One Week In December (15 page)

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Authors: Holly Chamberlin

BOOK: One Week In December
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Lily leaned against the doorjamb and watched her mother, her perfect mother, as she stood at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. Lily had always thought of her mother as one of the most straightforward, honest, and dependable people she had ever met.
Until now. Until Cliff's cruel betrayal and Nora's shocking revelation and Becca's strange demand. Until Lily's mind and her heart had begun to accept the incredible complexity of people and their motives.
There had to be more to Julie than Lily saw before her. There had to be more than she had ever seen and maybe more than she ever would see. There had to be some event that Julie kept all to herself, like a youthful engagement to another man, or a miscarriage, or—impossible thought!—an affair of her own. Secret desires, maybe never acted upon but cherished. Hidden resentments. There had to be.
Or did there have to be? Maybe Julie Rowan was keeping nothing to herself. Maybe some people were, indeed, “open books,” showing their one and only face to the world. Maybe some people simply had nothing to hide from the world. They lived one hundred percent honestly and behaved one hundred percent ethically. If guilt was possible, then why couldn't innocence be possible, too?
Maybe. But Lily was beginning to doubt that a truly innocent life was a possible one.
Her mother squatted to retrieve a new sponge from the cabinet under the sink. Really, Lily thought, her mother had the energy of a person half her age. Most people she knew, even some people Lily's own age, would have needed to grab on to the sink for help in rising, but not her mother.
Lily's thoughts drifted back to Cliff. Cliff had kept his affair a secret from Lily. For weeks it had been going on with Lily none the wiser, until a well-meaning girl in her dorm, who'd heard a rumor from a friend of the girl Cliff was cheating with, alerted her. At first, of course, Lily couldn't believe that Cliff—her Cliff!—would ever have betrayed her. But then, suspicion crept in as it is wont to do and, screwing up her courage, Lily confronted the guy she had considered the man of her dreams.
It had taken Lily's persistent questioning over several hours before Cliff finally broke down and admitted that yes, he'd slept with Ashley Griggs from economics class, and that yes, it had happened more than once. Maybe more than twice; he couldn't exactly remember. He thought he might have been drunk the last time.
How did you not know if you were drunk, Lily—who hardly ever drank—had wondered.
“Why did you lie to me?” Lily had asked then, bewildered. “When I first asked you if you'd cheated on me with Ashley, why did you swear that nothing had happened?”
Cliff claimed that he hadn't wanted to hurt her, that's why he hadn't confessed before and that's why, when confronted, he'd lied about his innocence. He was sorry for the affair. It had been wrong of him. He'd hoped that if Lily never found out about it, they could go on just like before. He'd wanted to spare her the ugly truth.
But Lily had wondered if she could believe him. Maybe he hadn't told her about the affair because he was afraid of getting into trouble, of losing his attractive, intelligent, warmhearted girlfriend. And as long as he could pull off a sordid relationship behind her back, well, why not keep his mouth shut? He could, as the saying goes, have his cake and eat it, too.
Lily simply didn't know. Maybe secrets were essential to life, at least to human life, to society, whether “society” meant a neighborhood, an extended family, a husband and wife, or a small group of friends. Maybe secrets weren't what were so bad. Maybe it was intent that really mattered. If you kept a secret to protect someone from being hurt—assuming of course your decision wasn't entirely selfish, assuming you weren't keeping quiet because if the truth got out you'd be in big trouble—maybe then you weren't doing anything wrong. Maybe, instead, you were being kind. Maybe you were being good and unselfish.
It was complicated, this thing called life. People wore masks. One person might harbor various personalities within herself, and might comprise several layers of characters. And because of this, a person might never, ever know for sure if or when she was doing the right thing or the best thing or the smartest thing. And if a person couldn't be sure about the quality of her own words and actions, how then could she ever judge the words and actions of anyone else?
Sureties, Lily was coming to realize, were not a part of human interaction. Maybe that old saying about death and taxes being the only inevitable, definite things was true.
Take her grandmother, for example. Lily had always seen her grandmother as—well, as perfect, as a person without doubt or cause for regret. How naïve she had been! Nora had known deception and secrecy, too, just like everyone else. She had known heartache.
Lily's cell phone rang. It was the tone she'd chosen to indicate a call from Cliff, a passage from a pop song he loved. Once she'd thought his having a special tone was—special. Lily put the phone on Silence. He could leave a message if he had anything important to say.
“I didn't know anyone was there!” Julie had turned from the sink at the sound of the phone.
“Sorry, Mom.” Lily came all the way into the kitchen and flopped into a chair at the table. “I didn't mean to scare you.”
“Oh, I don't scare easily. I was just startled. Who was that on the phone?”
“Cliff.”
“Why didn't you take his call?” Julie asked, folding a dish towel over an old-fashioned drying rack by the sink.
“Because I didn't want to talk to him.”
Julie joined her daughter at the table. “Has he been calling a lot? Or, what is it, sending typed messages?”
“Text messages. Texting. Yeah,” she said. “He's been pretty relentless.”
“Well, I hope you're not thinking of getting back with that boy.”
“Not really,” Lily said, surprised by her own reply. Not very long ago she'd been considering that very possibility. “Why?”
Julie shuddered for effect. “I never liked him. He gave me a bit of the creeps.”
Lily was stunned. “The creeps! I can't believe this! Why didn't you ever say anything to me?”
Julie reached over to pat her daughter's arm.
“As if you would have listened to your mother! No, Lily, every woman has to find out certain things on her own. Besides, you know I don't like to talk badly about a person. Especially one I don't know very well. Remember, I only met the boy two or three times. Evidence, or the lack of it, Lily, that's what you need to be careful of when forming an opinion about someone.”
“Well,” Lily argued, “if you even suspected he was going to cheat on me, I think you should have said something. You should have warned me.”
Julie waved her hand as if dismissing an annoying fly. “Oh, it was nothing as specific as that. I just didn't care for the boy. It was something about his face, something I thought I saw lurking there. Anyway, he's in the past, so let's let him stay there.”
Lily was stunned. What other secrets was her family keeping? She felt disoriented, as if everything she'd thought she could rely on was being revealed as an illusion.
“Well,” she said finally, “I still think that if everyone thought Cliff was a jerk, someone should have given me an honest opinion!”
“First of all,” her mother was saying, justifying her silence on the matter of Cliff, “I have no idea what the other family members thought about Cliff. And second, it's very hard to advise someone about a matter of the heart. And it can be very dangerous. People tend not to want to hear that their significant other is a—jerk, as you put it. Especially if it's true. If I had protested your relationship with Cliff, you might very well have run off and married him by now.”
“Oh, I would not have run off and married him!” But even as she protested, Lily wondered if her mother was right about relationship advice, that people really didn't want it. She thought of Nora and wondered if any of her friends had offered their opinions on what Nora should do about her cheating husband. Assuming Nora had told anyone about Thomas's affair, and now Lily remembered that Nora had claimed she hadn't. Maybe she'd been too ashamed to tell anyone. Or maybe—and Lily didn't much like this idea—maybe Nora had wanted to protect Thomas's reputation among their friends.
“Well, I'm sorry,” Julie was saying. “I seem to have made an awful lot of mistakes with my children and I'm just finding out about all of them today!”
Lily squeezed her mother's hand. “Oh, Mom, I'm sorry. It's just that, I don't know, I have a lot on my mind right now. Suddenly it feels like everything I thought I knew to be one way is really the other way, or both ways at the same time. Which makes no sense, but maybe nothing makes any sense. Maybe that's the point.”
Julie sighed, got up from the table, and gave her daughter a brief but strong hug. “Welcome to the gooey mess we call life. Every time you think you've got something in your grasp, it seems to slip away or change beyond recognition.”
It was not what Lily wanted to hear. “I think I'm going to lie down,” she said.
Lily retreated to the bedroom she always used when visiting her parents. It was the same room in which she had slept as a child when visiting her grandmother. There was comfort in the familiar surroundings. Lily was not a person who relished constant change and newness.
Julie had sewn the curtains by hand when Lily was only four; for Lily's twelfth birthday, Nora had made the quilt that covered the bed in sections of vibrant yellow, deep green, and multicolored calico. Though the curtains could use replacing and the quilt was threadbare in parts, Lily refused to let them go.
Over the low, painted wood dresser hung a mirror that was original to the house. At least, it had been part of the sale when her grandparents had bought the house back in the 1960s. Or maybe it had been in the 1970s. Anyway, the glass wasn't very clear, but Lily loved the rather ornate, heavy oak frame and was glad the old mirror hadn't been moved to another location in the house.
A small bookcase against one wall held a variety of old schoolbooks, as well as several often-read copies of Nancy Drew mysteries; a paperback copy of
Jane Eyre
that Lily had bought at a garage sale for fifty cents; and an oversize illustrated book about horses, from the time when Lily had been obsessed with the idea of owning a horse of her own. That phase passed after her first horseback riding lesson had ended in disaster. She'd been too frightened of the size of the animal in actuality to enjoy one moment of the experience. In books, horses looked so noble and romantic. In reality, they were terrifying and had very big teeth.
On a shelf over the bookcase sat a row of dolls: a Barbie with impossibly matted blond hair; a small rubber baby doll, naked; a threadbare Raggedy Ann. Lily had always found it hard to part with things she'd once loved. Maybe in that way she was a bit like her grandmother.
Lily curled up on the old single bed—Rain was using an air mattress during her visit—but was unable to drift off to sleep. Instead, she found herself thinking more about secrets and silence. She found herself thinking about how deceptions both large and small were so much a part of human interaction. About how easy it was to find yourself alone or apart. About how suddenly you could feel lonely.
Lily remembered when Nora had asked her what her friends had said about Cliff and his cheating. Nora had asked if her friends had been supportive, if they'd offered advice good or bad, if they'd sworn their loyalty to her as fellow women, warriors in the battle with men.
But the truth was that Lily had no real friends, and hadn't fully realized that until the break with Cliff. The person she'd turned to first had been Nora, her grandmother. The only place she'd wanted to run off to for sanctuary had been her parents' house in Maine. Aside from informing her roommate and a few other women in her social circle that she and Cliff were through, she hadn't opened up to anyone but her family.
Why? Lily turned on the bed so that she could get a glimpse out the window. The sky—at least the part of it she could see—was that weird winter white. It seemed foreboding and Lily turned her back on it. She wondered if other large families were like hers, a self-sufficient unit, a self-sustaining environment. As far as she knew, none of her siblings had close friendships. In the Rowans's case, the Rowans were enough.
But that couldn't have been entirely true, not always true. Because Lily had learned that lots of people had cared enough about Steve and Julie and their children to come to Becca's rescue, to help the Rowans execute their scheme to pass off Rain as David's child.
She wondered. Had the family dynamic changed after that? Had Lily, only five at the time, absorbed a new modus operandi, one that taught it was best to turn inward in times of trouble, as well as in times of joy?
Lily sighed. Secrets. Was she the only person over eighteen who didn't have any secrets? Try as she might, she just couldn't think of one piece of information she was deliberately holding back from the people she loved. She wondered if it was inevitable that one day she would, like most everyone else, have something she could reveal to no one, or to only a select few. A word she regretted having spoken. An act of betrayal, perhaps. Maybe even a crime.

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