Thirty Sunsets

by Christine Hurley Deriso

  “Ma’am, I need to record this conversation, if that’s okay,” the male officer says. I nod, and he asks, “Can you give me a description of the man who attacked you?”

  My hands fumble. “Um … ” I mutter a few words: “young,” “tanned,” “sandy-blond hair” …

  “Eye color?” he asks.

  I dunno … gray? Brown? Blue? “I’ve only seen him, like, four times,” I say, pressing a nail against my mouth, then yanking it away as I feel my bottom lip sting.

  The officer pulls out his walkie-talkie and relays the information to his colleague, who I presume is combing the beach right now in search of a guy who fits the description of probably five-hundred other guys within a ten-mile radius.

  “What’s the point?” I groan. “Surely he’s long gone by now.”

  The officer puts the walkie-talkie back on his belt loop. “You say his name is Scott?”

  I nod. “That’s what he told me. I don’t know his last name. He told me he’s been staying with his aunt this summer in her beach house … that he just finished painting her bathroom or something … ”

  Suspicion flickers in the officer’s eyes.

  “That should help narrow him down,” Dad says.

  The officer shrugs. “Lots of locals hang out on the beach and tell girls they’re staying in one of the beach houses … trying to impress them, I guess. I know the people on this street pretty well, and I don’t know of any who have a nephew staying with them this summer … ”

  “You wouldn’t necessarily know that,” Mom counters.

  He nods. “Yes, ma’am. But lots of folks keep us posted about their guests, especially guests staying a long while, so that we’ll know who to look out for. Of course, we’ll look into it.”

  “Why?” I mutter. “What’s the point? It’ll just be his word against mine.”

  “The point is to get a rapist off the streets,” Dad says.

  I start crying, and Dad wraps me in his arms. “It’s okay, sweetie … it’s okay … ”

  But nothing feels okay. I wonder if anything will ever feel okay again.

  twenty-seven

  Mom hands me a cup of tea.

  “Careful,” she says as I take it. “It’s hot.”

  I sip it as Dad smooths my hair. We’ve been sitting on the couch since the officers left. How long has that been? Five minutes? Fifteen? An hour? I truly have no idea.

  Mom closes the curtains with brisk efficiency. I don’t think those curtains have ever been closed before; who blocks a view of the ocean? But I’m grateful for the gesture. Any extra layer of protection, any way to minimize my exposure to the world, feels insanely comforting. Will I ever be able to enjoy looking out a window again, even with an ocean for a backdrop? Damn Scott for making the world suddenly seem so sinister.

  “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” Dad says.

  I turn toward him and squeeze his hand to steady my shaking. “I never want to see him again. I don’t want to have to talk about this with anybody. True, I wouldn’t want another girl to go through this, but how many other girls would be as stupid as … ”

  “You’re not stupid,” Dad insists. “He’s an animal, and he deserves to—”

  “He won’t get caught anyway,” I say in a flat voice. “‘Sandy-blond hair.’” I snort, disgusted at myself, then quip, “Anything else I can do for you, Officer?”

  “But you’d be able to identify him in a lineup,” Dad says.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. “I just want to pretend it never happened.”

  Mom sits beside me and pats my hand. “Things don’t work that way,” she says.

  Dad rubs my hair some more. “I’m so sorry all of this has hit you at once,” he says. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

  Then he sniffles.

  Oh my god. My dad is crying. I think I can handle anything in the world except this.

  I put my tea on the coffee table and wrap my arms around his neck. “Don’t cry, Daddy.”

  Mom rubs my back while he and I weep into each other’s necks for a few moments, our hiccupped breaths pulsing lightly against each other’s chests.

  When I pull away, we lock tearstained eyes and I say, “I’m sorry I was such a brat when you were trying to tell me about … about how you and Mom got together. Mom explained it, and I just want you to know … you’re my hero.”

  Dad manages a weak smile. “Are you kidding? My family is the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m no hero. I hit the jackpot.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t understand … ”

  “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. I’m glad your mom was the one to fill in the gaps. That’s the way it should have been.”

  Dad hugs me again, and Mom wraps her arms around both of us.

  I’ve never loved them so much in my life.

  twenty-eight

  “Let’s get one thing straight.”

  Mom, Dad, and I glance anxiously at the foyer. In the two hours that have passed since Brian ferried Olivia and her psycho mom out of the house, the planet has flipped off its axis. They just don’t know it yet.

  Brian doesn’t even have time to shut the door before the lunatic lady is railing at us again, hand on hip.

  “Nobody’s arranging any bait-and-switch adoption with my grandchild,” Olivia’s mother says, spitting out every word.

  Mom squeezes her eyes shut. We get up from the couch and join them in the foyer.

  “I’ve told you that,” Olivia groans. “Brian’s mother wasn’t trying to do anything sneaky or underhanded. She was just exploring our options—”

  “I’ll tell you your options,” her mother says.

  “—and once she realized we wouldn’t even consider adoption,” Olivia continues, gritting her teeth, “the case was closed. This is a non-issue, Mom.”

  “It didn’t sound like a non-issue when you were sobbing to me on the phone yesterday!”

  Olivia tosses a hand in the air. “Have you listened to a word I said?”

  “I’m not interested in your words, I’m interested in her actions!” her mother says, flinging a dagger-like finger in Mom’s direction. Then she faces Mom, her eyes ablaze, as she whips a lock of long blonde hair off her shoulder. “You may call all the shots in your family, but you don’t call them in mine !”

  Olivia shakes her head miserably, fighting back tears. “Am I in your family now, Mom?”

  The woman spins on a heel and faces her daughter. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Olivia struggles to look at her, but her eyes fall short. “I never felt like I was in your family.”

  “Oh, please.”

  Dad holds up his palm. “Look. It’s getting late. Nobody is putting anybody’s baby up for adoption. Brian and Olivia made it clear that they want to raise their child, and, of course, the choice is theirs. Theirs alone. There’s no point in rehashing a discussion that’s already been settled.”

  “I don’t trust her,” Olivia’s mother says, pointing at Mom again. “She’ll do something behind our backs, just like she concocted this adoption thing behind our backs. She thinks she can walk all over my daughter. She thinks I’m some trailer trash she doesn’t have to deal with. Well, guess what: you’re dealing with me whether you like it or not!”

  Mom’s patient but contemptuous expression makes it pretty clear she actually doesn’t like it but is grudgingly resigned to the fact.

  “And since it is getting late,” Dad says, stubbornly picking up where he left off, “I suggest we all get a good night’s sleep and continue this discussion in the morning, when we’re all feeling calmer.”

  “I drove six hours to get here,” Olivia’s mother whines.

  “You can spend the night with us,” Brian says, ignoring Mom’s ensuing flash of indignation. He looks at me. “Fo
rrest, would you mind sleeping on the couch?”

  Mom puts her arm around me and presses me close before I can respond. “Forrest is sleeping with me tonight,” she informs the group.

  Dad nods gamely. “So I guess I’m sleeping on the couch.”

  “I can, Dad,” Brian offers. “You can have my bed.”

  Olivia pipes up weakly, “No, my mom can sleep in a—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom mutters. “Let’s all just go to bed.”

  Brian nods, then gives me a double take. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

  I wrap my arms together and shiver.

  “Your mouth’s bleeding,” Brian persists. “Did you fall?”

  Mom shakes her head and mouths “later ” to him. Then she takes my hand and leads me toward the master bedroom before firing a parting shot at Olivia’s mother: “I trust you can make yourself comfortable.”

  “ … and then the ice cream was shooting out of my nostrils.”

  I giggle uncontrollably.

  Mom and I have lain in bed all night talking, and at some point our Earnest Conversation degenerated into full-blown giddiness.

  Mom tries halfheartedly to shush me, but she’s giggling too.

  “We’ve never done this before,” I say wistfully when our laughter dies down. “Just hung out and been silly together.”

  Mom’s jaw drops in mock indignation. “Are you forgetting Tipsy the Tootsie Thief?”

  I explode into a new round of giggles. When I was little, Mom would wake me up in the morning pretending to be Tipsy the Tootsie Thief, sneaking in to steal my toes. I always wear socks to bed (weird, I know), and Tipsy’s job was to snatch a sock off my foot and grab as many toes as she could wrangle, one by one, which made me squeal with laughter, howling as I tried to retrieve my sock while individual toes were tickled and “plucked” from my foot.

  “Tipsy,” I say now. “What kind of name is that for a kiddie game? Tipsy means drunk, Mom.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she huffs playfully.

  And truly, I didn’t know what tipsy meant until, like, middle school. Mom’s right … she protected Brian and me with the ferocity of a Fort Knox guard, so I was always approximately a zillion times more naive than my friends and classmates. Mom and Dad never had more than an occasional glass of wine, so my only association with “tipsy” growing up was “tootsie thief.” God knows it’s been annoying as hell, being treated like a hothouse flower while my worldlier friends were explaining the intricacies of French kissing to me during sixth-grade gym class, but I kinda love Mom for it right this moment. I’m sure lots of sacrifices were involved to raise spectacularly clueless kids. Mom rose to that challenge like a prize fighter.

  Her overprotectiveness was grating enough by adolescence to make me spurn tootsie thieves and other lame stabs at silliness, so the kid stuff fell by the wayside. Curled lips and eye rolls moved in to fill the void. I know, I know, that’s what teenagers do, but my stomach tightens a little with the sudden realization that my snottiness must be hard on Mom.

  So it feels good to be silly with her, even at four o’clock in the morning. It’s nice to shake off the intensity of the past few hours. We’ve tackled some pretty tough topics, and we’ve debriefed about our ever-evolving feelings toward Olivia.

  But as much as I’m enjoying the giddiness that’s slipped in through the cracks, there’s one more Earnest Topic I need to broach. I pull the down-filled comforter tighter under my chin.

  “So,” I say, “Brian knew, and I didn’t. What’s up with that?”

  Mom’s eyes skitter away. “I didn’t want either of you to know,” she says softly. “I wanted to create a perfect, complication-free world for you both.”

  “So … how did he end up finding out?”

  Mom purses her lips. “Your father insisted. He’d wanted to be honest with both of you from the beginning. Well … as honest as you can be about something like that. He said secrets always have a way of spilling out, and that you both deserved to know, and it would be easier if … ”

  She clears her throat. “Anyway. He was right, of course. But I fought him every step of the way. How do you tell a precious little boy that the man raising him, his hero, isn’t really his father? And besides, misleading him didn’t even seem like a lie. Your father is his father. Brian’s more like Dad than you are!”

  “So … when did he tell him?”

  Mom sighs deeply. “Right around his birthday. Dad always said age eighteen was the latest he would postpone telling him. He knew how hard it would be for Brian, but he said Brian would never trust us again if he found out from someone other than us, and he wouldn’t let him start his adulthood with this albatross hanging around his neck.”

  “His birthday … ” I say to myself. “Last summer …

  when he started dating Olivia … when he started breaking out in rashes … .”

  Mom nods, her eyes pained.

  “I said to your dad, ‘See? Still think it was such a great idea?’ I’d have given anything if we could all have just gone to our graves without—”

  “A few rashes, but that was it,” I say, still talking to myself. “I mean, it’s amazing Brian was so strong about it. He never said a word to me.”

  “He wanted to protect you,” Mom says. “We all did.”

  “So at a time when his whole world explodes into a million pieces, he’s worried about protecting me.”

  Mom smiles. “That’s our Brian. Like I said: just like Dad.”

  I take a deep breath. It all seems so clear now. I knew something was off with Brian, I knew it. I blamed it all on Olivia, and god knows she was a handy target at the time, but this buzz of anxiety has haunted me for months now: Something’s wrong with my brother. Something’s wrong with my brother. Yes. It all makes sense now.

  “Was anyone ever going to tell me?” I ask Mom. “Not that it wasn’t a total delight to have Olivia’s mother tip me off.”

  Mom touches my forehead with cool fingertips. “I hate that she did that. That woman, who couldn’t even be bothered to raise her own child, coming into my home and shaking up my baby’s world … ”

  My eyes fall. “Like Dad said: secrets always end up spilling out.”

  “Still,” Mom says. “I think we could have made it to the finish line with you.”

  I laugh in spite of myself. “Any other secrets you were planning on taking to the finish line?”

  Mom raises an eyebrow. “No, that one pretty much consumed all my energy. Well … there was that one time when I told you Grandma was sick so I could avoid having you go to the mountains for the weekend with Gina Pres­well’s family. I’d always heard her mother had a drinking problem … ”

  “And the time you told me we were buying a piano to rope me into piano lessons!”

  We both start giggling again, sputtering into our fingertips.

  “You are such a control freak!” I say, still laughing.

  “Oh, you try making it through motherhood without an occasional white lie to grease the wheels,” she says.

  I stick my tongue out at her and she narrows her eyes, and we start giggling again.

  I gaze into space. “Think Brian and Olivia have a shot at this family thing?”

  Mom sighs. “I guess we’ll find out. She’s a nice girl … she’s just so young … ”

  “Not much younger than you were when you got pregnant,” I observe, glancing at her quickly for a post-facto sensitivity check.

  “Exactly,” Mom says quietly. “I know too much. Even with your father in the picture, it wasn’t easy. I know their intentions are good, and heaven knows Brian will be a wonderful father. But Olivia, growing up without a mother … I do worry.”

  “Maybe it’ll make her a better mother than she would have been otherwise,” I muse. “I mean, nobody understands a mothe
r’s importance better than someone who hasn’t had one.”

  “Mmm,” Mom says noncommittally.

  “Mom,” I say firmly, “you gotta give them a chance.”

  Mom waves her arm expansively around the bedroom. “Uh, hello, she’s spending the summer in our home. Does that qualify as a chance?”

  “Not if you’re plotting behind her back.”

  “Oh, enough with the ‘plotting’! Everybody’s making me sound like Mata Hari for having the common sense to explore a couple of options.”

  “I have no idea who Mata Hari is.”

  “Well … you should read more.”

  “Yeah, that’s my problem: I don’t read enough.”

  We start giggling again.

  “I think Olivia’s gonna be a good mom,” I say after a moment. “And of course it goes without saying that I’m going to be a spectacular aunt.”

  Mom taps her fingers together lightly. “Ready or not … ”

  twenty-nine

  I rub my eyes, squint at the clock, then gasp and jump out of bed.

  One fifteen? In the afternoon? Have I really slept half the day away?

  Yes. Bright midday sun is peeking through the closed bedroom blinds and voices waft from the family room. After a couple of minutes, I hear Olivia and her wackadoodle mother say goodbye, shutting the front door behind them.

  I get out of bed, strum my hand through my bedhead, brush my teeth with my finger in the master bedroom, pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and walk into the family room.

  Mom is in the kitchen, singing cheerfully despite the fact that she probably only got about ninety minutes of sleep last night. Dad and Brian are watching baseball.

  They smile when I walk in. “Hi, Yogi,” Dad says.

  I flash a peace sign and ask, “Where’d Olivia and Cruella go?”

  “Lunch,” Dad says. “Her mom is headed back home from there.”

  Brian jumps up from his seat. “Sit here, sit here,” he tells me.

  I look at Dad and groan. “He knows.”