Relatively Honest

by Molly Ringle

  “Do you know who this is?” he demanded of her, pointing to me.

  “Of course I know who he is,” she said.

  Meanwhile, my father and Julie’s parents – a tall strawberry-blonde man with white eyebrows, and a short curvy woman with plum-colored lipstick – had also congregated at my doorway. They all looked scandalized. Guess they knew about the old family tree, then. My life was officially over.

  “Daniel,” my mother said, “tell me you weren’t doing what it appears you were doing – with your first cousin!”

  I shut my eyes.

  “It’s between him and me,” Julie pleaded. “We’re adults.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What?”

  She glanced at me. “So you did know.”

  “Hold on. You knew?”

  “Come on, Daniel, I know my mother’s genealogy.”

  “Well, when in this bloody lifetime were you going to tell me? I’ve been agonizing over…”

  “Daniel!” my father shouted.

  Julie and I stopped bickering and looked at our audience.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s back up. What are you all doing here, together? Could you at least tell us that?”

  They seemed to consider my question irrelevant, to judge from how they stared at us, but Julie’s step-mother finally cleared her throat and answered, “Your parents came over to visit us. They explained about us being related, and we were talking and having coffee, then Patrick came by looking for Julie. She wasn’t in, so we all decided to come over here and see you, since…” She glanced at her husband, who still looked appalled. “James and I were looking forward to meeting you,” she finished, sheepishly.

  “Oh,” I said, chastened. “Indeed. Pleasure’s mine.” I stepped forward and held out my hand. She shook it, limply. I turned to James French, but he refused to touch me. I stepped back.

  “Now your turn,” Mum said. “An explanation, Daniel, if you please.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “I suppose we ought to sit down and discuss this.”

  “Come to the parlor. Now.” She turned away.

  Our four surviving parents trailed down the stairs. Patrick lingered, eyes flinging not just daggers but whole cutlery sets at the two of us. “You’re sick,” he snarled at her. “I can’t believe you. Cheating is bad enough, but with him?”

  “Look, Patrick,” I said. “I understand you’re disgusted, and I’m sorry you had to find out like this. But when you have an open relationship, I don’t think it’s quite fair to call it ‘cheating,’ all right?”

  “We don’t have an open relationship!” he said.

  “Don’t be stupid. Julie told me you –” I stopped. My shoulders drooped. I looked at Julie, who was cringing. “Oh. Is that how it is, then.”

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, apparently to us both.

  “We are so over,” Patrick told her. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were hot. After this, I can’t even look at you.” He stormed down the stairs, ran past our parents, and flung himself out the front door. It slammed behind him. His pickup’s engine roared to life, and the truck zoomed off.

  Julie and I stood at the top of the stairs. “You lied,” I said.

  “So did you.”

  “No, I hid the truth. You actually lied.”

  Before she could answer, Dad shouted, “Daniel! Down here, now!”

  I put out a hand to stop Julie. I jogged halfway down the stairs, just far enough to see the four of them. “Sorry, Dad,” I said, “but it’s true what Julie said. We’re adults. Give us ten minutes alone, all right?”

  Mum rose to her feet, ready to deliver me some massive piece of her mind, but Julie’s step-mother waved her down. “Let them talk,” she said. Mum sat down, though never stopped glaring at me.

  “Thanks much.” I ran back up, hauled Julie by the arm into my room, and shut the door. “All right. How long have you known?”

  “Since fall term. A little before Halloween. You?”

  “Halloween? Bloody hell. I didn’t find out till winter holidays. So, hang on – when I told you about the investigator after Thanksgiving, and my parents acting weird, you went right along with it and pretended you didn’t know?”

  “I wasn’t sure. It could have been adultery.”

  “Fine, all right. So how did you work it out, us being related?”

  “Your name sounded familiar when we met. But it wasn’t because of the town in Canada. I’d done a genealogy project in middle school, and it occurred to me maybe there were Revelstokes on it. I had my dad send it to me in October. I didn’t tell him why.”

  “I see. And there I was, Daniel E. Revelstoke, your cousin, whom you opted not to tell.”

  “Oh, you should speak! When you found out over Christmas, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I, darling, was in love with you by then. And Mum told me not to ‘approach’ the delicate French side of the family, who undoubtedly hated us because of my parents jilting your mum, et cetera et cetera.”

  Julie grimaced, glancing aside at the wall. “Dad used to feel that way. I’d asked him a few times if we should ever write to the Revelstoke clan and introduce ourselves. But he always said, ‘From what I’ve heard, we’re better off without them.’”

  “Well. Lovely.”

  “Still, he did tell me over Christmas…” She gave a dry laugh. “That since I was all grown up and going to college now, I could try contacting my biological mom’s side of the family if I wanted. He wouldn’t stand in my way. He’d even be nice to you guys, he said.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he would have been the nicest man imaginable, except today he’s learned you’ve not only found cousin Daniel, you’ve been playing doctor with him for months. Which is rather the main point, isn’t it, so answer my question: why didn’t you tell me, back in October?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone! Why? Same reason as you. Because I was already falling in love with you, and I didn’t know what to do. Remember Halloween? The frat party? I was trying to forget you, trying to get over my huge embarrassing crush on my own cousin! Then you made it worse by rescuing me.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Then, since I couldn’t get over you, I hoped I could be one of your girls, pretending I didn’t know, figuring it would be over before you even found out. But then I wanted more. I wanted you to love me. At the very least I wanted us on good terms – especially since we’d be seeing each other at Thanksgiving in the future. So I let myself get close, and…couldn’t get far away again.”

  It sounded dreadfully familiar. It wasn’t fair to be angry with her when I was equally guilty, but bitterness drenched me anyway. “Reckon I see why you didn’t leave Patrick. Needed a respectable choice to fall back on, didn’t you?”

  “I was about to break up with him.” She sounded miserable. “I would have, even if he hadn’t found out today. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I haven’t loved him for ages.”

  “Then what? You would’ve gone public with me? We still could.”

  “No, I...I was going to confront you about the cousin issue, see what you thought.” She bowed her head, her disheveled fringe falling forward to her lips. “I still would’ve wanted to keep it quiet. Even though it isn’t incest, legally.”

  “Yeah. Guess you must have looked that up too.”

  She tried to smile. “We can even get married, in your country.”

  “Or about twenty of the States.” I tried to smile back.

  A little laugh escaped her. She wiped away a tear. “All that Cyrano ‘cousin’ stuff…”

  “You played it so cool,” I said in admiration. “I was a wreck.”

  “I’ve been a wreck. Inside.”

  “You knew I knew. Didn’t you? What you almost said today…”

  “I was pretty sure,” she said. “You’d made some remarks.”

  “Same here. Sometimes I did wonder…”

  “Daniel!” Mum shouted from downstairs.

  “In a m
inute!” I shouted back. I looked at Julie. “So what do we do? Run off to California?”

  She lowered her face. “Well…you and I may believe it’s okay, but we have to talk to our families.”

  “I’m getting the impression they’re not chuffed. Planning to change that?”

  “I’ll try, but…Daniel, they come first. I’m not going to disown them, or make them disown me.”

  “What am I, then?” I pleaded. “The affair you hid from everybody?”

  “Well – yes. You were that.”

  “Were?”

  “But you became more. I love you. I do.”

  “And I love you, so what’s it matter what they think?”

  “I don’t do things to break up my family,” she said. “It’s happened enough in our family’s past. Don’t you agree?”

  Our family. It was the first time one of us had put it like that. Disconcerting, to say the least. “Yeah, but if you and I break up, then that’s a break in the family too, isn’t it?” Miserable joke at a time like this, but a valid point in its way.

  She smiled sadly. “Let’s go down and see what they say.”

  I advanced, took her hands, and rested my forehead on hers. “Stay with me. Please. We can work this out.”

  She squeezed my hands. “Don’t make it hard on yourself. You could have anyone.”

  “What?”

  She walked past me and opened the door. “Come on.”

  “Jules…” I followed her, but now we were going down the stairs, and facing our four parents like they were a jury.

  They stayed silent and waited for us to speak. Mum looked the worst. Her hair, normally so sleek and tidy, had got all disarrayed somehow. Dad wore a guilty sort of look (probably not unlike mine) but anger gleamed in his eyes when he looked at me. Julie’s dad, who seemed like he might be a pleasant guy in normal times, now looked ready to castrate me and fling my bleeding body into a tank of sharks. Only Julie’s step-mother seemed to carry any degree of sympathy – though she did appear to have some trouble breathing properly, which didn’t indicate the most perfect calm.

  “We’re very sorry,” Julie said, her hands folded in front of her. “We both hid the truth from each other, and from you and Patrick, just to be together. It was wrong.”

  “How long did you think you could get away with it?” her father asked her.

  “This is a rather sick low, even for you, Daniel,” my father added.

  “Come on, it isn’t so awful,” I said. “There are web pages –”

  I stopped when Julie gave me a forbidding look.

  “Fine,” I muttered. “No one minded when Cyrano did it, but when it’s me, oh…”

  Julie turned to face the jury again. “We realize you probably have objections. And we’re ready to hear them and act accordingly.”

  I cleared my throat. “For the record, I am not in agreement on the ‘act accordingly.’ We’re adults, remember?” I directed the words at Julie, but she averted her gaze.

  “Daniel, I can’t see why you’re so determined to indulge in this…this abhorrent behavior,” Mum said. “It’s not as if you couldn’t find some other girl. You always have in the past.”

  “How very polite of everyone to keep pointing that out,” I said.

  “You are in no position to be snippy,” said Dad.

  “And you are in no position to judge me for keeping secrets!” I answered. “Would it have killed the pair of you, somewhere between London and here, to mention, ‘Oh by the way, Daniel, if you meet any girls round Sunriver, best enquire into their heritage before hooking up’?”

  “Dan,” Julie pleaded.

  I shut my mouth and looked away.

  “We’d like to hear what you have to say,” she said to the parents.

  “First cousins – it’s simply wrong,” Mum began.

  “Genetically,” Dad added.

  “Not true,” I said, unable to let a falsehood stand. “Modern studies show that children of first cousins are not at any great risk.”

  “Now you’re having children?” Mum sounded as if she might lose consciousness.

  “God’s sake – no! But you brought up the genetics.”

  “But it’s not even legal,” Julie’s dad said. “First cousins can’t marry. It’s incest.”

  “Yes and no,” I said.

  “It isn’t incest,” Julie explained. “Not according to the laws of Oregon. But it’s true that cousins can’t marry in Oregon, either.”

  “Then there you are,” Dad said.

  “But we can marry in England,” I pointed out. “Or several other places. Even half of the United States.”

  “Forget marrying,” Julie’s step-mother said. She leaned forward and pressed her fingertips together. “You’re young, both of you. And you mean well. I know you do. But whatever happens between you will affect all of us, because we care about you. And when you belong to the same family, it complicates everything one more degree.”

  “And with you in particular, Daniel,” Mum added, “it’s not as if we have any reason to expect you to stay with the poor girl for very long. You never do. And I do object to such treatment when it’s my niece we’re talking about!”

  “Stop throwing that at me!” I said. “I wouldn’t hurt her. And do you think we haven’t considered all this?”

  “I know his history,” Julie said softly. “I won’t hold it against him if he does the same to me.”

  “Bloody hell!” I said. “Has anyone any faith in me?”

  “Daniel,” Dad said, “this was a relationship you both kept secret, a relationship founded on lies you told even to each other. Why should we have faith in you? What have you done to make anyone proud?”

  I opened my mouth in indignation, but the truth of what he said knocked the words out of me. To my total horror, tears rose into my eyes. I grimaced and looked down before anyone could notice.

  “We’re sorry,” Julie said. “I forgive Daniel for lying. And we never wanted to upset any of you. Really, we’re so sorry. What do you want us to do?”

  “You are adults,” her father conceded. He sounded ice-cold. “It’s up to you. But I didn’t raise a daughter to watch her screw around with her own cousin – especially a boy who treats girls like this one does. And I won’t have her in my house.”

  “Dad,” Julie pleaded, her voice full of sobs. I couldn’t look at her.

  “James,” her step-mother said.

  “I’m afraid I agree,” Mum said. “It mustn’t continue. That’s my opinion.”

  Maybe Dad nodded, I don’t know. I didn’t look. I was using all my willpower to keep the tears right where they were.

  The sofa creaked; James French stood up. “I’ve said my piece. Let’s go. Julie? Get in your car. We’re going home.”

  Mum and Dad sprang up to follow them to the door. “I’m so sorry,” Mum was saying. “I never expected…we’ll work this out. I do hope we’ll all still speak.”

  “Of course. We’ll work it out,” Julie’s step-mother said.

  Julie turned to join them. I caught her wrist. She looked at me, and from the distressed change in her eyes I could tell she saw the tears in mine. “Don’t,” I whispered. “Please don’t.”

  “This is the future,” she whispered back. “It won’t do.” A tear fell down her cheek. She pressed my hand, slipped away, and walked out the door with her parents.

  Chapter 21: Family Breakups

  “LISTEN HERE, Daniel,” Dad said, seconds after they had gone.

  Never in my life had I liked what followed the words “Listen here, Daniel,” and I suspected I wouldn’t like it now either. I stamped toward the stairs. “I don’t want to speak to the pair of you.”

  “You can’t just walk away!” Mum shrilled.

  “Can’t I?” I slammed my bedroom door shut.

  I sat in my desk chair and turned my computer on, then sat still for probably half an hour, totally at a loss. I checked my email, as if Julie might have written to me
when she wasn’t even home yet. I opened the instant messaging application, thinking Sinter might be of some use, but he wasn’t logged on. I returned to gazing at my desk drawers, tugging on my lower lip and contemplating what on Earth to do next.

  At last I opened up a new email and wrote to Julie:

  All right darling,

  The worst is over. We both knew all along, so that’s sorted. Really that’s the part I was most worried about. Patrick knows, and it sounds like he’s out of the picture now. I gather you’re not really upset about that. (Don’t listen to him, by the way. You ARE hot.) Then there’s our parents, who aren’t thrilled, but we couldn’t expect that right off. They need time. However, the way they’re treating us right now, like we’re irresponsible children, is not acceptable. I’m sure you’re with me.

  So here’s what I say. Pack some things. Come back in your car and get me. We’ll drive off and find somewhere cheap to stay for the summer. Doesn’t matter where. We’ll get jobs. We’ll go back to Eugene in the autumn, unless you want to transfer to another uni. When they forgive us and accept us we can come back, but there’s no reason we should sit here and take this. We want to be together. I understand you had to leave with them just now, to appease them, but you couldn’t mean to leave me, really, could you?

  Call me on my mobile. We’ll discuss.

  xoxo,

  Daniel

  SEVEN HOURS later, after dark, she rang me. I was still in my room, refusing to eat, refusing to face my parents.

  “I got your email.” She sounded depressed.

  “Right, and what do you think? Tonight, should we?”

  “No…”

  “Tomorrow, then. We’ll wait. Today’s been difficult.”

  “You don’t understand. I meant it.”

  “Meant what?” I asked.

  “When I said this won’t do.”

  “Why? What’s the matter? All those ‘I love you’s and ‘I can’t get enough of you’s…”

  “I meant those too.” She was shading out of depressed and into miserable. “But I also said my family is everything.”

  “Yeah, I am family, all right?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “Yes, but – I don’t understand. Why would you risk everything, going behind everyone’s backs, if you didn’t want to be with me?”