Mine to Tell (22 page)

“Mama,” I said sharply. “Please calm down and tell me what happened. Maybe there’s been a mistake and I can take care of it.”

“Oh, there’s no mistake,” she said, sniffling, her voice warbling but less rangy than before. “It’s out there. It’s in our paper, your whole story, with a byline that it’s about someone in our community, and there’s no mistaking who it’s about. I’ve had seven calls already, people prying, not a one of them calling to comfort me or assure me it doesn’t sound exactly like Julianne. No, they’re just being nosy, sniffing around for dirt. Oh, oh, oh…” Her voice began to change again, the high tone returning and tears spilling into the gaps between her words.

“Listen to me, Mama. You’ve got to tell me what you know. There’s been some mistake. I didn’t do this, and I know Edith wouldn’t let it happen. So just tell me everything you know, and I’ll get to the bottom of it.” I sounded strong and confident, but my grandfather’s face kept swimming in front of me—his hurt, his anger, the shame he was probably suffering.

She tried to compose herself, but the agony, real or imaginary, had her. She was defeated, overcome with humility by a story my family had tried to keep buried for too long. It hadn’t gone away when they’d denied it. It had festered instead. Just like I’d said it would.

“Well,” she sniffled, “it’s in our county paper, and according to Maxine it’s in Troy’s big paper, too.”

A cold chill ran through me. Troy was a larger city. If it was there…

“Mama, do you have a copy of it?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” she snapped.

“Grab it, and tell me if it says my name or AP anywhere on the article.”

I held my breath while she fumbled for the newspaper. I heard it rustling, exaggeratedly, as if she was shaking it like a rat terrier would shake a rat. “There,” she said at last. “No, your name’s not on it. It just says ‘written by a local author.’ And I don’t see AP anywhere, either. Is that good?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I lied to her. “That’s good, Mama.” I heard her let out a shuddering sigh.

“Good because your name’s not on it?” She sounded slightly hopeful.

“Sure,” I answered, not at all concerned about my name. “That’s real good.”

“Are you coming back here?” she asked, sounding very much like she didn’t want me to, like I would be lynched by my own family if I returned to the town where I’d grown up.

“Not yet,” I said, looking at my watch. It was getting late, but I might be able to catch a flight to Cincinnati. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call and let you know where I am. In the meantime, Mama, don’t worry.” I emphasized the last two words, knowing I might as well be telling her not to breathe.

“I’ll try not to,” she said. “Be careful.” And she hung up.

I looked at my watch again and then grabbed a phone book. I’d go to the airport and sit there on standby if I had to. I was going to Cincinnati tonight, one way or the other.

Chapter 37

“A house divided against itself falls.”

Forgiveness is not about forgetting. I can forgive John, as I hope he’s forgiven me, but I can’t forget. I try to erase his memory and the images of him married to another from my thoughts, but every bit of him is still there. I no longer pine for him. It’s too late for that. So maybe it’s me I long for, the me he awakened, the girl who was so free to love without fear. Maybe it isn’t him at all. Maybe it’s what he aroused in me. Whatever it is, it’s still there, deep inside, trying to stay hidden. There’s no place for a person like that in Isaac’s world. No place for laughter, joy, expression of oneself in soul, mind, or body. No pleasures, no arts, no life.

There’s no forgiveness in Isaac’s world, either. He goes through the motions of intimacy with me like I go through the motions of cooking and cleaning for him. He has no heart when he touches me, just fire, and determination to possess. I have no heart when I tend to his home, just a determination to do my best. He can’t forget. He still preaches condemnation at me from his pulpit. He is souring his boys toward me. I am an alien here, with only a few possessions as reminders of who I really am, where I belong, who I should be. I keep them hidden from him, and I return to them when the dullness and tyranny of this existence dry me up so much that I can no longer bear it. I return to the few fragments of my real being, memories of better days, arts in their purest forms. Drinks from a well I hope never goes dry. If it does…so will I.

~*~

Kyle stopped reading, only the static of the telephone connection in my ear.

“I thought you’d want to hear that,” he said, his voice soft and accentuated by the brittle crackling of the line.

He was right. It felt like a long drink of home, of me, of remembering who I was and what was important. I needed that. I’d arrived in Cincinnati in the wee hours of the morning after a late-night flight. I’d gone to Jill’s, woken her from a sound sleep, and stayed there after she’d assured me she knew nothing of the story’s leak, sleeping away my exhaustion until mid afternoon. My fury reawakened as Julianne’s words seeped through me. The fury I’d brought to Cincinnati over the betrayal Julianne and my family had suffered, the anger I had at her unwanted exposure.

“You were so right,” I said into the mouthpiece. “How’d you know?”

I could hear him shrug on the other end of the line. Could see it in my mind. Could imagine a soft kicking up of one side of his mouth as he said nothing, the tiny grin sharing all his thoughts.

“Did Jill tell you I was here?” I asked. “Is that how you found me?”

“Yeah, she called when you came in. Said you were upset.” He paused, and I didn’t ask how she knew his number. “Is it partly because of something you found in Chicago?” he asked, his voice like my mother’s now, worried and afraid, but afraid
for
Julianne, not
of
her.

“No,” I said quickly, suddenly realizing I hadn’t told him what I’d learned in Chicago. I had been going to call him from my hotel yesterday when I’d called my mother instead. All of the good news and excitement at what I’d learned had vanished in the panic over Julianne’s exposure. “I found John!” I said, excitement returning. “Well, about him. I found some of his relatives, but I didn’t get to talk to them. I would have looked for them today, but I came here instead.” My excitement waned, reality snuffing the thrill of finding my great-grandmother’s ex-fiancé once again.

Kyle breathed softly into the phone. “Wow,” he finally whispered, awe in every fraction of the word. “So you’re in Cincinnati because the story leaked?” he asked, his tone more tenuous.

I hadn’t really thought about him or how the spread of Julianne’s story would affect him. I could eventually move away from my old hometown and go on with my life. But Kyle wouldn’t. He’d be a fixture there forever, and everyone would know he’d been at my side as I revived my family’s shame. I swallowed.

“I want to know how it leaked,” I said. I could hear his silent nod, hear his thoughts churning. “That’s why I’m here.”

“You’ll let me know,” he said, but he was asking.

“Of course. I’ll call you later.” And we hung up.

It was late in the afternoon, and Jill was at work. I dressed and followed her, determined to find out what had gone wrong.

Chapter 38

“You are approaching the battle

against your enemies today. Do not be fainthearted.

Do not be afraid, or panic, or tremble before them.”

“I’ll go with you,” Jill said from my side, our steps quick and clipped as we marched out of the newspaper’s office. It was late afternoon, and my head was pounding.

“No, I should go alone,” I said, not looking at her.

“Of course you should, but that doesn’t mean you have to,” she persisted. We ducked into my old favorite coffee-and-donut shop, where the coffee was flavored with a slight hint of grease. “Two fat coffees,” Jill said to the person manning the cash register. He grinned. Apparently she’d kept up the habit of ordering his greasy coffee while I’d been gone. He gave us our drinks and we sat at a table near the window.

“I miss this,” I said, inhaling the aromatic steam above my cup. “I’d forgotten how much until we stepped in here.”

She grinned. “You’re not ready to come back yet, though,” she said with unexpected insight. I looked up at her.

“Have you been talking to Kyle about me?” I asked.

She grinned. “Don’t be so vain. You think if I was talking to him I’d be talking about you?”

“Well, don’t talk about me.” I gave her a mock warning. Then I turned to gaze out the window at my small piece of Cincinnati. The newspaper’s tall building loomed not far away, other smaller buildings crowding it, people scurrying at their feet. Jill was right. I wasn’t ready to come back.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

About what?
I wanted to ask, but it was one of those trite conversation wasters that led to nowhere. The kind Kyle would never do. “About letting the column go AP?” I asked, not even looking at her. “I’m going to talk to my family first. Even though the damage is already done to them, I can’t approve it to go out over AP without their consent.”

She nodded, and we both took sips of oily coffee. “I hate to say this,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But there’s a better place to get coffee now.” She glanced sideways at the counter to see if the donut man was listening. “It sprang up after you left. It has real coffee, some flavored, even. And no grease.”

“That settles it,” I said. “I’m not coming back if you’re abandoning our fat coffee.”

We relaxed and swirled our cups to watch the oily sheen travel around the surface.

“If my family’s okay with letting Julianne go public, I still may not be,” I said. “This is too much about me. It’s like I know how she feels, and I’m not certain it’s right for her…or me. Forgive the analogy, but we’re like turtles just barely poking our noses out of our shells, discovering our world and who we are in it. If there’s a huge commotion outside the shell, we’ll never come out.”

Jill was a good enough friend to tolerate my analogy without an eye roll. She continued to swirl her coffee, and without looking up she asked, “And what about Trevor?”

I cringed. Speaking of commotion. I had hurt for him for awhile, but now I hurt because of him. “I know what to do about that. Whoever delivered all of those clippings from your paper to the ones in my home community did it spitefully. Who else could it have been? I’ll find him. I’ll confront him. And he won’t be a part of my family ever again.” I was seething. I could no longer blame him for trying to pin me into a relationship I wasn’t ready for, because we were both at fault for that. But for this, this act of cowardly vengeance? This fell to him and him alone. The idea that he’d stoop so low was like a knife, bigger than the one when I’d seen him with the blonde and more painful even than when he’d cursed at me. It was like a part of me turning on myself. We were supposed to have been one. He was to have been a part of me. And now we were nothing, because one part was trying to destroy the other.

“I wish you’d let me come with you,” Jill said again.

I shook my head. “It may make me feel better, but it won’t give him the freedom to be himself. You’ll put him on guard and detract from what I really want out of him.”

“Okay,” she said, settling back in her chair. “But come right back to my apartment as soon as you’re done, all right?”

“Of course,” I said. We stood and dropped our cups into the trash bin as we exited. Maybe I’d try that other coffee shop sometime. Maybe next time I was here.

Chapter 39

“He who covers a transgression seeks love, but

he who repeats a matter separates intimate friends.”

“Coming,” Trevor’s voice called from the other side of his closed door as he responded to my knock. The door was flung open, and my face looked directly at his. Our eyes locked, and the calm anticipation drained from his. “I was expecting you,” he said.

“Can I come in?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to.

“We can talk here,” he said, not moving.

“Why did you do it?” I went straight to the point. I wasn’t sure how long I could endure this confrontation. He didn’t look the same. He was handsome still, but those weren’t his eyes, his smile was gone, and the tie that had bound us was broken and ugly.

He didn’t respond. For a fleeting second the fierceness disappeared from his eyes. It became sickly and weakened, as if he was tired. He was a man of mixed emotions, not just an ogre, but certainly not someone who hadn’t been soiled by the debilitation of unforgiveness. I saw Isaac in him for a moment. Someone whose world hadn’t turned out as he’d planned or arranged. You can’t arrange other people to suit you, and that’s what he’d tried to do. Both of them had. Neither Julianne nor I fit those spots they’d carved out for us. We’d tried, but we just didn’t fit.

“Don’t ever contact my family again,” I said, and I whirled away, tears rising from deep within my gut.

“Wait,” he called.

I didn’t wait. I ran. I hurried to the stairway, not wanting to be trapped in the hall waiting for a slow elevator. I flew through the stairwell door as I heard a slam behind me. I hurtled down the stairs, listening, but no door opened above me, no footsteps followed me. He’d slammed his own door and stayed on the other side. He hadn’t come after me.

Chapter 40

“For the despairing man there should be

kindness from his friend.”

I visited my grandfather before I did anyone else when I returned home. I didn’t want to argue with him or even try to persuade him how wronged we’d all been by Isaac more than by Julianne. I just wanted to be with him, let him talk or just sit in silence if that’s what he chose, just touch him again if he’d let me.

He seemed more bent when he opened the door. Worn and tired. He looked at me for a moment, letting things register…how he felt about me, about what I was doing, about how I should be treated.

“Come in,” he finally said, looking down as he moved aside. I stepped into his kitchen as he closed the door, and waited until he nodded at the table. We each took a seat opposite the other, condiments and accoutrements nearer his end where he usually sat, while my end, where my deceased grandmother used to sit, was vacant, the place where a woman much like my mother had been. One who’d worn herself out trying to be good.