The Third Child (22 page)

“How long was this after your father was arrested?”

“Two years. I was seven. That’s when Si and Nadine adopted me. My grandma wanted me, but she was too weak to take care of me. She had crippling arthritis. I knew the Ackermans, from my father’s trial and all his appeals. They had tried to make things easier for my mom, but nothing could really help. So I became theirs. They’ve been very good to me—but you see, I’m not their son and I never can be…”

“But why didn’t you tell me? I keep coming back to that.” Seven. She had been crazy about horses and dogs, and her father still made a fuss over her. Her worst fear came from a video of
Snow White,
all the grasping trees. She played Mommy to Billy and pretended to spank him when he was bad, although none of them had ever been spanked. Where did she get that? TV, probably. She was happy then, adoring her parents, with her little brother as playmate.

“For years I haven’t told anyone. Si said I shouldn’t—that it would cause me trouble. That the authorities—principals, teachers, administrators, bosses—would expect the worst from me, and I’d be having to prove myself all the time. So I haven’t told. Not friends, not girlfriends, nobody. I thought of telling you, but it seemed such a big thing—at first, I wanted you to know me before I spoiled everything. Then I kept thinking it wasn’t the right time yet. And then I’d waited too long to suddenly say, Oh, by the way, actually I do know who my parents were. Guess who.”

“But you didn’t get involved with me to get back at my father?”

“I was watching you from the first day of class, don’t you know that? At first, who your father was put me off. That’s why I waited so long after we spoke the first time to make a move. I didn’t know if I could handle your family being who they are. Then I decided, it’s not your fault. You didn’t choose them.”

And he hadn’t chosen his birth parents. She had almost broken up with him because of them. She put her arms around him, huddled as he was with his knees drawn up, and tried to hug him. “Neither of us had a choice. We got what we got.”

“I’m not ashamed. Don’t think that. But it’s still an open sore. My father was killed for something he never did. I’ve always known that, and there isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it. I’ve always been powerless.”

“And now you aren’t? Because of me.”

He put his knees down finally and turned on the bed, pulling her against him. They lay side by side with the length of their bodies pressed together. “I can’t lose you,” he said into her hair. “I can’t. You’re the first, you’re the only woman I ever loved. We’re supposed to be together. It’s our fate to find each other and be together.”

Tears ran slowly down her face again, and she clutched him. “We are together,” she promised. “It doesn’t matter what I know now. Rosemary can’t pull us apart. No matter how hard she tries.” He was hers, he really was. She was not a fool. What she had learned made no difference between them except to give her an understanding of what he had gone through, the pain inside him. She did not love him less for that. She loved him more.

He was pushing his prick at her. She helped him pull her panties down, and then he thrust into her. They weren’t even undressed. But she felt the same dumb compulsion to couple, to push themselves into each other and hold on, to move together like frightened children rocking themselves to sleep. They were proving to each other and to themselves that they were still joined. He needed to feel that and so did she. It was not pleasure, not desire but the compulsion to know they had each other that drove them, with him pounding into her and her thrusting up at him, on and on because for a long time neither could come. Finally, sore already, she shivered with her orgasm and shortly afterward, as she bit the insides of her cheeks because it hurt, he came with a loud groan.

“Together we’ll set things right,” he said. “Together.”

M
elissa was on the telephone with Rosemary. “I won’t leave school just seven weeks into the semester. I won’t!”

“We’ve decided it’s better for you to return home. Alison has checked, and we can get you into American University in January.”

“Better for whom?” She articulated carefully, putting on the
m
as she never would with anyone else. “Not for me. I have friends here. I’m doing well in school, and you want to yank me out. No, thank you. You’ve paid my tuition and my room and board for the year, and I’m staying.”

“Melissa, you’ve behaved irresponsibly and you must accept the cost.”

“Of seeing a boy whose parents you don’t like? He didn’t choose his father. He didn’t choose who adopted him. Why blame me? Why blame him, for that matter? I think you should just chill out. He’s one of three guys I’ve been seeing. You only met him because I ran into him in Washington. I’ve gone out far more with Jed—whom you’d really like. But he’s also seeing another girl…. Blake’s just a student here. He has a better grade point average than I do.”

“Your father is under attack now and we need to circle the wagons. Seeing that boy is potentially embarrassing, and could prove dangerous. Ridiculous stories the
Inquirer
is running could hurt Rich’s campaign, as well as potentially damaging your father.”

“I don’t see what newspaper stories have to do with occasionally dating a boy here. He’s not a reporter. He doesn’t work for a newspaper. He’s just a student, like me.”

“He’s nothing like you, and don’t forget that for a moment. Why are you being so stubborn about this? Are you sleeping with him?”

“Absolutely not! But I have to be free to choose my own friends in college. As I told you, he’s not even the guy I’m most interested in.”

“You can never be free to make poor choices, Melissa. It reflects badly on your father, and we are a public family.”

“If I dumped him because of who his dead father is, wouldn’t that reflect really badly on me?”

“Melissa, this is not negotiable. This is not a request. We will not allow you to see that boy any longer, for your own good and for the good of your family. A modicum of loyalty, please.”

“I will consider what you have said. Carefully.”

“Do more than ‘consider’ it. Implement it.”

When she hung up, Melissa was quivering with anger. Rosemary was not the least bit concerned with her well-being but only too willing to sacrifice her desires and her happiness to Dick, to Rich, to Rosemary’s own considerable ambitions. Could they really pull her out of school? Her tuition was paid, her dormitory was paid through January. She had to talk to Blake right away.

She caught him just after his web design class. “Blake, my parents are putting tremendous pressure on me to break up with you. They’re talking about pulling me out of school.”

“We won’t let them do that.” He started to head toward the student center, then spun around. “Let’s go to my room. We can talk there.”

They sat cross-legged, facing each other on his bed. “I’ve been saying that we just see each other casually, but they may guess that isn’t true. Rosemary’s adamant about getting you out of my life. She’s afraid of you, I think.”

“I can tell from her correspondence with Rich that she means business. He advised her to pull you out of school, and she’s ready to do so.”

“I won’t go! I’d feel humiliated. Like someone sent home from camp for wetting the bed. I won’t break up with you at her command. I won’t!”

“We have to stop them.” He rose to pace the room. “Do you have any money?”

“Not much. But everything’s paid through January.”

“I have some money. Friends of my father put it into a trust that Si
arranged after my mother died. I mean, it’s not a lot, but it’s mine. It was in trust until my eighteenth birthday so I could go to college no matter what. It could pay for you if your parents won’t—there’s enough I think.”

“You’d just give it to me?”

“I know if we were married I could.” He was still pacing, turning on his heel, running his hands roughly over his close-cropped hair. “Maybe it’s time we do that.”

“Get married? Like, for real?”

“We’ll do it eventually anyway.”

“I always hoped we would.”

“If we marry, your parents can’t touch us.”

“So are you asking me, Blake?”

“Sure. Why not? We’ll be safer.”

“How do we do it? I mean, so it’s legal and all.” See, she was right and Rosemary was wrong. Not only did he really love her, he was ready for them to get married. She was so excited she jumped up and hugged him, hard. She would be married way ahead of Merilee. She was loved and she would have her own family, away from them.

“I’m not sure. I think we get a license and a blood test—like to tell if we have syphilis. I don’t think they test for AIDS. But whatever.”

“When should we do it?”

“As soon as possible, to head your mother off at the pass. I’ll go online and get the facts for Connecticut. We have lots of states to choose from in New England if there’s a problem. I’ll get on it right now.” He headed to his computer and booted up.

She almost said that she’d checked Connecticut law, but she was afraid to sound as if she had already been thinking about marriage. “Should I, like, go home and get packed?”

“Don’t do that until I see if we have to leave. I mean, we don’t require a honeymoon. We just need to make it legal. I have a test in web design Friday, so I don’t want to be away then. But we could get married in the morning and still get back in time for me to ace that test.”

She giggled. “It sounds so unreal. Getting married in the morning and going back to class in the afternoon.”

“We’re mated already. It’s just a legal thing, so they can’t push you around, you know?” He stood up and came around his chair to put his hands on her shoulders. “This is okay with you, right?”

“More than okay. I want to.”

She ran back to her room. She was delighted to see Emily at her desk with her laptop on, writing a paper. “Em, guess what? No, don’t. You’ll never guess in a hundred years.”

“Must be something good. You’re all lit up.”

“Blake asked me to marry him!”

“Jesus. Are you real? Was he kidding around?”

“He meant it. And I said yes.”

Emily backed out of her file and shut down her laptop. “Lissa, what is this? We’re just sophomores. He’s only like the second guy you ever bonked.”

“But my mother is threatening to pull me out of school. If Blake and I were man and wife, they couldn’t touch us.”

“They could try to get the marriage annulled.”

“It would be a scandal if they did. Because the two of us would be screaming and kicking and fighting.”

Emily straddled her desk chair, staring. “But how come you want to get married so quick? I mean, it seems crazy to me. We’re still kids. We don’t need to think about pairing off permanently for years. We have lots of time to meet guys and get to know them and find out what we really, really want. It’s time for fun, not for settling down in a condo with some guy you only met last year.”

“But I love him, Em. How much can you love someone? That’s the way I love him. It can’t get better than that. What would I be waiting for? A rock star? A millionaire? I just want someone to love me the way I love them.”

“So can’t you just go along loving him for a couple of years until you know for sure what you want to do with your life?”

“I don’t have a couple of years. Rosemary’s threatening to pull me out of school.”

“That would be so uncool. You couldn’t get into a good school in the middle of the year.”

Melissa snorted. “That’s what I told her. She doesn’t care. She’ll always sacrifice me to my father or Rich. Everybody’s more important than me.”

“You just can’t let them pull you out of school! You have to talk to her.”

“She’s not interested in what I want. Only what’s good for Dick. What’s good for Rich. What’s good for her.”

“So if you got married, you could stay in school?” Emily frowned, trying to puzzle it out.

“I wouldn’t even tell her unless she tried to make me go home. Then that would be my trump card. You see?”

“Sort of. But it just seems like such a drastic step. Although I suppose you could always get a divorce if it doesn’t work out.”

They both laughed. “Me, a divorcée at twenty.” Melissa felt close to Emily again. “It seems like I’ll wake up and it’s just a game or a fantasy, something you play around with imagining when you’re bored. But it’s the only way I can be sure of being with him, of staying in school. The only way to keep them from just eating me up to satisfy themselves. And it isn’t like I never thought of marrying him. When the two of us stayed in my parents’ house last summer, while they were up in Maine, we pretended like we were married.”

Melissa wished that Emily could enter into her plans more enthusiastically. She tried to imagine how she would feel if Emily came barging in one evening and announced she was getting married. Probably her first thought would be that she would have to get another roommate and she would not see nearly as much of her friend. “Em, it’ll be a secret. We’ll just have the ceremony and come back here and resume. I’ll be living here, we’ll go to classes and do each other’s hair and borrow clothes and everything will be the same. But I’ll just have an insurance policy against my mother.”

About an hour later, she checked her e-mail and found a message from Blake. “Wow, do you believe this? Above eighteen, no parental permission
is needed.” Melissa turned to Emily, waving her hands like wings. “It costs thirty-five dollars and we need to get a blood test and I need a rubella vaccination. What’s that?”

“Measles,” Emily said. “You must have had it. We all did in grade school or earlier.”

“How can I prove it?”

“Go get another one. Who cares if you get revaccinated?” Emily laughed. “Thirty-five bucks. At that price, we could afford to get married every week.”

“Tomorrow morning we’re going to pick out rings.”

It was the weekend before they had everything organized. Emily would be a witness. Blake had not told his parents, but he had let his sister know. Sara flew in from Austin to Logan in Boston, where Emily drove them to pick her up the night before. Emily was agreeable about driving back and forth. She also drove everybody to the justice of the peace Saturday morning.

“Do you mind doing it like this?” Blake asked Melissa in the backseat of Emily’s car.

“I hate big weddings. They’re gross and humiliating. I’ve always said if I ever got married, I’d do it quickly, quietly and no fuss.”

“Well, what you wanted is what you’re getting. Quick, quiet and sans fuss. So here we go.”

Sara leaned over the seat. “Never understood big weddings. Unless you could have an orgy. That would be cool. Did you remember to buy rings?”

The jeweler had tried to talk them into ordering fancy rings, engraved, platinum, part of a set with a diamond. They bought the plainest gold bands in stock. Blake put them on his Visa. Now he jingled his jacket pocket. “Right here.”

They had an appointment but they still had to wait. A couple was ahead of them and another couple came in while they were sitting around the little waiting room—sort of like a doctor’s office: vinyl chairs, a small sofa and coffee tables covered with
House & Garden
and
People
magazines she was too nervous to pick up. She almost expected her parents to rush
in. She half expected Blake to jump up and say it was all a joke. But the other couple came out, looking dazed, and the justice’s wife waved them in. “The Ackermans? Come this way, please.”

“That’s us.”

“Are you going to take his name?” Sara nudged her. “It’s not a great last name.”

“I don’t want to keep my father’s name. I’ve never been a proper Dickinson.” The idea of getting rid of the whole family at once was exciting.

The justice of the peace was a heavyset white-haired man with a silver-tipped cane leaning against his mahogany desk. On two walls were shiny leather-bound legal books she suspected were not real, they looked so untouched. She imagined opening one of them, and nothing but blank pages riffling past. How did somebody get to be a justice of the peace? A strange phrase. Was there a justice of the wars? He made a joke she smiled at without hearing. Then he asked for the license and the blood tests.

“Everything seems to be in order. Shall we proceed?” A rhetorical question. “You’re sure you want to enter the holy state of matrimony?”

She felt a little sick to her stomach—apprehension? Fear that something would go wrong, someone would burst in and stop them before they could marry.

She was trying to imagine what she would say to Rosemary if she suddenly appeared, when the justice said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

“Are we married?”

“Absolutely,” the justice said.

His wife added, “I hope you’ll be as happy and loving to each other as we are.”

“Married forty-four years,” said the justice, rubbing his cheek absently. “You can pay my wife in the outer office. Send the next couple in, Betty.”

She could not remember the ceremony. She knew she had spoken on cue, but it was a blur. She felt as if she had missed her own wedding. But what did it matter? Emily and Sara took turns photographing them on the sidewalk. As they crammed back into Emily’s little blue Honda, Melissa
said, “It’s hard to believe it’s legal. It’s like a game we played. Like a rehearsal. When I was a little girl and we played wedding, it took much longer than that.”

“It’s real.” Blake was looking moody. She wondered if he regretted marrying her, if he already had qualms. She was afraid to ask. She turned the ring on her finger round and round. Finally she asked softly, “Are you okay?”

“Did you see the way that fat pig looked at me? And the way he asked you twice if you really took me in matrimony?”

She hadn’t noticed a thing, lost in a fog of anxiety. “Yeah, he was a loser. But who cares? The ceremony is just as legal. It’s like we stuck a couple of twenties in a Coke machine. We put the money in, and five minutes later, a marriage comes out.”