Untold

by Shannon Richard

  I’m not going to lie, I liked the first show much more than the second…

  * * *

  The next two weeks of entries were all about the places that Danny took Bethelda around Mirabelle. How he’d tap on her window before the sun was even up to go down to the beach with her and watch the sunrise. How he’d pick flowers and bring them to her when they were both working at the CCC. How Danny’s favorite movie was Back to the Future and that he wanted to own a DeLorean one day.

  Brie looked over at Lo (Delores) at this point, and wondered if that was where Bethelda had gotten the name.

  * * *

  July 9

  I know I have my moments of jumping in to things without looking. More so with boys than anything else. But there is a difference between jumping and falling, and I’ve now officially fallen in love with Daniel Emmanuel Fernandez.

  Last night we got caught in the rain again. We were walking at Alligator Lane (which I still don’t know why it is named that as there aren’t alligators there). Anyway, it was close to dusk when the clouds blew in off the water. We started back for the truck but the skies opened up before we got back.

  I pulled Danny into the backseat and told him I wasn’t ready to go home yet. We were kissing for a while, and then we were pulling each other’s clothes off. I thought about my first time many times. How it would happen. When it would happen. When I pictured it, it was always on my wedding night, my husband helping me out of my pretty white dress. What else was to be expected of a good virgin Catholic girl?

  Instead it was impulsive. Reckless. Both of us soaked to the bone in the back of an old truck. It was perfect…

  * * *

  The month of entries that followed were all about Bethelda and Danny sneaking around town to be together. Bethelda had gotten home late one night and was caught sneaking in by two very disapproving parents. She’d been grounded for a week in which she agonized about not getting to see Danny.

  Though there was one day that her dad was at work and her mom went to the grocery store that she snuck Danny into her bedroom. Bethelda had gone from boy-crazy virgin, to sex-crazed teenager at the drop of a hat. But it was more than just the sex…or so Brie thought from what she was reading.

  Bethelda went down to Gainesville to start school at the end of the summer. She and Danny were still constantly talking to each other, writing letters between phone calls. Brie wondered where those letters were. If Bethelda had kept them. If they were still in the house.

  Even without seeing it from her father’s side of things, it really did seem like the two loved each other. Danny told Bethelda he loved her all the time. Told her he wanted to marry her. That after she was done with school they’d get a house wherever she wanted…as long as it was on the water. That way he could work from the fishing boat that was his, and she could write.

  So what happened to her father? And she knew that Daniel Fernandez was her father. Bethelda had said it at the beginning: he had golden brown eyes. So where did he go? Did he bail when the inevitable pregnancy happened?

  Because Brie knew that particular spoiler to the story. She’d been preparing herself for it when she got to that passage. Something she knew was just around the corner. But even with preparing herself, it still was jarring when she got there, like she’d missed a couple of steps on the stairs.

  * * *

  September 12

  I’m late, like ten days late. And no, I’m not the most consistent in that department but I have never been TEN DAYS LATE. We’ve used protection every time we’ve been together. Well, there was that one time on the beach, but that was just once.

  Oh God.

  I haven’t told Danny yet. I know I need to, but I’m scared. This was not part of the plan. Nowhere near part of the plan…

  * * *

  September 13

  I told Danny last night, I was sobbing on the phone, but he was totally and completely calm. In fact, he seems excited about the baby. Like, by the end of the phone call he seemed overjoyed.

  He said we’d figure it out. We have a little over two months until I come home for Thanksgiving break. I might or might not be showing, but it’s fall, so I can just wear baggy sweaters to cover up any bump I do have.

  That’s when we’ll tell my parents…

  * * *

  September 23

  I got a package in the mail yesterday. Danny mailed me a tiny yellow onesie with a family of ducks on the front. He put a note in there that said, It works if we have a boy or a girl…

  * * *

  October 30

  Danny came down to visit me this weekend. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since I left at the end of August. He got a ride with his uncle who was going down to Tampa. He went with me to my doctor’s appointment on Friday. There’s a clinic in town that I’ve been going to. We got to hear the baby’s heartbeat.

  Allison is out of town this weekend, so Danny and I had the whole dorm room to ourselves. I snuck him in, not that it was all that difficult as our RA doesn’t exactly keep us under a close watch. That first night we lay in bed and he had his hands on my stomach while he talked to the baby.

  I’m pretty sure he wants a little girl as he kept saying her and she…

  * * *

  November 19

  I’m nervous. Dad is coming to pick me up today. They haven’t seen me in months, so I’m sure the weight that I’ve gained is going to be obvious. Maybe I can just push it off as the freshman fifteen. Though, it might be closer to the freshman twenty at this point.

  I also haven’t heard from Danny in a couple of days. He always calls on Thursday night and he didn’t this week. When I tried him at his uncle’s house the phone just rang and rang.

  Dad and I should get back in enough time today for me to go over to his uncle’s house…

  * * *

  That was where the journal entries for that year ended. There were a couple of pages with a big black ink dot at the top. Like Bethelda had set the pen down to start writing, but hadn’t been able to move the pen, the ink soaking into the paper. There were other pages where the lines had blurred, watermarks scattered across the paper.

  Tears. There were tears everywhere.

  Brie didn’t hesitate in grabbing the next journal The Scarlet Letter. How freaking appropriate. The first couple of entries were full of starts and stops, the words almost illegible.

  * * *

  January 1

  I can’t

  * * *

  January 2

  Why

  * * *

  January 3

  He’s gone.

  * * *

  January 19

  I don’t know where to start. It’s been two months since it happened.

  Two months since everything ended

  Two months since my world ended.

  Danny’s gone.

  There was an accident out on the water. A guy was on his speedboat, drunk and not paying attention. He crashed into Danny’s uncle’s fishing boat. Seven people were killed that day, including Danny.

  I don’t know how to breathe anymore. I feel dead too. How can I be here without him? What am I supposed to do now? He left me behind. I can’t live without him.

  * * *

  Brie had known at the first glance of the passage that it was going to be a blow. Bethelda’s normally neat handwriting was messy, like her hand had been shaking as she wrote. There were also tearstains all over the page, blurring the lines and the words written in pen.

  Reading the facts of the accident was jarring, seeing it all laid out like that. Brie wondered how many times Bethelda had recited those facts, reminding herself of the harsh reality. The heartbreak of it all leaked off the page with every word.

  Her father hadn’t left Bethelda…hadn’t left Brie. He’d been taken from them.

  * * *

  It was close to eight that night when Brie put the journal down, leaving off with Danny’s death. That was as far as she was going to be able to g
o into Bethelda’s writings for the night. But she wasn’t done trying to learn more about her past.

  She had her father’s name now: Daniel Emmanuel Fernandez.

  From the journals, Brie had learned that Danny’s parents were Inés and Leandro Fernandez. They’d come to America with Inés’s brother Rafael in 1958. Leandro and Rafael had been fishermen back in Cuba, so that was what they did while they lived in Tampa. Inés had been a nanny/cook/maid. After Leandro and Inés had died, both Rafael and Danny had wanted to get out of Tampa, so they came up to Mirabelle.

  Brie wasn’t all that hopeful that a computer search was going to come up with anything on any of them, and she was right. The only thing she found was an archived article from the Mirabelle Newspaper on the boating accident. Danny’s uncle had died in the accident, too.

  There wasn’t even a picture of her father…

  Brie stood up so fast from her seat that the chair went rolling out behind her, hitting the wall with enough force to startle Frankie who’d followed her into the room.

  “Sorry.” Brie patted the dog’s head before she walked out of the office and headed for the den/library.

  Since that night she and Finn had gone through the photo albums looking for the Lo costume pictures, Brie hadn’t touched the photo albums. She hadn’t wanted to dive into that particular pool. Hadn’t been ready.

  She sat down on the floor and started searching through them. She set aside the Christmas tree collection, the ones of Bethelda as a child, another of Petunia and Harold pre-baby. When she got to the ones of teenage Bethelda she started to flip through them slower.

  Bethelda had thick, long red hair that was rather beautiful. It had been hard for Brie to say that her biological mother had been beautiful, mainly because the one and only time she’d met her, she’d been sneering. But looking at these photos, with a smiling and happy Bethelda, it was easier to see what Danny had fallen in love with. Who Danny had fallen in love with.

  Brie got to the photo of Bethelda at her high school graduation, wearing her cap and gown and with Petunia and Harold on either side of her, proud as could be.

  The next photo was of Bethelda in a red bathing suit on the beach, and she was rocking it pretty hard-core. She had a figure all right, a figure that was pretty similar to Brie’s.

  The next photo was of the church picnic, Fourth of July banners hanging in the background while Bethelda and two girls showed off blueberry pie.

  And there he was, her father. He was in the background looking at Bethelda. His eyes weren’t clear in the picture, but she knew it was him. She could just tell that she had his nose. He was handsome, just like Bethelda had described.

  Brie would swear her heart actually stopped beating for a moment.

  It was her father. Her fingers moved over the photo, a photo that started to blur the longer she looked at it. He was there, right there. Proof that he existed.

  The pain she’d been holding back for the last few hours finally escaped, she couldn’t fight it anymore, and she wept as she sat on the floor.

  * * *

  The next twenty-four hours were not the easiest of Brie’s life. It had taken her awhile to get a hold of herself after she found the photo of her father, and by that point she was so mentally and emotionally exhausted she went to bed, her head pounding something fierce.

  Her dreams that night were ones of Bethelda and Danny, a young couple so incredibly in love. If there was one thing she believed, it was that they’d loved each other.

  When Brie woke up the next morning she was still exhausted. She hadn’t been able to entirely recoup the energy she’d depleted the previous day, but at least she wasn’t running on empty.

  After she took care of Lo and Frankie—which was oddly painful as they reminded Brie of Finn—the first part of her morning was spent looking through more of the picture albums. Brie got to see the transformation of Bethelda from happy, to miserable.

  There was a picture of Bethelda outside of her dorms at UF, looking excited but nervous. The next one was Thanksgiving, where a slightly heavier Bethelda was looking at the camera with a blank stare. There was no light in her eyes. After that was a picture at Christmas. Bethelda wore a big, baggy black sweater, her gaze vacant. Like she wasn’t even there.

  The next picture was the following summer, a no longer pregnant Bethelda standing at a table outside the church selling raffle tickets. She looked miserable.

  The photos became less and less as the years went. Just holidays and random events. Bethelda’s expressions went from looking slightly annoyed to downright hostile before they just stopped. Brie guessed the last one was probably when she was in her late twenties. Harold and Petunia were in it, so Brie guessed it was shortly before he died.

  There weren’t any more pictures of Danny. Brie suspected this was because these albums were most likely put together by Petunia. Which meant any other photos of Danny would be somewhere else.

  After some more coffee, Brie started reading the journals again. Bethelda was in so much pain after losing Danny that it was almost debilitating. What got her through it was focusing on school and nothing else. And Brie meant nothing else.

  Bethelda didn’t really talk about the baby growing in her belly. The little she did was very disconnected, like the child wasn’t a part of her, wasn’t a part of anything. People either believed she was just getting fat, or they didn’t ask questions. She continued on with her baggy-clothes strategy, which got a lot harder when May rolled around and it was starting to warm up outside.

  The only person Bethelda did tell was her roommate. The night Bethelda went into labor, Allison drove her to the next town over where a convent of nurses-turned-nuns helped her have the baby.

  After that, she signed the adoption paperwork and left. Just like that.

  Bethelda’s descent into what she became was not quick. It was a slow progression of shutting people out, letting her pain turn inward and making her hateful. By the time Brie was finished reading for the day, she’d gotten through nine more journals. The last one she read was when Bethelda was twenty-eight…the same age Brie was now.

  That night when Finn called Brie, she didn’t answer.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When You Find Me

  Something wasn’t right. Finn knew it, felt it in his gut. When he’d called Brie the night before she hadn’t answered…nor did she answer that morning when he’d called.

  He’d just finished up with a panel when his cell phone started buzzing in his pocket. His moment of hope that it was Brie was short-lived when he looked at the screen to see Hannah’s name.

  “Hey, I’m glad you called. Have you talked to Brie? I can’t get a hold of her.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone before Hannah cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Finn, I…she was just here.” The tone in her voice was one he was familiar with; it was the same one he got when he was about to deliver bad news to the owner of a pet.

  “What happened?”

  “She dropped off Frankie and Lo, and asked me if Shep and I could watch them until you got back. Finn, Brie left. Left Mirabelle and she wouldn’t tell me where she was going.”

  Right then and there his world came crashing down around him. Everything he’d realized he wanted since Brie had walked into his life was gone. Just that quickly.

  He’d been left.

  Again.

  * * *

  Growing up, Brie and her parents would always go on vacation in Helen, Georgia, at least once a year. Whether it was a week in the summer, during spring break, or sometimes at Christmas, they’d stay in a cabin and just get away.

  Brie needed to get away now, so that was where she went. The little one-bedroom cabin she rented was right on a river, surrounded by trees.

  It was after six when she got to the cabin that night—she’d stopped for groceries in town first. The sun still had about two more hours in the sky, so she preheated the oven for the frozen pizza she’d just bought
, poured herself a glass of wine, and went outside on the deck.

  As she’d reached the max of what she could handle, she decided to take a journal-free day. Though she hadn’t left them behind. Nope, she’d packed up all of them and brought them with her. They were like little Pandora’s boxes, all waiting to let loose more pain and heartache.

  The journals weren’t the only thing she’d taken a break from, either. She’d turned off her phone, but not before she’d sent Finn a text. All it said was, I had to leave. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.

  She was a coward. She knew it. But she’d had to get out. Had to get away. Had to run away.

  So there she was. Alone.

  No man is an island. That wasn’t true. Bethelda had been her own island. Isolated herself to the point where she had no one. She’d taken the love for the man she’d lost and turned it into something else. Something dark and twisted. Something vengeful.

  When other people had love and happiness, she’d made it her job to make them miserable. She also liked to rub salt in the wound of those that were hurting. Her vengefulness had started well before the blog; she’d been a menace at the Mirabelle Newspaper, too. Though, where Brie was in the journals, Bethelda hadn’t been fired yet. That wouldn’t come for another eight or nine years…right after Brie had met her.

  The low beep filled the air, pulling Brie from her thoughts. She turned from the river and headed back inside to put her dinner in the oven.