The Beresfords (33 page)

Nor was my last conversation with Jonathan what I hoped. If anything, it made me feel worse than Caroline’s harangue.

The barbecue was over. The ribs had been eaten, the lemonade toasts endured. Tom and Marcy took themselves off, Tom ruffling my hair and muttering, “So long, kid,” while Marcy  clutched me in an unexpectedly tight hug. Eric Grant
forebore
to speak to me most of the evening. He was grim and unlike himself, not even rising to Tom’s taunts or Caroline’s ribbing. When he finally rose to go (Caroline cadging a ride off him so Jonathan could stay longer), he pressed my hand and murmured, “Have a good trip, Frannie. I wish you well.”

“Thank you,” I squeaked. “I wish you well, too.”

“I don’t suppose you’d call or write.”

“Oh—I—I don’t think so.”

He gave a sad smile which made me feel guilty for a million reasons again, but thankfully
in another minute he was gone. I hoped the next time I saw him—
if
I ever saw him again—he would be some other girl’s property and would have no meaningful looks for me beyond the eat-your-heart-out variety.

Caroline hissed one last time in my ear, “Remember—if you change your mind about my dear twin, I’ll have him on the next plane to rescue you. This offer expires in two months.”

Jonathan and I sat on the edge of the pool, our legs dangling in the now perfectly warm water. We were alone. Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie were watching television and Paola had gone home.

“How are you feeling about tomorrow?” he asked. “Are you more sorry than excited or excited than sorry?”

I swished the water with my foot. “I’d like to see my mother again. And meet Robbie and Jamie and my—stepfather. But overall I’m scared and don’t want to go.”

“Think of the adventure, Frannie! New surroundings, new people to love, a new chapter in your life. I only hope you don’t forget about us old Beresfords in all the excitement.”

“I would…never…” more was impossible to say.

He laughed softly. “I was kidding, of course. I know you would never. I’ve never known anyone like you, Frannie, for attachment to familiar faces and places. You seem to love us more and more, the more familiar we are to you. It was Eric Grant’s downfall, I’m afraid.”

I felt his eyes on me in the fading dusk, but when I didn’t reply, he went on. “I told Grant that the whole novelty of seeing him as a potential boyfriend would be enough to scare you off. You thought of him as Tom’s friend or Caroline’s brother and no more. To have him suddenly (in your timeframe at least) spring new feelings on you was sure to catch you off guard and repel you. Am I right?”

“He surprised me, for sure,” I said in a low voice. I little expected Jonathan to dredge up my least favorite topic, and with our time together slipping, slipping away, I resented it all the more. “But even when the surprise was over I couldn’t consider him in that light.”

“Naturally. Because you need another few years to adjust your mindset. Caroline said she thought you might only get used to the idea after the two of you were engaged!”

Wrath swelled my chest. Of course they would talk about me—the whole family did. And of course she would joke about it.

Jonathan scooped a handful of water and dribbled it on my knee to catch my attention. “Hey. You’re upset. Forgive me for teasing you. I wasn’t sure the best way to bring it up. You used to tell me everything, Frannie, but you’ve kept this to yourself. It felt strange. I didn’t like it.”

“We don’t talk that often anymore,” I managed. I would
not
cry. I would not.

“And I’m sorry for it. But since we used to, and I have all that past credit in the bank, I hope you’ll let me spend some of it now. I thought talking to me about it might be a relief to you. You know, don’t you, that I naturally take your side. You couldn’t be expected to welcome Eric Grant when you had no feelings to offer in return, and you shouldn’t be blamed for rejecting him if that was where things stood.”

“No, exactly!” I cried, looking him full in the face. “I couldn’t. Thank you, Jonathan, for thinking that. You seem to be the only one.”

“Dad and Caroline thought you encouraged him, but I explained that I saw no change in your behavior. You were always polite and friendly and unassuming. It wasn’t your fault if Eric took that for more than it was. He’s a charming guy. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he wouldn’t be wrong if he jumped to that conclusion. But you were the hundredth time.”

I didn’t doubt it. The way Caroline put it, her brother was besieged with admirers, of which I was probably the hundredth. Bare minimum.

“You did nothing wrong,” said my cousin again. “And you’ve been completely open with him. He has no excuse for his perseverance, unless you count your good looks and sweetness and intelligence and character.”

The growing darkness hid my reaction to these words, but I turned away to hide my face nonetheless, wrapping my arms around my middle. What he said meant everything to me. I could live on it. I would have to. But the pleasure his words gave me was overwhelmed by the guilt that always followed.

It would be good to leave home, if only because of this.

Unwittingly, Jonathan plucked me from my morass of emotion. “Those are the reasons I’ve heard
him
list, anyhow,” he said, “time after time,
ad
nauseum
, in Caroline’s opinion. But for any and all reasons, Eric Grant is hanging on. He thinks, if he waits it out you’ll warm up to him eventually.” I saw the shine of his teeth as he smiled at me in the half-light. “And Frannie—I hope that
will
be the case one day. He’s a good guy. Especially now. If you could hear how sincerely he ponders things—wrestles with things—in that Bible study! I hardly think anyone worthy of you, but he just might be, one day.”

I yanked my feet from the water and curled them on the concrete. “I’ll never, never,
never
think of him that way. Not ever!”

My vehemence made Jonathan stare, and I scooted further away from him, even if it meant sitting in the damp spot my legs left on the deck.

“Frannie, what is up? Why the dramatic language? It isn’t like you.”

“I meant—I only meant—that I don’t think—I don’t imagine I’ll ever feel differently toward him.”

“Well—I can only say that I have different hopes. It would thrill me to have more ties to the people I love best in the world.”

“We’re already tied,” I insisted. “We don’t need him.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s okay, Frannie. Come back here. I warned him he’d have an uphill battle, trying to detach your heart from all its comfortable places and force a new attachment on it. I wish he went about it differently. I can’t help but think he would have done better to consult me in the first place, since I’ve known you so long and, I think, better than anyone. Between the two of us we could have won you, Frannie,
Cyrano-de-Bergerac
style. Don’t you feel even a little sorry to be breaking his heart?”

“I don’t think his heart is breaking,” I retorted. “And there’s no point in thinking about it or wishing anything different. We are totally unlike. We have nothing in common. We would be miserable together.”

“How can you say that? ‘Nothing’ in common? You have mutual friends and family. His outgoing personality compliments your shyness; his adventurous nature would rub off on you and your steadiness on him. And most of all he’s become a believer. Think of that, Frannie, when you say you have nothing in common! It’s not nothing—it’s everything. What else matters, in comparison, than having the same beliefs—the same faith—motivating how you go about life, guiding your decisions, influencing your choices? How you spend time, money. How you raise a family.
If
you raise a family. It’s everything. It can make up for differences in temperament and history. You and Eric would be very, very fortunate, to share a ‘nothing’ like your faith.”

We were close to his own pain here, I realized, and I could not argue. Nor could I pursue the subject. I took a different tack.

“That may be something,” I conceded, “but there’s more than that. I can’t help but say—remember when we first met them—him—that summer? I didn’t like the way he treated Greg—”

“Frannie, that was
years
ago,” protested Jonathan. “You’re the one who said Greg should forgive Eric, and here you are unearthing it after all this time—”

“Not just how he treated Greg,” I resumed hastily, “and I don’t just mean the time with the swim trunks—I mean all along. But it was also how he—flirted—with Rachel and Julie. He…played them off against each other and—and made them behave in ways they—they might not have, normally.”

Jonathan gave a long sigh. “It was
years
ago,” he repeated. “You were fourteen at the time. Give people a little space to act like reckless teenagers and Rachel and Julie some credit for their own behavior and choices. It was a bad summer all around. We were
all
not thinking totally straight, and I include myself in that. Most of all.”

I didn’t answer. As if I needed reminding of the first time I discovered a chink in Jonathan’s armor.

“And,” he went on, “since we’ve always talked to each other in Bible, Frannie, may I remind you that Eric Grant is in the process of ‘putting off his old self,’ as the apostle Paul would say, and ‘putting on the new man.’ It doesn’t happen overnight, but it happens. Cut him some slack. If God is willing to forget past sins, we don’t want to be less so.”

“No.”

“So much of who we become depends on who we love. And who loves us.”

His thoughts, I knew, had gone back to Caroline. Who was Jonathan becoming—who had he already become—because he loved Caroline and she loved him?

“With the right person,” he said, “we ourselves become better people.” Giving himself a shake, he swung his legs out of the water and reached for a towel. He made to toss it to me, but I shook my head. I was already dry. “I’m not saying you have to go out with Eric, Frannie, but if you ever did, I think you would be the best thing that ever happened to him. He might—eventually—make you happy, but you”—he held out a hand to me and helped me up—“you would make him everything.”

1989

I had few memories of my mother that I could recall without flinching inwardly. There was the time she saw me admiring another child’s teddy bear and I found a similar one on my pillow the next day. When I screamed with joy and held it up to her, she shrugged, but I saw the smile tugging at her mouth. And another occasion when one of her boyfriends waved his beer bottle at me and slurred, “
Wassamatter
with her? She doesn’t talk?” and Mom clutched me to her and said, “Shut up, Ray. You’re a moron and she’s got more things right with her than you ever will.” Her praise thrilled me as much as the unexpected hug, though in retrospect Ray did not, at that moment, have a whole lot going for him and maybe she said it more out of spite for him than pride in me.

After the Beresfords took me in, she called me at least twice a year. The calls followed a format: how was I? Was I being good for my uncle and aunt? How was school? Did I know how easy I had it, and if she’d had it that easy she would never have become the screw-up she was. Did Paul and Marie call her a screw-up? No? Well, she bet that bag of a sister Terri did. (This was unfair. Aunt Terri never used “screw-up” in her life. She preferred “person making bad choices.”) And the calls always wound up with, “Well—no matter how cushy your life is out there, don’t forget your mother.”

I did not forget my mother. I sent her cards, school pictures, copies of my mediocre report cards, the Bible memory verses they handed out in Sunday school. She acknowledged none of it, and as I grew older I never knew what to say in the accompanying note, but I persevered. When I was twelve I overheard Aunt Terri telling Aunt Marie, “Looks like your sister Beverly is finally getting her act together” and Aunt Marie’s, “Paul certainly thinks so.” Aunt Terri sniffed, “As well she should—that was no cheap rehab he shelled out for.” And Aunt Marie, serenely, “Paul says if it works, it works. There’s no price that can be put on a human life.” This declaration was met with only a grunt, and the conversation ended.

After Mom “got her act together” more or less, she married Bill and had Robbie and Jamie. Bill never answered the phone. I knew him only as a grumbling background voice. Robbie and Jamie, on the other hand, I had spoken with since before they could reply. Mom would tell me, “Say hello to the kids, Fran” and stick the phone to their ears while I gibbered out nonsense. It was easier than talking to each other at any rate, and after a couple years my half-brother and –sister began to lisp back to me about what they saw on TV or what they liked to eat or what injustice each received at the other’s hands.

As scared as I was to see my mother again and live with these strangers, as anxious as I was that my exile from the Beresfords might prove permanent, I was nonetheless aware of a trembling core of hope. They might be strangers, but three of them were blood strangers. Maybe they would love me. Maybe I would belong in a way I never had with my adoptive family, connect with them in a way I never could with the Beresfords, apart from Jonathan, and he was nearly lost to me now.