If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (18 page)

During those months, Marcel would lie on the mattress on the floor of her bedroom, her eyes wide open. The winter sunlight would stream through the big open window and rest on her tangled, red-gold curls. Sometimes she would cry, but mostly she seemed oddly peaceful. That’s what had attracted me to her in the first place, her peaceful ways. She wasn’t always running around crazy like everyone else we knew. She was too quiet for the rest of the Comanche Street girls, who befriended her mainly to get closer to John Paul. Marcel also knew how to listen. She listened to the things I said and let me finish sentences. She understood without my having to explain every little thing. While everyone else made fun of me for not lying to my parents, for not doing drugs or getting drunk on the beach at night, Marcel knew that I was good because I was adopted and I didn’t want my parents to give me back. She knew that even though I thought about my real mother and wanted to meet her someday, I didn’t want to leave the life I had now. I didn’t want to go back to something I’d never known in the first place.

Liz and Nanny resented those weeks I sat by Marcel’s bed, holding her hand, reading her excerpts from
Charlotte’s Web
and
Old Yeller
. She’d always liked animals better than people. “She’s blind,” I told them, when they complained that I wasn’t around enough. Liz sniffed. “Probably just faking it to get attention,” she said. “Or maybe she doesn’t want to come to school because everyone knows about her jailbird brother.” “Fuck you,” I said, and felt good when Liz’s eyes flew open in surprise. I rarely said “fuck” unless I was angry, and I was known to never get angry. I was afraid of my anger, of where it would take me. I also felt guilty about Marcel, about abandoning her for Liz and them when the Brennans’ real problems first began, and she never wanted to go anywhere, to come over for dinner or go to the church dances on Friday nights. Marcel and I had done everything together since we became friends in junior high, but during those first bad months, she never called me and sometimes wouldn’t come to the phone when I called over to her house, even though I knew she was home. “That’s what happens when you depend on one friend too much,” my mother said smugly as I moped around the house, angry and lonely and sad. It was I who’d felt abandoned then, even though I felt bad for Marcel and missed the exotic dinners and Charlie’s stories and Claudine’s card readings by candlelight. With other friends you always had to share, the way I had to share Liz and Nanny, and I missed the way that Marcel and I had been when we only had each other.

•   •   •

C
laudine ran around looking for answers, for solutions to make things right. She went to psychics, to positive-thinking seminars at the Elephant Beach Public Library. All over the Brennans’ house, messages were plastered to the walls, the mirrors: “John Paul is fine, and all goes well with the case.” “Marcel can see again. She has perfect vision.” Claudine brought home healers, the type of people who lived over the
stores on Calypso Street, who put Celestial Seasonings tea bags over Marcel’s eyes and forehead, stuffed her mouth with milk thistle, poured a pomegranate poultice onto her chest. Since all the money coming into the house was going to the lawyer, Claudine repaid these healers by reading their cards. Marcel heard them at night through the walls of her bedroom, the soft drone of their voices. Their cigarette smoke seeped under the crack of her bedroom door, filling the air with scented secrets. But it all came to an end when Charlie put his foot down after one woman with wild hair and rolling eyes sat beside Marcel’s bed, chanting in a high-pitched wail until Marcel began crying, pleading, “Enough! Please! Enough!” After the strange woman left, Claudine, exhausted, stood over Marcel’s bed and shouted, “Enough, Marcel, eh? Enough? You think you’ve had it? Well, I’ve had it, too!” And she stomped away, sobbing, slamming the door to her bedroom.

Marcel worried that her mother would stop loving her, that she would end up selling pencils out of a tin cup on the corner of Stardust Alley, where the local bums panhandled. She tried to make a joke out of it, but her voice quivered and her laugh was strangled. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, taking her hand. “Claudine’s just upset, man, she’s worried about you, about John Paul. Anyway, you’ll always have me.” It was true, but my heart felt clammy as I said this. Several weeks before, my mother had come into my room after dinner. She’d had the
Elephant Beach Gazette
folded in her hand, the issue where John Paul’s name appeared in the police blotter. “Your father and I don’t want you seeing Marcel anymore,” she said. “We don’t want you going over there.” She spoke quietly instead of screaming, which was unusual. She had always liked Marcel, encouraged her to stay for dinner, spend the night. My mother and I stared at each other for a long time. And then I did something unusual, too. I nodded and said, “Okay.” We looked at each other for a long moment, and then she left my room, closing the door softly behind her.

When I wasn’t with Marcel, her milky blue stare haunted me. One day after school, I was running errands on Buoy Boulevard and coming
out of Krackoff’s Bakery when I heard a car horn honking and saw Claudine leaning over the steering wheel of her green Karmann Ghia. I went over and got into the car. She was sitting, smoking, with the window cracked open. I lit up as well; Marcel had told her that I had permission to smoke, which was a lie. Winter was outside, carrying the scent of melting snow. Ahead of us, the horizon was gray, subdued. The radio was playing even though it would run down the battery, some antiquated jazz our parents listened to that had nothing to do with us.

I looked at Claudine. Her face was thinner, her lips chapped and dry beneath her lipstick. She had borrowed money from her best friend, Renee, to help pay for John Paul’s lawyer. Before all this, John Paul had contributed to the household expenses with the money he made working at Moe’s Garage. He loved his mother so much that he would have lain down in a sewer filled with rats if he thought it would help her in some way. He had worked on the Karmann Ghia until it was in pristine condition. Claudine sighed. She stubbed out her cigarette. She stared out the window at the changing traffic light, the people bundled up against the cold, crossing Buoy Boulevard. “I’ve just come from the lawyer,” she said. “He found something, some loophole. He says John Paul could be home by June.” Her voice sounded torn and weary.

“But that’s good news, isn’t it?” I said. “June’s only three months away.”

Claudine sighed again. She reached for another cigarette from the pack on the console. She lit up, then leaned her head back and exhaled through her nose. “If we can keep paying him,” she said.

But the lawyer was wrong, because John Paul was home at the end of April. The charges had suddenly been dropped. Nobody knew why and nobody cared. We had never known the girl and now her imprint disappeared from everyone’s life but John Paul’s. Claudine and Charlie wanted to sue the girl’s family for defamation of character but John Paul begged them to let it go. He didn’t want things dragging out. He wanted to get on with his life. For his homecoming, Claudine baked a Basque cake with
white icing, covered with so many candles their wax melted into the frosting. John Paul sat between Claudine and Marcel, holding their hands, beaming. But it wasn’t until the last week in May that Marcel opened her eyes one morning and could see again.

•   •   •

I
t was in our last year of high school that Claudine began to talk of leaving. She would be moving around the kitchen in that quick way she had and begin muttering. She muttered while preparing breakfast, setting dinner on the table, driving us to the movies, her murmur soft beneath the radio static. While she picked up Charlie’s squat glass, filled with straight gin, and wiped the wet rings off the glass coffee table. We overheard her on the phone with her friend Renee. “Now that John Paul is out, eh?” she said. “I’m waiting for Marcel to finish school and then we’ll see.” She finally found a job as a receptionist at the local law firm of McGonigle & Testa. Her hours were from eight to four but she was seldom home before six. “Are they paying you overtime?” Charlie asked, sitting in his club chair, one ankle crossed over his knee.

Claudine nodded. “Time and a half,” she said, her face hidden in the closet as she hung up her coat. Then she’d pad into the kitchen in her panty hose, leaving her high heels upright in the middle of the living room, looking as though they were waiting for someone to step into them and take off into the night.

It was still early in our senior year when Marcel met James. He lived in the same small New England town as Claudine’s old friends and they had asked her to have him to lunch or dinner while he was in New York for a training. James was tall and thin and nice-looking in a way you might not remember after he left the room, but when he looked at Marcel his face lit up. He had a wonderful smile.

Marcel liked him. She liked that he was so respectful, so deferential, holding her elbow when they walked down the porch steps to take a walk
by the bay after dinner. She liked the nasal twang of his New England accent. I liked him because he made Marcel happy. Claudine liked him for the same reason. “He’s perfect for now,” she said, beaming, spreading a freshly baked apple tart with real cream that she’d begun whipping before dinner. While he was in New York, either he’d take the train down to Elephant Beach or Marcel would take the train to the city and they’d walk around Manhattan, see movies, go to dinner in the Village. Once or twice I went with her, and James was always so well-bred and polite; “Here’s both my girls,” he’d declare, as we walked toward him in the waiting room at Penn Station. But the way his eyes lit on Marcel, the way he’d watch her face as she spoke even the simplest phrase, such as, “The train was late taking off,” made me feel lonely, so I left the two of them to each other and spent more time around Comanche Street, hoping to overhear some news, maybe catch Conor while he was reading snatches of Luke’s infrequent letters home. When James left for another station on Cape Cod, Marcel went to visit him one weekend a month. She loved going up to the Cape. She never felt like she was leaving anything behind.

Claudine’s muttering reached full tilt right before New Year’s. She would talk of starting a new life someplace and Charlie would either laugh and try to crack a joke or he’d get up and leave the room, carrying his drink with him. If he was home, that is; most nights, he’d take taxis to the Treasure Chest. Marcel said he came home late, after she’d fallen asleep, and that one or two nights he hadn’t come home at all, claiming to have slept in the truck in the driveway so he wouldn’t wake anyone up coming into the house.

Charlie’s absence didn’t seem to bother Claudine in the least. She’d work late and come home bright-eyed and breathless when she should have been tired, carrying a rotisserie chicken from the A&P instead of preparing crab stew or shellfish and rice. Some nights she would take Marcel to Essie’s Diner beneath the bridge for dinner, saying that since it was just the two of them it didn’t pay to fuss, that she would cook
something special over the weekend, when John Paul came home. He had moved into the city and was living in a sublet on St. Mark’s Place, driving a cab and taking a film course at New York University. Marcel didn’t care about a special dinner because those nights at the diner were special times, when she and Claudine were like girlfriends instead of mother and daughter, sitting over their hot turkey sandwiches and cups of coffee, smoking their after-dinner cigarettes. Marcel loved when her mother would put her hand against her cheek, gaze into her eyes, ask her about school, about James. But perhaps the rebellion began on those smoky winter nights at Essie’s, when you could barely see out the windows because of the steam heat rising and the fog in the harbor. Claudine would nod and smile, pleased to see Marcel happy again, and say, “Yes, yes, he’s a very nice young man, he’s fine for now,” and Marcel, annoyed, finally asked, “What do you mean, ‘Fine for now’? Why do you always say that?” Claudine, astute enough to realize her mistake, would laugh and wave her fingers for the waitress. “Never mind, never mind,” she’d say gaily. “You’re smiling again, that’s the main thing.” And she’d order a piece of warm blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream for them to share, and more coffee, if it was fresh. Afterward, Claudine stopped saying that James was fine for now, but Marcel’s resentment had already taken root. She felt that her mother, who could read everyone’s future in the cards, including her own, was denying her daughter a destiny.

On those nights when Charlie was at the Treasure Chest, and Marcel was in her room, talking long-distance on the phone to James, Claudine would sit up, reading her own cards, poring over maps that had been stored in the basement, pinpointing destinations. She didn’t want to head back to the Basque region, as her memories were war-torn and her family mostly gone, having either died or moved away. She planned to save until she had enough for a plane ticket, and longed for Italy or Paris or the French Riviera, but wanted a place where her money would last until she found a job and an apartment and the great romance that she felt she deserved after so many barren years, a great romance with someone
who would become the love of her life, confirmed when the cards turned up the King of Clubs: a kind man, loyal, loving, trustworthy. A king among men.

•   •   •

I
t was a long winter, filled with black ice and snowdrifts. It snowed a great deal, leaving everyone housebound and getting on one another’s nerves. It was during this time that Claudine became snappish, her patience more starched and fragile in the aftermath of the terrible times the Brennan family had endured. “Inside,” she would yell at Charlie, pointing toward the living room with the knife she was using to mince shallots. “You go your way, I go mine, at least until dinner is ready.” Or else she would follow Marcel around the room with her eyes until Marcel would blurt out, “What?” Then Claudine would sigh and shake her head and turn back to her cards or her maps or her travel magazines. And for the first time Marcel could remember, Claudine yelled at John Paul, over the phone. “What do you mean, you’re not coming home?” she screamed into the receiver. “When you needed me, I was there for you, eh? I lived for you. Now that I need you, you disappear?” John Paul was happy living in the city, where no one knew who he was or what had happened to him. He didn’t like coming back to Elephant Beach. He said that every time he got off the train at the station, he could feel his heart sink like a punctured balloon. Every week that he didn’t come home, he mailed money to Claudine, to help pay back the lawyer. Claudine would open the envelope, smile wistfully, and tuck the bills into her purse before turning back to a Victoria Holt novel that had been in all the drugstores the previous summer. Romance novels were one of Claudine’s new passions, Marcel said; she was always beginning or finishing one. They all had the same pictures of bursting bodices and wild embraces on the front cover.