kindness to me. Without acknowledging it even to myself, I had begun to find his attentions flattering and—the very last time I saw him—not entirely unwelcome. It grieved me that all the goodness he was discovering in himself should be so quickly abandoned when temptation came. Whatever I had said in the past, if you had asked me an hour before Jonathan’s appearance, I would have grudgingly confessed that Eric Grant did indeed seem to be putting off his old self and putting on the new. And now?
Now, I was mortified. Familiar insecurities flooded back. Of course he would prefer Rachel. Even Caroline said how good she was looking. Don’t be ridiculous, Frannie! I chastised myself. You didn’t want him anyhow, and thank God. So much for his deep love for you—he chose a married woman with a baby over a tongue-tied, gauche girl, and who could blame him?
I am those things, I thought. Tongue-tied and gauche. But I was also who I was becoming—who I was created to be by a loving Father in heaven. I whispered my new names to myself. Confident. Precious. Chosen.
Tell the truth, Frannie. Is anything terribly wounded here, except your pride? No, not terribly, I had to admit, but there was a pang. I would miss Eric, in my way. Miss feeling special. If Caroline was the only one to write me this summer, he was the only one who missed me enough to come out. And I had thought fondly of the afternoon we spent at the Cherry Pie Festival. I actually enjoyed being with him and maybe—just maybe—looked forward to seeing him again.
The Beresfords Page 29