I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (8 page)

Mrs. Sondervan opened her front door to me. Happily startled, she kissed my cheek on my way in and said, “Jared just got home.”

She started to call him when he walked into the foyer, and Mrs. Sondervan, noticing our expressions, quietly excused herself.

“Do you have a minute?” I asked. “I want to show you something.”

“Sure,” he said without much emotion and followed me into my car.

At first we said nothing. I just drove, and the place we were going wasn’t far at all. We could have walked.

I parked on Lakeside Drive and nodded toward Reeds Lake.

“Come on,” I said and reached for the blanket in the back.

“We’re getting out?”

I nodded. He followed me and helped me spread the blanket on the ground not far from one of the trees in John A. Collins Park, and we sat.

It must have been going on ten o’clock. Darkening blue sky. Pale yellow half moon. And enough light from streetlamps and condos across the street to guide our way.

Jared did not look remotely angry. Just expectant and almost easy about it, but for the intensity of his eyes, visible even in the half-light of the park.

For just a second, I looked away, looked sideways, to my left, toward the water. Looked up at the sky and saw a memory and cleared my throat and cleared it away. But not entirely.

Not at all.

“This is my other Most Favorite Place on Earth,” I said. “I was five. Almost six, and I was sitting here.” I touched the blanket in front of me. “On my dad’s lap, watching the fireworks on the Fourth. Mother sat here and pressed her shoulder against his all night long. Peter lay on his back in front of us all and giggled when Mother tickled his belly.

“We were the last to leave that night. My dad kept saying, ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ And I don’t know how long it took, but this place was eventually like it is now. Quiet. A little light. You could smell the smoke from all the exploded shells, and I still love that smell. I go right back to that night. Peter fell asleep, but I couldn’t. It was so odd that we weren’t leaving, and I had to know why.”

I started to get a little teary. Ignored it. Kept talking.

“Finally my mother asked, and my dad said—and I was still in his lap; his arms were still around me—‘I just want this night to last a little longer.’ And I remember saying, ‘I want this night to last forever.’ And he squeezed
me, and he kissed my cheek, and he said, ‘That’s my girl.’ And I was. I was his girl.

“We were so happy then.” More tears. A sniffle. “We were a Real Family. We were like yours, and it was the last time. He was killed a few weeks later. Without him, we were just…broken. Whitt was supposed to put us back together, but it never happened.”

Sniff.

“Right after the accident, Mother stopped talking, so Peter stopped talking, so—” I shrugged. “—I stopped talking. There was no one to talk to. About anything real. About my dad. Whenever I mentioned him, Mother cried, and Peter got angry, and I was so young, I had no idea what was going on, and no one would explain it to me.

“I remember wondering where my Real Mother and my Real Brother went.”

I caught my breath.

“Wherever it was, they went together, because they’re completely fine, and they’re completely close, and they barely know each other, and they think they do, and that’s just how they like it. And I look at them sometimes and think, ‘These cannot be my people.’ But I don’t say anything because it does no good.

“No one can fix this.

“This is just how it is.

“I’m not fine having a mother and a brother who don’t know me and don’t want to,” I said, and my voice thickened with tears. “So this is my favorite place, because here I remember what it was like when my dad was alive, and it was so good. It could have been so good.”

“Come here,” Jared said, grabbing my shirt, pulling me close, kissing me, telling me he loved me, holding me tight.

I was so like my dad.

I wanted this night to last a little longer.

And it did.

There was more.

In the quiet of the park and the stillness of the night, Jared and I sat across from each other, holding hands—sometimes he touched my face—as I shared more stories of my life between my dad and then.

I conked Peter over the head with a flower at Mother and Whitt’s wedding. He deserved it, laughing too ridiculously through the vows, so I returned him to the appropriate state of decorum with one well-timed lily-white whack.

Of course, I got scolded. Mother interrupted her vows to tell me how ladies behaved, and I might have cried but for a wink I got from Whitt. A wink and a smile, and it made me blush in a good way.

He made a great start—an expert start as a stepdad, nearly returning the three of us to the Four of Us again.

“You were close?” Jared asked, and I nodded.

Whitt and I were once very close.

I might have been his groupie when he first married Mother, I was so enchanted by him. Wherever he was in the house, I was nearby, inching closer and closer over
the months and years until I was squished next to him in a chair or sofa corner while he read to me. And he read for hours. I’d fall asleep, and he’d carry me to bed.

We played games, cooked together, washed the dishes, went to the beach. I made him cards and ceramic junk in all my art classes, and he received every single gift as if it were rubies.

I was desperate—desperate—to call him Dad, but that didn’t work out the way I hoped it would.

“What happened?” Jared asked.

“Do you know Caitlyn Pryce?”

“I know who she is.”

“In the summer before seventh grade, she was telling a bunch of us at the pool one day that she was adopted. This is the kind of stuff junior high girls discuss the way doctors discuss brain tumors. We’re fascinated and concerned at the same time, and nothing is more urgent.”

Jared smiled.

“So I started thinking that ‘Hey, I think I’d like to be adopted’—legally adopted by Whitt, and then I’d have a real reason for calling him Dad. So I mentioned it to Mother and Whitt one night at dinner. I don’t know where Peter was.

“So I see Whitt and Mother consult each other with just their eyes, and then Whitt says, ‘I’d like nothing more.’ And because my thirteenth birthday was coming up—October third, in the event you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t.”

“I know. So because my birthday was coming up, Whitt said he’d make that my birthday present, and there were papers, I guess, and he called it a Signing Party.
We were going to have a Signing Party on my birthday, and I would become his Real Daughter.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” I said. “My birthday came, and he never even mentioned it. So I didn’t mention it, and pretty much that’s it.”

“Hmm,” Jared said. Just
hmm
, and he brushed his hand along my cheek, tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.

“It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget, does it?” I said.

“It doesn’t.” He squeezed my hands. “Bronwen, I want to know these things. I want to know that you don’t eat meat and that you think I’m wrong or that I’ve said or done something that has completely upset you. I’m going to tell you the same, and then we’ll do this. We’ll talk. Like people do. Although maybe not in one big file-dump like this. Unless that’s how you need to do it.”

“I don’t know how I need to do this,” I confessed, half laughing at myself. “I mean, no wonder no one in my family ever really talks. It’s completely exhausting.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” He put his hands on my cheeks. “You’ll practice. With me.”

We kissed some, and after a short time, he leaned back and asked, “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“No—wait. Yes,” I said and actually had to take another, albeit smaller, breath. “I am not—” I paused. “—actually blonde.”

He nodded as he traced his finger over my eyebrows.

“I know,” he said. “Your eyebrows are brown, and I have a sister who has been coloring her hair for ten years.”

“Lauren colors her hair?”

Jared laughed. “I thought you were going to tell me something shocking,” he said.

“You’re obviously not related to me. If you were, you’d be out cold.”

“Why do you color it?”

“I don’t know. It makes my mother happy.”

“Like eating meat made mine happy?”

I squinted at him, wrinkled up my nose—a kind of tacit
yeah, I know.

Jared was right. There was more to talk about, but not that night. It was late, and I was worn out, and back at Jared’s when I dropped him off, he said, “Call me when you get home.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Call me when you get home.”

I did, just to say I was there, and he said, “Dream of me,” as usual, before we hung up.

I had no dreams, and I know you dream every night, but this was one of those tense, blackened-dream nights where I woke up aching and wholly unrested with a headache that caffeine and aspirin would not touch.

“You know the best thing for that?” Jared said over the phone.

“What?”

“Another day at the beach.”

And by eleven o’clock, we were in his car on the high-way with the windows down and radio on and my headache drifting away.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we were on our way to our own place—our own cottage at the Lake?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, it would be,” I said and laid my head back against the seat and just enjoyed the sun and the wind and thought I heard Jared say the word
soon.

Or maybe I wished it, but when I looked over at him, he was smiling, looking at the road. But smiling.

Bronwen Sondervan.

I’ll admit it. I tried out the name a few times in the privacy of my own room and, even there, in the privacy of my own imagination.

We all do that—try on our boyfriends’ last names for size and sound. Even Kirsten, who, by the way, has a standing agreement about premarital sex with Charlie Frank: When
he’s
ready for it, she’ll tell him.

Bronwen Sondervan.

I liked it.

And everything that came with it.

In the days before my thirteenth birthday, I had tried on the name Bronwen VanHorn and liked it and everything that came with it too.

But, of course, nothing came with it and my birthday was a series of events that left Mother happy and me blonde.

I waited for Whitt to remember.

He was busy. Maybe he forgot.

I hinted, as much as I could as a newly worried thirteen-year-old. Mostly I asked and answered the same question—same question, different answer—over and over inside my head, until I turned my worry first into anxiety and then into sadness.

Why didn’t he say anything? He forgot. No, he’s just a little late. No, this must be some huge, complicated legal thing. No, it’s too complicated for him to deal with. No, he doesn’t want to deal with it. No, he doesn’t want to deal with it for me.

Days passed.

Finally, I worked up enough nerve to ask Mother, in the privacy of her car one day, “Doesn’t Whitt—isn’t he going to—I thought for my birthday, we were going to have that Signing Party. Remember?”

“Hmm? A party. Oh, Bronwen, I’m sorry. I never knew you wanted a party. You never said anything about a party.”

“No, not a party. A Signing Party. Remember? What we talked about? About Whitt, and I’d be Bronwen VanHorn?”

“Oh, that. Oh, honey,” she said, dropping a hand on my thigh and shooting me a there-there-poor-thing smile. “Well, since it didn’t happen, I think we should all just let the matter drop and not worry about it too much. Don’t you think that’s best?”

I nodded politely while wanting to cry
best?! This is not best. This is horrible.

“I knew you would,” she said happily, and we did as we always did. We let the matter drop.

But dropping and resolving aren’t exactly the same thing. Well, they are in this family but not to me. These are not my people.

From that day on, I found the only way to live with the heavy disappointment of the whole thing was to turn it into indifference, which I then turned into a gun—loaded, cocked, and ready to fire.

I began making myself scarce when Whitt was home, inhaling dinner or making it myself earlier, with the excuse that I had homework, some project, some test to study for. Vegetarianism got me out of the role of assistant chef to him, and invitations from friends got me out of most so-called family days at the beach. When I did go, I disappeared into my iPod, and, no, I did not feel like swimming today, thank you.

Whitt backed off a little, gave me space, didn’t pester me to tell him what was wrong. I heard Mother explain to him that girls my age needed privacy, that I in particular needed privacy.

Privacy and ketchup.

Just what I wanted.

Sometime in the middle of seventh grade, I walked into the kitchen in the midst of a whispered conversation between the two of them.

I heard Mother say, “Nothing’s wrong. She’s growing up.”

“Well, something’s…” Something.

His back was to me. I couldn’t quite hear.

“Whitt, no. It’s not that,” Mother said, unaware of my presence far across the kitchen.

“But she won’t—”

“Whitt, look, she’s thirteen, and girls change. Sometimes very suddenly. And they just want to be left alone. They don’t want to be bothered. They don’t want anyone asking them about their personal lives. Trust me. I’m her mother. I know. Plus, she just got her period, and—”

And that’s when I left and tried not to die of embarrassment before I reached my bedroom.

I was fourteen when I fired that gun I’d been carrying around for a year, retaliation—self-defense, actually—for Whitt’s not coming through, for not wanting me as his own, for not loving me like a father should, for wrecking my thirteenth birthday. And if I had been at a courthouse or in some lawyer’s office for Signing Day, I would not have had time for Making a Day of It with Mother, so, yes, my blonde hair was Whitt’s fault too.

Sometime after he returned home from work one night—it was a Thursday; I’ll never forget this—he found me on the floor of the family room, working on algebra homework. Exponents and radicals.

“Hey there, Little Miss Lilywhite, how does Chinese sound for dinner tonight?” he asked.

“I prefer to be called Bronwen,” I said rather royally and without looking up from my paper. “It’s the name my father gave me.”

Bang!

He’s called me Bronwen ever since.

So I got over myself eventually, like most junior high girls do, some earlier than others and some not at all. But I did, just kind of accepted that this is how things are, and I could live with how things are until I was old enough to change them, to do my own thing. And by the start of high school, I had returned to the family table, such as it was in both respects.

Not quite a family.

Not quite a table.

Mother, Whitt, and I at the breakfast bar, Peter out with the Girlfriend of the Moment and later away at school, returning for Grand Entrances and Second Comings.

And we all found our way into that Super Polite Phase that Kirsten described between her family and Charlie Frank’s. And it was fine, except it wasn’t.

“Your family is so normal,” I told Jared one night in early August on our patio—Mother and Whitt were out again—”that Harvard Medical School should send all its psych students here to study you. To see how Real Families are supposed to interact.”

“We have some shirttail lunatics in this family,” he said. “I’ve got some third or fourth cousins somewhere that live on a commune.”

“A commune? That’s it? My grandmother says the military is secretly training monkeys for use in combat.”

Jared smiled, chuckled a little.

“She celebrates my grandfather’s birthday on the wrong day. Every year. She’s seen his birth certificate and says it’s a typo at the county clerk’s office. No one can dissuade her. From anything.”

“Everyone’s grandparents are quirky.”

“Quirky? Come with me,” I said, taking his hand and dashing—really dashing—up the stairs to my room, where I plucked from my bookshelves
The Onderdonk Reliable Method for Preventing Most Diseases of the Rectum.

“This was a birthday present,” I said.

He smiled as he read it, thought the inscription was a hoot, and then dropped it and himself on my bed.

“Come here,” he said, holding a hand out to me, which I happily took, and within minutes, we were lying back against my many pillows kissing, and he was untucking my tank top. He slid his hand over my stomach, slowly but effortlessly, up to my bra, under my bra. His hands on my body felt soft and exciting, but when he slid one down toward my shorts, I said, “I think we should stop.”

And after just another minute or two, I said it again, and he said, “Okay.”

August’s normally hazy and slow days flew by, speeding us faster and faster toward the twenty-fifth, when Jared would return to Hope for his senior year. We had
talked—and I had worried—about what the school year would bring for both of us.

Holland, Jared reassured me, wasn’t so far away. Thirty-five miles.

“Civil War soldiers walked that in a day. In the summer. Carrying packs and wearing wool,” he said.

It soothed me some.

“I’ll be home at least one weekend a month, and you’ll come down. Stay with my friends. You and Kirsten.”

So we told ourselves that ours was not a long-distance relationship—not when Civil War soldiers walked it in a day.

But it felt so very far away to me.

On the twenty-fifth, around six o’clock, I stood in his parents’ driveway with the Sondervans and Lauren and Spence, waving as Jared drove off and trying desperately not to cry. But I did cry—only a little but enough to completely embarrass myself.

Mrs. Sondervan hugged me and said, “I love how much you love my son.”

Spence clapped his hands together, saying, “This puts me in the mood for pizza.”

“Rain puts you in the mood for pizza. Sun. Weekends. The beach. Snow. Football. Saying good-bye to my brother,” Lauren said.

“Weddings,” Spence teased. To his future in-laws he said, “Is it still a no on pizza at the reception?”

“It’s a resounding no, Spence,” Mrs. Sondervan said. “But if you’d all like one now, that sounds good to me too.”

I assumed she meant the four of them and started to say good-bye, when Mr. Sondervan took my hand and asked, “And just where do you think you’re going, Miss Bronwen?”

“I think I should go,” I more asked than said. “It’s your dinnertime, so—”

“It’s our dinnertime,” he said and winked at me. “And you know what that means?”

I shook my head. He put his arm around me.

“You’re going to learn to love meat,” he said through that same impish smile I saw so often on his son.

“How about if I just eat around it?”

“How about if we order something we all like?” he asked. “And how about you speak up about what you like and don’t like. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, by which I meant
Maybe.

Some habits are hard to break.

Mother and Whitt sat talking on the patio when I returned from the Sondervans’, and I joined them there for a few minutes and threw a ball to Sam three or four times.

“I know you’re going to miss Jared,” Mother said as I sat down in a chair across from her.

I nodded. Mother sat forward and put her hand on my knee. “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, honey,” she began with a smile, “but I’ll be happy to see more of you now that Jared’s back at school. It’s not that I’m not very fond of him and happy to see him. We both are. It’s
just that you were spending an awful lot of time at the Sondervans’.”

“I know. I really love them.”

Whitt looked over at me then as if to say—something. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t read him the way I could read Mother. So it startled me when he casually stood, said he felt tired, and said good night to us both.

Mother and I remained on the patio a little longer, talking about the beautiful sunset, and
isn’t it just beautiful; yes, it really is beautiful; what a gorgeous night. Isn’t it? It is.