Autumn Dreams (40 page)

“I didn’t even know you went out,” Cass said to Jared. She bit her tongue so she wouldn’t give a lecture about hurricane safety and the wisdom of wandering about in wind and weather like this. “Where’ve you been? Besides Paulie’s, I mean.”

“We went down to the boardwalk to see the action,” he said, taking off his hat and shaking his head like a great Saint Bernard. Some of the flying drops landed on Flossie, asleep on the back of her favorite love seat. She hunched her back, hissed, scowled malevolently at Jared, and flopped back in the same position.

“It’s great out there!” Paulie said, his eyes sparkling. “I’ve never seen the waves so big.”

“Didn’t you two ever hear of a tidal surge?” Cass demanded.

“No tidal surge here,” Jared said. “The wind’s blowing out to sea, not in from it.”

“The wind blew me right across the boardwalk,” Paulie said. “Blew me right up against the railing.”

“I want to see,” Jenn cried.

“You’ll blow away,” Cass protested.

“Get your rain stuff,” Jared said.

Jenn ran upstairs, moving faster than Cass had seen her move in weeks.

“Is this safe?” Cass asked, wishing she, too, could go get blown across the boardwalk and watch the wild sea. It sounded wonderful.

“It’s fine,” Jared said. “No danger. Rodney’s only a class one.”

“Only a class one,” Cass said as some shingles from someplace flew past the window.

Paulie started waving his hands. “And the wind’s blowing away, out to sea. The huge waves crest, and
boom!
The wind blows all the spume and lots of the wave backwards so it falls down behind the waves instead of rushing to the beach. There’s the fun of seeing all the big waves without the worry of seeing them eat all the sand.”

“That’s good. We’ve got to keep those beaches to keep those tourists,” Cass said. Losing them to major storms was a matter of millions of dollars of lost revenue.

Jenn clattered down in her red hooded raincoat and duck shoes.

Jared pointed to her feet. “They won’t do you much good. The streets are full of water.”

Jenn shrugged and pulled the back door open. Wind and rain poured in. “So my feet get wet. Yours are wet.”

“Wait a minute,” Cass called. “Are there electrical lines down?”

“Not that we saw,” Jared, standing on the back step, yelled over the roar of the wind.

Cass frowned. “You could get electrocuted if wires are down in standing water, and you walk in that water.”

“Well, yeah.” Jared stared at her as if to say,
And you had a point?

Cass grabbed a towel and wiped her hands. “If you’re going out to brave the elements, I want a kiss from all of you before you go. In fact, I want a kiss from you before you go anywhere anytime.” She walked into the stream of wind and rain.

Paulie leaned down for her kiss first. She bussed him on the cheek and then patted the same cheek. “Thanks, Aunt Cass.” He kissed her back.

Aunt Cass, huh? “Thank you, Paulie.”

Then she kissed Jared and Jenn. “Be careful, guys.”

“We will.” Jared jumped in a puddle at the foot of the back steps. “Don’t worry, Aunt Cass.”

“Yeah, Aunt Cass,” called a waving Jenn. “We’ll be okay.”

Aunt Cass
. She pushed the door shut, no small feat against the force of the determined wind.
Somehow I’ve become Aunt Cass
. She smiled. She liked the intimacy of the shortened name, the name Dan called her.

“You have such a nice family,” Brenna said as she rinsed the knife she’d been slicing the apples with. “You care about each other so much.”

Cass shrugged. “That’s what families do.”

“That’s what families
should
do,” Brenna answered, her voice thick with emotion. A large tear rolled down her cheek.

“Oh, sweetie.”

Brenna sniffed and another tear appeared.

Cass opened her arms, and Brenna fell into them. She clutched Cass with a startling strength, an unexpected neediness. Her slim shoulders shook.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Cass asked, keeping her voice soft and encouraging.

Brenna drew a deep breath. In a voice that quavered she said, “I miss my mom.”

“Of course you do. How long since you’ve seen her?”

“Almost a year.”

Cass rubbed Brenna’s back. “That’s a long time.”

Brenna sniffed and nodded. She pulled back and looked at Cass with a terrible ferocity. “I love her.”

“I know.” Cass smiled gently. “We all love our moms.” Even when they’re driving us nuts.

Brenna’s red eyes filled with new tears. “You don’t understand.”

“You’re right. So why don’t you explain.”

Brenna looked uncertain, even scared.

Cass reached out and stroked the girl’s hair. “Does it have something to do with the phone calls you’ve been making?”

If anything, Brenna looked more upset. “You know?”

“I know you’ve made calls from here several times, and Dan and I saw you make a call up on the boardwalk. I know you listen to something and then hang up in tears, but you don’t speak.”

“My mom. I listen to my mom.”

Cass took Brenna’s hand and led her to the love seat. “Why don’t you speak to her?”

“I can’t. I’m afraid she’ll hang up on me, and I couldn’t bear it.” Agony etched Brenna’s lovely face as she huddled in the corner of the love seat.

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she hates me.”

Cass blinked. “Your mother hates you?”

Brenna nodded.

“Do you know for a fact that she hates you, or do you just think this?”

“I think it.” Brenna pulled a very used tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. Cass reached into her own pocket and pulled out a heavily wrinkled but clean tissue. She offered it to Brenna who took it gratefully.

“Why would you think such a thing of your own mother?” Visions of all types of child abuse flitted through her mind.

“It’s because of the terrible thing I did,” Brenna whispered, her eyes on her lap.

Paradigm shift
, Cass thought. “It’s not what your mother did but what you did?”

Brenna hunched her shoulders. “I ran away from home.”

Not good, but not the end of the world. “Lots of people have done that.” Cass rested her hand on Brenna’s knee.

“But I never left a note. I never called.” Her voice caught and she had to swallow. “Not once all year.”

Cass stared at Brenna’s bent head, a million questions leaping about her mind like a bunch of unruly kangaroos.

Why had Brenna run?

Why had she never told her mother she was all right?

Did she run with Mike or meet him later?

What of her father? Had she left because she feared him?

How could the girl have put her mother through the agony of not knowing where she was? Surely she was old enough to know better. Unless there was danger from her mother or father?

“Did they abuse you, Brenna? Did they hurt you in any way?” Cass was ready to call the police this very minute. “Is that why you ran?”

“Oh, no.” Brenna looked appalled at the thought. “They’re very nice people. They’ve always loved me.”

Cass blinked. “But you ran away without letting them know where you were or how you were doing for a whole year.”

“We’d been apart all summer and missed each other desperately. We thought being together always would be so romantic.” Brenna’s voice shook.

“We meaning you and Mike?”

Brenna nodded, her eyes still on the floor.

“So you knew him before you ran?”

She nodded again. “We’ve been together since our freshman year.”

“In college?”

Brenna looked up, confused. “What?”

“Not freshman year in high school.”

“Oh. Right.” Brenna cleared her throat. “I met him the first day at orientation. He’s from Idaho and I’m from California, so there was no way we’d be able to know each other before, is there?”

“I guess not.” Cass waited. She didn’t have to wait long.

“We fell in love right off, just like in all the books.” She smiled at the memory. “He’s such a great guy.” Her smile faded, and great hurt filled her eyes. “Except he won’t go home with me.”

“Why not?”

“I think he’s afraid of what my dad will say.”

And so he should be, Cass thought. “Tell me about the running away before we get to the going home part, okay?”

“I love my mom,” Brenna said. “And I love my stepdad. Hank’s a wonderful man. He really is. He’s been wonderful to me. It was Tuck who gave me trouble.”

“Who’s Tuck?”

“My stepbrother, Hank’s son. He was seven when Hank married my mom. I was two.” Brenna fell silent, lost in her thoughts.

“Tell me more about him,” Cass prompted. “He’s the reason you ran away?” A nasty man or boy living in the same house could make life miserable, to say nothing of dangerous for a vulnerable younger stepsister.

“Tuck’s strange. He always has been as far as I know. Hank’s had him in therapy most of his life, though I don’t think it’s helped him. I know he resents me, and sometimes he scares me. He likes to hurt me, not so much physically as by hurting my things. He’ll steal something or damage it. Once he hurt my pet bird so badly I had to have him put to sleep.”

Cass shuddered. Living with someone like that could drive anyone to run away.

Brenna took a deep breath. “But I have to be honest. I chose to run away. I wish I could blame it on Tuck—he’s strange enough to scare anyone off—but I can’t. I can’t blame it on anyone but me.” She dropped her head into her hands. “I’m only twenty, Cass, and I’ve ruined my life forever.”

Seeing a good bout of self-pity just around Brenna’s corner, Cass said, “So you just decided to disappear? Poof. I’m gone?”

“That’s about it. See, I always felt like a useless, poor lit—” She broke off.

Cass waited.

“A poor, useless college girl.”

Yeah, right. What had she meant to say?

“But Mike made me feel special. He liked me for me, not for
my—” Again that hesitation as she searched for a word to replace the one she decided not to use. “Um—my body. In fact, he didn’t even know I had any.” The last was an outburst, like she was defending Mike.

“He didn’t know you had a body?” Cass raised an eyebrow.

Brenna flushed as she realized how foolish her comment was, but she didn’t change it or clarify. “Mike and I planned it carefully. We made believe we were driving back to school from our homes after fall break our sophomore year. We left our cars in downtown L.A., walked to the bus station where we bought tickets separately so no one would remember a couple, paid cash, and took the bus to Saint Louis. From there we took the train to Philadelphia. I dyed my hair brown—I’m really blond—and Mike got his hair cut real short. We hitched rides across New Jersey to Long Beach Island and worked at the various shore towns, staying about two months at each place. We never stayed too long because we didn’t want anyone to get too close to us.”

“Just the two of you against the world.”

Brenna winced. “It sounded so cool when we thought of it.” She shrugged. “When we left L.A., all we took with us were a backpack each, our laptops, and several hundred dollars as a bankroll. We were going to live on love and odd jobs.” She turned a tragic face to Cass. “It’s not working, at least not any longer. And it’s all my fault.”

“Because you miss your family.”

“Yeah.” Brenna blew her nose again, “I’m so homesick I could die, and I’m worried about them, too. I’ve watched you with Jared and Jenn and seen how much you care. And they’re not even your kids. Yesterday you were so worried about Jenn when she took off. I got all too clear a picture of what my mom must have gone through.”

“Is still going through,” Cass said.

Brenna buried her face in her hands and wept. Cass watched, her heart breaking for the girl and for her mother.

Brenna gave a ghost of a smile. “In a way it’s nice that Mike won’t take me home. It proves he loves me.”

“Wait a minute.” Cass had to challenge that thought. All it proved to her was that Mike wanted to avoid conflict. “What about his family? Shouldn’t he let them know he’s all right? And
don’t you think that if he truly loved you, he’d want to make you happy whenever it was within his power?” She thought of the brothers and the care they took of their wives, her father and his care for her mother and her. “Or does he think that if you go home, you’ll ditch him?”

“I’ll never ditch him. I love him,” she said simply. “And because I love him, how can I go home without him?”

“Hasn’t the boy ever heard the word
visit?”

Brenna nodded. “I know. We talked about me visiting alone if he didn’t want to come. But I don’t want to go alone because, quite frankly, I’m scared. If I’m alone, I don’t know if I can make people understand why we did what we did.”

Cass thought there was a good chance nobody’d understand even if Mike was with her.

Brenna put a hand to her mouth to mask the deep sob that rose from her throat. “What if I have to choose between my family and Mike?”

Cass patted her hand. “I don’t think that will happen, sweetie. But even if it did, you’d be all right. You could go back to school, get your degree, get a job you liked. We can all live on our own if we have to, and we can live full lives. Look at me and SeaSong.”

Brenna looked and it was obvious she didn’t want for herself what she saw. She was just too polite to say so.

Cass sighed. Some days she didn’t want what she had either. “Granted, life is probably more fun when you have someone to share it with, but my point is that you can make it on your own if that’s the way things fall. God will help you.”

“God doesn’t even like me.”

“How can you say that? God loves you.”

“Yeah, maybe He loves me, but He doesn’t like me. How can He after what I’ve done?”

“Brenna, don’t you think that if God is really God, He can forgive anything? Don’t make the mistake of thinking of Him as if He were a regular person. He’s not. He’s God. He can forgive the worst sins because of Jesus’ death. If we don’t believe that, we’re saying that Jesus’ death was in vain. It wasn’t good enough because some sins were beyond His redeeming power.”

Brenna frowned. Clearly she’d never thought of forgiveness in that way.