Sitting at the table, Aunt Mary said tartly, “Lil, I never have understood why you named them both the same, but it’s a free country, and I suppose a person can name their children what they want.”
Jamie felt her heart stop. She heard Bridger gasp, and he clutched at her shoulder.
Aunt Mary said sternly to her sister, “Now you may be able to get away with this ‘Grandma’ nonsense around here, but you can’t with me. I was there, and I know what’s what. I know little Jamie is your daughter, just the same as big Jamie is your son.”
Grandma began to wail deep in her throat, but for once Jamie did not care. She was gawking at Bridger, and his eyes, gazing back at her, were alight like blue windows with candles in them.
He whispered, “I—I have a sister? A kid sister?”
“You’re my—brother?”
Bright wings and black wings were whirling and whirling in Jamie’s mind, and she did not know whether they were vultures or God-sized butterflies. No, she had no father, and her mother—her mother was a crazy woman who had lied to her—but yes, yes, she had Bridge, the other Jamie Bridger, her very own brother—butterflies and joy took over. Jamie screamed and jumped up and down with joy, and she kept jumping while Bridge grabbed her and danced her around the kitchen, both of them laughing and crying and flinging back their heads and shouting at the ceiling.
“I’ve got a big brother!”
“Sister! I’ve got a sister!”
“Yo, Bro!” Jamie yelled at him.
“Yo, Sis!” He spun her around and lifted her up off the linoleum and bear-hugged her.
Wailing, Grandma hid her face behind her wrinkled hands. Aunt Mary got up and went to her. “Lily, what’s the matter? It’s all right.”
But Grandma seemed not to hear. “Daddy would not approve,” she whimpered.
“Lil—”
“Daddy would not approve!” Grandma screamed, and she scuttled blindly out of the room. Jamie heard the panicky, faltering footsteps heading up the stairs, and knew without having to look: Grandma was going back into her dark hole again, back to hiding in the closet.
Chapter
11
“They had you to replace me,” Bridge said. He was sitting at the kitchen table, looking dazed, giddy with revelation. “I swear to God, that is just what they did. Separate bedrooms for sixteen years, and then I don’t turn out the way they want, so pop, they get together and make you, Jamie.”
“Except I turned out to be a girl,” Jamie said. “I always had the feeling I wasn’t what he wanted. Grandpa, I mean.” She winced. He was not her grandpa—he was her father. But she did not want to call him that. “Um, Cletus.”
Bridge said happily, “Pooh on him. I bet Ma loved having a girl.”
Jamie had to smile. “I think she kind of did.” She stopped smiling. “But if I was supposed to replace you, that kind of explains what’s going on with her, right? She’s got it in her head that only one Jamie Bridger is allowed.”
Bridge sighed and said, “She’s in need of help, Jamie. She’s ill. Cletus was sick, the marriage was sick. I never realized before how strange and sick my parents were.”
Jamie nodded. Like her, he had gotten used to what he was raised with. He had accepted the way his parents were without thinking about it much until he had to.
“I feel stupid.” Bridger started to grin again. “David says he was betting all along we were brother and sister, only he didn’t want to say it.” Bridge had called David to share the good news. “But I swear, it never ever occurred to me. I just never dreamed Ma and Pa would do that. They seemed like they hadn’t had a sexual thought in years.”
“About thirty years,” Jamie agreed.
“I don’t remember ever seeing him kiss her, not even on the cheek.”
Aunt Mary came in, sighing. She had been upstairs trying one last time to talk Lily out of the closet. “No use,” she muttered.
“Aunt Mary,” Jamie appealed to her, “are you absolutely sure I’m Grandma’s daughter?” Hearing what she had just said, she flinched.
“Lily’s daughter?” Aunt Mary smiled the wide, sweet smile that definitely came from Grandma’s side of the family, not Grandpa’s. “Yes, honey child, I’m sure. She stayed with me while she was pregnant with you. I was there when you were born.”
“You were?” Jamie’s heart stopped, then thumped as if it wanted to get out of her chest and dance. She had never known until that moment how much she had missed having a history, an account of her own birth.
“Yes, indeed. At Chicago General.” Aunt Mary sat down, pushing the potato salad out of her way. Nobody wanted lunch.
In a hushed voice Jamie asked, “When was I born? In the middle of the night?”
“Five in the morning. Just in time for a summer sunrise.” Aunt Mary contemplated Jamie with wise warm eyes. “You were kind of purple and fuzzy, like a big bay-berry, and absolutely beautiful.”
Jamie had never felt so real. She sat stunned by her own validity. Across the table, Bridger was leaning back and laughing at the look on her face.
Aunt Mary patted Jamie’s hand. “We both just adored you,” she said. “I cried when she went home and took you away.”
“But—” This was all very odd. “But why was she staying with you? Was Grand—uh, was Cletus there?”
“No, he wasn’t. He was in Silver Valley. Lil didn’t ever really tell me what was going on.” Aunt Mary frowned into the distance, thinking about that time. “Trouble with Cletus, I figured.” Her gaze shifted to Bridger. “I knew you had gone away, Jamie.”
“Bridge,” he said. “Call me Bridge. ‘Jamie’ is kind of effeminate for a good-looking young man like me, don’t you think?” He was giving her a wry smile, trying to tell her something. Aunt Mary gave him a level gaze in return.
“Bridge, they never explained what happened, and I guess it’s none of my business.…”
“I fell in love. With a guy,” Bridge told her quietly. “Pa found out.”
Aunt Mary sighed. There was silence for a moment. Then Aunt Mary said, “Honey, I wish you had come to me.”
Bridge ducked his head, embarrassed by his own emotions, trying to hide. “I’m all right,” he mumbled.
“Now you are,” Mary said. “Back then it must have been very hard.”
Bridger got his wry smile back and looked up. “I was the talk of the town,” he said. “Ma was ashamed, I guess. Needed to get away.”
“That’s what I thought then.” Aunt Mary shook her head. “But it’s not what I think now. Or, it’s not the whole story. I think Cletus was ashamed—of having a pregnant wife. I think he did not want her to be seen.” She looked at Jamie. “I think he was already planning to pass you off as somebody else’s.”
For years there had been an imaginary father for Jamie, maybe young, maybe cute, maybe a nice guy who just did not know about her. Now there was a real father who was old, and hard, and—embarrassed that she was born? It was enough to make a person crazy. Jamie said fiercely, “I hate him. I’m glad he’s dead.”
Aunt Mary said, “Now, it’s not all his fault. He was not always a terrible person. Lily helped make him that way.” Jamie gawked, Bridge looked blank, and Mary smiled sadly at the two of them. “She gave him too much,” she explained. “She handed her whole life to him on a platter; how was he not supposed to become a dictator? Don’t ever do that, Jamie. It’s wonderful to fall in love, but don’t give away your soul.”
Jamie sat staring. Upstairs there was an old woman cringing in a dark hiding place, and for the first time Grandma’s sickness was making sense to Jamie. Grandma had given her selfhood to Grandpa, and now that he was dead, it was gone. Resurrection Lily Lutz Bridger did not know who she was anymore.
But how did anybody know that, ever? What was selfhood? How old did a person need to be to have it?
Who am I? Who was Jamie Bridger?
She knew who her parents were now. Why did it not seem like an answer?
“A
unt Mary.” Maybe thinking similar thoughts, Bridge asked, “What was Ma like, really? Before?”
So Amaryllis sat in the afternoon sunshine that slanted through the kitchen windows, and she told them about her sister.
Lily was like a kitchen-garden flower: sweet, a little bit homely, shy, but as with many shy people, when she actually said something it was usually worth listening to. She had intelligence; she did well in school. But their father did not believe in college for women. Lily stayed home, and cooked for her father after her mother died, and thought about things—the Cold War, the atom bomb, fallout shelters, children starving in India. She did not go out much but seemed always to be watching the world for answers. She did not date but seemed to be waiting. For ten years she waited.
Then Cletus Bridger came to town. He was a bit older than she was, but handsome, intense, alive with sureness. “What they call, these days, charismatic,” Amaryllis said. A tent preacher, he had convictions about what was wrong with a world that contained Khrushchev and Elvis, and the courage to speak his mind. Lily went to hear him, and he seemed to her to be the answer, the man she had been waiting for.
“And I don’t think she ever changed her mind about that.”
Shy though she was, she went up to him afterward to talk. He came home with her to talk. He came back the next day. She was lost in adoration of him. He saw it and smiled on her. He stayed in town longer than he had planned. They spent a lot of time together.
“She was twenty-nine,” Amaryllis said, smiling. “He was thirty-three. They took a lot of teasing, especially from me. I was always the mouthy one, and I had been married eight years already and figured I knew everything, and—oh, well, it wasn’t just me. The whole family got a kick out of them. The whole town did. Poor Lily. She and her beau would go for a walk, and when they got back, half a dozen people would be waiting to quiz them about where they’d been and what they’d done. Lily would just blush like a rose. But Cletus wouldn’t blush.” Aunt Mary stopped smiling. “He would get mad.”
“And go ballistic,” Bridge said, wry again, as if his father’s rages were not unfamiliar to him.
“Yeppers. He would fly right off the handle. Anybody else would have just teased back, but there he would be, yelling and screaming about how his feelings for Lily were pure and chaste. She was a spotless angel. Their converse was the converse of kindred spirits. How dare we have such dirty minds. Sex was a dirty thing to him.” Aunt Mary stopped talking and looked thoughtfully at Bridger.
He grinned at her. “I figured it out years ago,” he told her. “Dates don’t lie. I was born about six months after they were married, right?”
“Very premature,” Amaryllis said dryly.
“I guess it was a scandal.”
“Back then it could have been, but we all loved Lily. And we would have liked Cletus just for being human, if he’d let us.”
But being human was not what Cletus Bridger wanted. The birth of his son, proof that he was not above human failings, chagrined him. He felt shamed into giving up his ministry and taking a secular job. He changed. Striving to make up for his lapse, ever more intent on the exemplary life, he frowned through his days, becoming dour and strict with Lily and the boy. The woman had led him astray. The boy reflected on him. In his dealings with them, Cletus needed to feel completely in control.
“You’re lucky you’re a girl, Jamie,” Bridger told her. “He probably left you mostly to Ma. But me, he was always on my back.”
Ultimately, however, even Cletus Bridger could not control his growing son. And when he could no longer control him, he cut him off. Like a wrong thought, an unacceptable impulse, an evil lurking in the heart, the bad boy had to be thoroughly rejected. After casting him out, Cletus led Lily in going through the house, gathering up everything that had belonged to their son, taking it all to the dump. When all traces of the youngster were erased, Cletus ordered Lily to forget she had ever had a son. And, being Lily, she set about doing so. If she cried in the night, she tried not to let Cletus know.
He gave her another child. This time the two of them were going to do it right. This time the child would grow to be a credit to Bridger righteousness.
But almost as soon as it was accomplished, Cletus began to be afraid. Had he fallen into shame again? His wife was forty-six years old, he was fifty, and soon the whole world would see her condition and know what lewd act the two of them had been committing.
“He told me my parents were evil people,” Jamie said, her voice soft with not wanting to believe it. “Filthy, lewd, evil people. He called them a slut and a goat. He shouted it. Did he—was he talking about himself? Was he talking about …” She didn’t want to call her Grandma. “Was he talking about his own wife?”
Nobody wanted to answer.
“He was crazy,” Jamie whispered, hot with hatred of him. “He drove her crazy.”
“But she went along with him.” Aunt Mary shook her head. “Everybody should learn to stand up for themselves, but she never stood up to him about anything. When we lost our father, she started calling Cletus ‘Daddy.’ And she obeyed him as if she had no mind of her own.”
He sent her away to keep her pregnancy from being talked about in Silver Valley. When she had the baby, it was a girl instead of the expected boy. They named it “Jamie” as planned, but Cletus knew in his heart that the wrong-gender child was a reproach to him, like the boy that had turned out wrong, a judgment for having committed a carnal act. Therefore, so that the world would continue to perceive him as a righteous man, the child had to be hidden. Back in Silver Valley he instructed Lily to pass the child off as a visiting niece, a little girl she baby-sat, a neighbor’s child, or to keep her out of sight altogether. But Lily was dangerously softhearted about the girl. Around the house she permitted her to call her Mama. And the relatives knew. Lily’s family in particular knew and teased unmercifully.
“Especially me,” Aunt Mary admitted. “I simply could not stop. I could not believe any man could be so straitlaced. I kept trying and trying to make him laugh. And then the older you grew, Jamie, the more you looked like him.”
“Oh, no.” Bridge got the picture and groaned.
“Oh, yes. By the time she was three or four, they couldn’t pass her off as the neighbor’s kid anymore. I kept teasing Cletus, asking him, when she started school and he had to fill out the papers, was he finally going to admit to her?”
“No way,” Jamie said bitterly. “It was easier to move. Run away from everybody. Lie to me. Tell me they were my grandma and grandpa so I wouldn’t embarrass them by being their daughter.”
Silence. Then Bridger stretched out his hand to her and said softly, “We were all victims of an obsession, Jamie. Even Pa.”
“Silly man,” Aunt Mary grumbled. “He missed out on so much. Jamie, if you were mine, I would have been dancing in the delivery room.”
Jamie gave up her bitterness and laughed, thinking suddenly of Shirley and her dancing turtles. Imagine Aunt Mary doing a fandango on the birthing table.
“You know,” Aunt Mary said thoughtfully, “Lily is too young to be so old. You know, she’s younger than I am, and I don’t consider myself an old woman. I might live to be a hundred, if I take after the Lutz women. So might she. There might be lots of years left for Lily. Do you think it’s too much to ask, after all she’s been through, that they should be good years?”
“Asking’s got nothing to do with it,” said Bridger, standing up. “We’re going to make it happen.” He headed for the phone to call the doctor.
Chapter
12
Bridger waited until Aunt Mary and Jamie were in the car, out the driveway, down the street, and out of sight before he moved from the window. Aunt Mary had wanted to find a mall (there weren’t any within thirty miles) and take Jamie clothes shopping, but Jamie had asked if they couldn’t just go hiking in the state park instead. Trees and birds and such seemed to mean something to Jamie. Comfort her. And Jamie needed comforting.
>
Bridger sighed. Jamie was having a hard time, and he knew how she felt, how it felt to be a kid with your world changing, out of control, with the people you love failing you.
He turned away from the window and trudged up the stairs.
In the center of the dark bedroom he stood still. “Ma?”
No answer.
Bridger decided it was okay to try something. He knew he could get her out of there—sometimes at the hospital where he worked he had to lift patients twice his size. But he did not want to manhandle his mother unless he absolutely had to.
In a deep, commanding tone he said, “Lily.”
“Daddy?” His mother’s voice came to him like a black moth across the darkness, wavering.
“No,” Bridge said, “it’s me.” Let her decide who “me” was. At least he had not lied to her.
“Daddy?”
“Come out of there,” he told her.
Coat hangers rattled. Lily wobbled out of the closet and stood staring at him.
“Come on.” He beckoned, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “It’s time for your appointment.”
She looked puzzled. But evidently he was a family male of some sort—a daddy, and it did not much matter which one exactly—so she obeyed him. She followed him downstairs. “My purse,” she said, and she picked it up. “Do I look okay?” She patted at her braids, which were coming loose; she had not let Jamie fix them for her.
“You look fine.” Bridger almost said Ma, but caught himself in time.
Mrs. Leweski’s old Buick, borrowed for a couple of hours, was parked out front. Lily followed him to it. He opened the passenger door for her.
For just about twenty hours, less than a full day, he had had his mother back. Now here stood a woman, almost a stranger, with the round eyes of a child. His mother was gone.
Too bad, Bridge. Grow up. Toughen up.
Looking for Jamie Bridger Page 10