I imagined his list of goals, and at the top: DIANA. With a ten-point plan to achieve me.
The idea terrified me.
Maybe, I thought, I ought to date around, hint that he should wait for Laurie to grow up….
And I might have, I really might have, except for the night he turned sixteen, six months ahead of me. He came over to take me out to a fancy dinner with his newly minted driver’s license – I remember him in his dark suit, and I had my hair up and I was wearing one of Mama’s dresses that I’d taken down from the attic. I remember Francie sidling into my bedroom while I put on mascara, hopping around, giving me her malicious little look.
“It’s smudged,” she said, and she sounded gleeful. “You look like a raccoon.”
I applied lipstick that I intended Richard to kiss off me later. “Don’t you have homework to do?”
“Field trip tomorrow, dumbo.” Then Francie leaned in and whispered, “Do you hear that?”
“What?” I stopped and listened. I vaguely heard Daddy downstairs in the music room, talking to – well, it had to be Laurie. I couldn’t make out his words. I shrugged and turned back to my dressing mirror. “What’s the deal?”
Francie was still whispering. “You know those kittens Laurie found?”
Oh, I knew those kittens, all right. I’d spent a week trying to keep out of their way. I’ve always had this deep-seated aversion to cats, a visceral reaction that I can’t explain – and, yes, I know the irony, since my sister is now Cat Courtney. Over Daddy’s vociferous objections, Laurie had dragged them home after she found them abandoned on the side of the road, and she’d been feeding the smallest one with an eyedropper with more patience than I could have ever mustered.
I picked up my blusher and dusted my bosom lightly. With any luck, that, too, Richard would kiss off in the course of the evening. “What happened?”
“The black one got loose and scratched the piano.”
Oh, boy. Now I could more clearly make out Daddy downstairs – not the words, but the deep, biting tone. Poor Laurie. She was really in for it now.
But it was not my problem. I was not getting involved. In that household, you learned early not to get between Daddy and the designated victim du jour. Laurie would just have to cope, and it wasn’t like it was the first time she’d been on the wrong end of a lecture.
I picked up my evening bag, said a meaningful “Bye” to Francie’s “Your lipstick’s smeared,” and went downstairs just as Richard rang the doorbell.
From the music room, I made out some of what Daddy was saying: “Irresponsible, Laura Rose – head in the clouds – disobedient – disgraceful – look at me when I’m talking to you—”
Richard looked so tall and handsome in his suit, and I have to admit, even now I remember how fast my heart beat when I saw him. I was so lucky, but I also so did not need Daddy, in that mood, to lay eyes on him. From the moment Richard and I had become an item, he had hated Richard with an unreasoning passion, calling him that Ashmore boy, or, when he was really pissed off, that godless Ashmore boy. I whispered to Richard, “Quick. He’s in one of his moods.”
Richard gave me a look that conveyed his understanding. We had spent many, many hours talking about what a strange bird Daddy was. “What’s the problem now?”
“Oh, Laurie upset him—” and I pushed open the screen door to leave.
But then we both heard it. “Words don’t appear to mean anything to you, Laura Rose. Perhaps this will persuade you—”
And we heard the first swish of the belt through the air, and a small, immediately silenced sound.
I’d never heard Richard swear before, and it shocked me. I didn’t even know he used that word. Maybe he felt free to say it now that he was sixteen. But my shock went quickly by the wayside, as he yanked the screen door wide open and brushed right by me.
He strode right into the music room, normally a room he never went into because he disliked Daddy as much as Daddy disliked him. After my initial surprise, I started in after him, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Francie, slinking down the stairs, freeze in place.
The scene in front of us appeared surreal. Daddy, in a rage, his belt wrapped around his hand, the better to swing with. Laurie, little Laurie, only ten years old, standing still, a welt on her arm, her face and eyes blank, gone away inside. And Richard – my wonderful Celtic knight, already well over six feet tall, his face hard, putting out a hand to grasp Daddy’s wrist.
“You hit her again,” he said, “I hit you. Then I call the police.”
Daddy said between clenched teeth, “Get out of here, boyo. This is not your concern.”
Richard did not back down. “If it takes a man to beat a defenseless girl, I’ll be a boy, thank you. I am not joking, Dominic. I will turn you in.”
That was the first time he called Daddy by his first name. I saw Daddy’s eyes darken. The insult was not lost on him. Neither was the threat.
“And after I call the police,” Richard added coolly, “I will call my mother.”
I almost clapped my hands, just barely restrained myself. Brilliant. My boyfriend was brilliant. Because if Daddy truly feared one person on earth, he feared Peggy.
If Peggy heard about this, Daddy could say goodbye to seeing Lucy.
I looked at Richard there in that room, that night, and I didn’t see the boy who routinely let me think I had him just where I wanted him. I saw a young man unafraid to take on a man almost three times his age, standing up for a helpless child who had no one to stand for her. I saw – and should have been warned by – the underlying steel of his character. I saw him pit his will against Daddy’s, and win.
I really should have been paying attention to that.
But I was as starry-eyed as Francie, gazing at him from the stairs. To me, that night, he truly became my Celtic knight.
I don’t think I ever came closer to loving him. And when we finally left, after he told Laurie to go upstairs and directed Francie to take care of her – Daddy disappeared into the back of the house to sulk – I knew that my virginity and his wouldn’t last the night.
~•~
And it didn’t. That night, Richard became my first lover. I became his. He’d spent the early morning getting his driver’s license; he’d spent the afternoon soloing and getting the license that meant more to him – his pilot’s license. We instantly put it to good use. We skipped the fancy dinner, picked up some Mickey D’s, and flew out to Ash Marine. The entire flight, our bodies hummed with anticipation, both of us telling each other in look and touch what lay ahead that night.
For several months, we had been going steadily further and further, hormones egging us on, but we’d always pulled back. Not this night. Once we were there on that lonely island, with only time and tide to keep us company, we walked down to the cove, ate our moonlit meal, and surrendered to the inevitable.
How much resulted from my sudden hero worship, inspired by the sight of Richard standing up to Daddy, and how much was the idea forming in the back of my mind that here was my savior, I don’t know. How much on his part was passion and how much was sheer adrenaline, I don’t know. I only know what happened.
It was a lovely, lovely night, full of passion and awkwardness and tenderness. No matter how angry Richard has gotten with me in the years since, I’m sure he still looks back fondly on his sixteenth birthday.
~•~
He turned out to be, with a little bit of practice, a very good lover. He wasn’t selfish, he worked hard to make sure that I enjoyed myself – I came to see the Standing Stone of Ireland, as we dubbed it, as much an instrument for my pleasure as for his – and he took care of the birth control.
He also took good care of me. He taught me to drive. He looked over my chem and trig assignments and kept me from flunking my junior year. He wrote the essay on my college applications for me. He did my Christmas shopping for me when I got sick.
Every girl in my class envied me my perfect boyfriend. Gorgeous, smart, court
eous, caring – hell, if I hadn’t had to put up with him, I would have envied me.
But, you see, I didn’t want to be taken care of. I wanted to be saved, yes, because those hours of practice never stopped, nor the constant reminder of my destiny to replace my mother. But I didn’t want someone making decisions for me, knowing what was best for me, telling me what to do! That was the problem! I had enough of that with Daddy. But try telling that to Richard.
~•~
As I said, Richard took care of the birth control. With one horrible exception, he did the perfect job there that he did everywhere else.
I know that he insisted on protecting me because he wanted to protect himself, and who could blame him? He didn’t want to ruin his future, mapped out in his precise way in his cradle. Architecture at UVA. Master’s. A few years apprenticeship in a commercial firm. Then concentrate on doing what he loved best: preserving the architectural heritage of Virginia. How many times I heard it all! And, of course, rebuild that awful Folly, which never looked like much to me. (Of course, I was wrong. The damn thing is a palace now. How was I to know he would somehow find 10,000 square feet in there?)
The last thing he needed was a fertile girlfriend.
That’s why, when I proved to be a little too fertile my senior year in high school, the weekend he came home from UVA to take me to the Valentine’s Day dance, I took care of it.
I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t believe it when I was late; I could set my watch by my period, and Richard was nothing if not careful. All I could think was, It can’t be, it can’t be, because Richard Ashmore did not make mistakes like that. The Standing Stone of Ireland couldn’t have done this to me. But when he came home the first weekend in March and we went out to a movie, and I nearly tossed my cookies at the smell of popcorn, and then I fell asleep on him halfway through the film, I had to face the fact that IT had happened.
I couldn’t even call it anything but IT.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I did almost succumb to temptation a few days later when he called me from UVA. We talked several nights a week, and that night he asked me if I was still feeling rundown. I said no, which was a lie, because I could barely keep my eyes open and my breasts hurt so bad I could barely stand to wear a bra, and I just felt weird. Then he started talking about his biology class – I remember that he was reading Darwin – and I wanted so much to say, “Speaking of biology, Richard – guess what.” But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Because I knew what would happen.
He’d stand by me. He’d insist on us getting married.
But I didn’t want to get married. Not then. Not when I was still a senior in high school. Not when I was on the verge of getting away from Daddy. Not ever if I had to live at Ashmore Park and become a clone of Peggy Ashmore.
I wanted to go to college. I wanted the freedom of living on campus. I wanted to study music, not the music Daddy drummed into me, but my music, jazz piano. I wanted (truth!) to date other boys, to see if I was missing anything by tying myself down. I wanted the right to tell both Richard and Daddy to go to hell.
And how could I do that if I was blown up like a whale?
And how could I turn myself into a jazz pianist if I had a baby?
And how could I live out my secret dream, enjoy a bohemian life in Paris in my wild and crazy twenties, hang out at cafés, eke out a precarious existence as a pianist in sleazy night clubs, drink cheap wine and have meaningless flings with bad boys, if I became Mrs. Richard Ashmore?
I’d do the Mrs. Richard Ashmore thing after I’d lived.
~•~
When I was officially two weeks late, I went across the river to buy a couple of tests because I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew there. I got up first thing the next morning and did the test, and the ten minutes of waiting for the result – God, I can’t even bear to remember the agony of wondering and waiting. I nearly ran back into the bathroom to look at the test after five minutes. But, no, I followed the directions, I waited ten, and I went back to look at it, and it was bright fucking blue.
Blue. Positive. What the hell was so positive about blue?
I remember saying, “Oh no, oh no, oh no, no, no.” Just babbling. Looking at myself in the mirror, seeing all the color drain from my face. Taking the test again and getting the same result. Moving in shock, carefully repackaging the tests so that I could throw them away where Daddy wouldn’t see them in the trash and that little snoop Francie couldn’t “find” them. Sitting huddled in the shower with my face against my knees, feeling the water wash away the tears that I couldn’t stop crying. Knowing that, for this moment in time, I was seventeen and I was the future Callas and I was actually a mother. And Richard, the future Frank Lloyd Wright, all unknowing up there at UVA, was a father. We were – oh, God, how had this happened – parents.
How could we be parents! We were kids!
Knowing that I couldn’t ruin his life or mine by letting IT happen. Knowing I had to erase IT out of existence. Knowing, because I’d been a good little girl and listened to Monsignor at Mass, that I was going to burn in hell forever.
Not wanting to know that nothing could ever turn back the clock so that IT never happened.
~•~
The day my world crashed was March 15. The Ides of March. Every year, I feel a chill when I see that day on the calendar.
~•~
I scrounged together most of the money, raided Laurie’s secret stash that she thought no one knew about, and stole the rest from Daddy’s wallet. Richard was planning to come home for the weekend, so that Friday I signed myself out of school and took a bus to the clinic in Richmond. I sat there by myself but hardly alone – there were other girls my age there, and a lot of older women, and every last one of us carefully didn’t look at the others. Nobody talked. We each sat there in our own private purgatories.
I had never seen so much paperwork in my whole life, and I signed it all without reading it. I have no idea what I signed. They called my number and took me in for another test. God didn’t listen to me, because it was still positive. I remember thinking that how on earth had I passed this test when I couldn’t even pass math unless Richard coached me.
He’d coached me into passing this one, all right.
But I couldn’t think about Richard. I couldn’t allow him in my mind. I changed him into MY BOYFRIEND, so when the counselor asked me if I had a ride home, I said yes, MY BOYFRIEND was coming to get me. No name, not a person, not half of this equation, certainly not someone who’d have a definite opinion about IT if only he knew. Just MY BOYFRIEND. She asked if I was sure I wanted to go ahead, and I remember just nodding and noticing with mild interest that I felt nothing inside.
I just wanted to get IT over and done with.
Then back to the waiting room. Another hour of being a robot. They called my number, and I followed the nurse into the back. I laid down my money, and I remember that I started to feel guilty, because I had taken Laurie’s hard-earned babysitting money – but no, I wasn’t going to think that word.
I didn’t feel guilty one little bit about stealing the money from Daddy.
I felt nothing about where I was or what I was about to do.
Then the procedure. That’s what they called it – the procedure. Like getting your teeth cleaned or your eyes examined. I didn’t have the money for a general anesthesia, so I was awake for the whole procedure. That awful sound. The pure indifference of the doctor. An hour in recovery. One hour to recover from IT in your life, and then you’re spic’n’span, good as new.
It was afternoon when I left, and I waited for the bus, sick from relief. IT was over. I had dealt with IT. I didn’t have to think about IT anymore, because now I was recovered. And then – I saw a Honda Accord drive by, the same color that Richard drove. It wasn’t his, of course. The clinic was in south Richmond, and coming from UVA he’d skirt the city on the north. But I saw that car, and I thought how much damage the Standing Stone of Irela
nd had done to me and how I had to pay for his failure. I thought how he hadn’t had to deal with IT those last few weeks. I thought about how he had gone to class, done his assignments, driven home for the weekend probably anticipating a roll in the hay – read Charles Darwin, for God’s sake – because his devoted girlfriend had taken care of IT for him.
That was the first time I ever wanted to smash his face in.
I wanted to throw up. How could I feel that way about Richard, who was so good to me, who loved me so much, who tried so hard to take care of me?
I couldn’t face the long bus ride home. I couldn’t face going in the house, seeing Daddy, seeing my sisters, acting like I’d been at school. I couldn’t face going out with Richard that night – and, dear God, what would I do if he wanted to make love?
So, finally, I told someone. I called Lucy. She immediately drove the fifty miles to get me, took me home, and tucked me into bed. She listened to me cry when my hormones refused to get the hell out of Dodge. She swatted Francie away from me. She told Laurie to make me some chicken soup. She told Daddy to back off, he had been pushing me too hard. She told Richard I was stressed out over school and to leave me alone for a few weeks.
I owe my sanity to Lucy sometimes.
~•~
I still didn’t tell him. But it hung over the rest of my senior year, a shadow that never completely left me. Richard knew something was wrong; he could hardly help but know, because for months I burst into tears at the drop of a hat. I was going to hell, and I was so afraid of going to hell. It didn’t help one little bit when I blurted that out one day and he said that hell didn’t exist. It damn well did, whether the great Richard Ashmore thought so or not, because I was getting a pretty good glimpse of it.
He called every night to check on me, he comforted me when I fell from okay to depressed in the blink of an eye, he heeded Lucy when she told him I wasn’t feeling well because of problems with my period. He never did pay much attention to my cycle anyway, but that was brilliant of Lucy because Richard had the normal male reluctance to inquire deeply into the mysterious world of menstruation. But, at least, for a few months, he never once made a move for sex, and that was just as well, because I think I would have thrown up all over him if he had done anything except kiss me.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 24