Look Twice

by M. Garzon

  I saw my opening. “Yes, I suppose I must take after my father more.”

  “Yeah, did you ever find the guy? I couldn’t believe your mom never told you. I thought she was waiting till you got older. Looks like she waited too long.”

  I leaned forward, curling both hands around my cardboard coffee cup. “Is that what she said? That she was waiting until we were older before telling us?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember.” She drummed her long, red-painted fingernails on the table as she thought. “I suppose I just thought she must be keeping his contact information for a reason, and what other reason could there be?”

  I sloshed half my coffee on the table. I was so flustered that I just sat there staring at it while Jan got some napkins. I grabbed some from her and started wiping up the mess. I waited until I thought my voice would be steady before looking at Jan again, but she seemed unconcerned.

  “She knew where to find him?” I said tightly.

  Jan nodded vigorously. “Well, of course. How else could she have called him after you were born?”

  I felt a ringing in my ears and slumped back in my seat. My eyes closed against the shock. My mother had lied to us. She had always told us that she didn’t know where our father was. She had claimed to only know his name, and that, she refused to tell us.

  “You okay, sweetie? You’re not gonna pass out on me, are you?” Jan asked.

  I opened my eyes and forced myself up a bit straighter. “I’m fine.” My voice was thin. “Seth and I... we didn’t know that our father knew about us.”

  “Oh yeah, he knows. She only called him the once, far’s I know, but I remember it clear as anything because it was the day you all came home from the hospital. I was watching you sleep while your mom got this little flowered box and took a piece of paper from it, real carefully. Then she went into the other room and called your father, told him she’d had twins. They didn’t talk long.”

  I wasn’t fully aware of what happened after that. I had a vague recollection of Jan reminiscing and me excusing myself too abruptly. I was probably a menace on the road all the way home because I didn’t remember driving. My heart thumped loudly in my chest the whole way, raw from the double betrayal.

  Our father knew about us. He knew our last name, he could have found us. My mother had probably been right in saying that he wanted nothing to do with us — but how could I trust her now, after finding out she had lied to us for all those years?

  I drove slowly up the long driveway in the gloaming. I parked in front of the shed and sat there, my head resting against the steering wheel, and felt no desire to move ever again.

  A rap on the window made me jump, bumping my nose on the steering wheel. “Ow! Dammit, Seth, you scared me half to death,” I muttered irritably.

  “The meeting with Jan didn’t go well?” he guessed, helping me out of the car. He shut the door and leaned against it, his hands shoved into his pockets.

  I heaved a sigh and glanced around. The outdoor rings weren’t lit, so no one was in them. I hugged myself and leaned against the car next to Seth.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Moo, but Mom lied to us. She knew where to find our father.”

  I felt him go quiet next to me.

  “She did?” In his hoarse whisper I recognized the same shock and sense of betrayal that coursed through me.

  I nodded miserably. After a minute Seth twisted towards me. I could feel his eyes on the top of my head, but I was afraid of the anger I’d feel if I looked up now and saw my mother’s eyes. I slipped my arms around him instead.

  “Do you want to talk about it tomorrow?” I suggested quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  We had school the next day, which gave our feelings the chance to settle somewhat. I got home before Seth did and I rode Hades, trying hard to concentrate. By the time I was done Seth was leaning on the gate with a determined look on his face. I put Hades on the crossties and Seth started helping me untack.

  “Where’s Dec?” he asked.

  “He had a meeting. He said he’d probably miss dinner.”

  He nodded. “Then I guess now’s a good time to start.”

  “Start what?”

  He slung the bridle on his shoulder and rested the saddle against his opposite hip before quickly scanning the barn. It was almost feeding time, which meant a lull in the usual stream of people. We were alone.

  “We’ve got to find mom’s stationery box.”

  I had immediately recognized Jan’s description of the ‘flowered box’; it was an old stationery box that my mother had used to store a few sentimental keepsakes. It held a letter from her own mother, a lock of my baby hair (Seth had been virtually bald until toddlerhood), and a few old photographs that hadn’t made it into the album. Photographs! I stared at Seth in sudden excitement. Maybe we could find a picture of our father!

  “Let’s do it.”

  We quickly finished putting Hades away and ran to the house. Gran often came over on evenings when Dec wasn’t home, but luckily tonight we were alone.

  “Where do we start?” I asked nervously.

  Seth looked at me. We both knew the answer. We crept upstairs — which was silly since we were the only ones home — and went to Dec’s room. I paused just inside the door, my heart accelerating. It wasn’t as though we never went into Dec’s room, but since my mother died it wasn’t a frequent occurrence. And we’d never gone in like this, with the deliberate intent of snooping.

  Blue was curled up on her dog bed. She wagged the tip of her tail without getting up, and I went over to scratch her neck.

  “Where’s the box, Blue? Can you tell us?” Since Blue could offer us nothing more than an apologetic look, we started searching.

  “Why don’t you take the dresser, and I’ll do the closet,” Seth said, opening the closet door.

  “No! There is no way I’m looking at Dec’s underwear. I’ll take the closet.” I pushed past him and started digging through the closet’s contents, but I paused almost immediately. A few of my mom’s clothes still hung in Dec’s closet. To what end, I wasn’t sure. The only thing of hers that I’d kept for myself was a faded, pale green T-shirt. In the beginning, I’d slept in it until it was threadbare, and now I kept it safely tucked away on my closet shelf for those times I felt the need to be close to her. Maybe the clothes in Dec’s closet served the same purpose. I finished searching the bottom and found nothing. I dragged a straight-backed chair from the corner of the room so that I could search the shelf. There was a hat I’d never seen Dec wear, a pile of sweaters, and, in the far corner, a box. It was about the size of a shoebox, but wider. I lifted it with shaking hands and stepped down from the chair.

  “Seth.”

  He hurried over and licked his lips nervously before lifting the lid. He quickly pawed through the papers inside. No flowered box. He slumped to the floor. I sat cross-legged next to him and dropped the box in front of me.

  “We’ll find it,” I said encouragingly.

  “Where? It’s not in here. He wouldn’t put something like that in the office, it’s too personal.”

  Dec was very orderly, which was turning out to be helpful. We knew we wouldn’t find the box someplace completely illogical. Out of curiosity, I looked through some of the papers in the box. An old school certificate, a cut-out magazine article about Dec when he was eventing, a travel guide. Then my breath caught. Slowly, I pulled out an eight by ten photograph of my mother. She was awash in golden light, her pale hair swirling around her face as she laughed. She was wearing a sundress and leaning away with one arm raised, as though she was holding hands with whoever had taken the picture. She looked so young and so full of life. I heard Seth sniff and realized he wasn’t the only one crying. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and froze.

  “Crap.” Seth’s face was stricken. “That was the door.”

  We threw the papers and picture back into the box and Seth leaped up to replace it in the closet. I carried th
e chair back to the corner as quietly and fast as I could. We did a last scan of the room and ran out.

  I had just shut my bedroom door when I heard Dec on the stairs. There was a knock a second later.

  “Come in,” I croaked. I tried to slow my pounding heart.

  Dec stuck his head in and frowned when he saw me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, just... homework. I’m frustrated with homework.”

  “Why don’t you come downstairs and eat? It doesn’t look as though you two had dinner.”

  I nodded and got up, feeling foolish for having been so rattled. Next time we went snooping, I thought, we were going to prepare an excuse in advance.

  Fourteen

  “By the way, we’re having company on Saturday,” Dec said during dinner the next day.

  I was surprised. We rarely had company on the weekends because that was when we were most busy with work.

  “On a weekend?” I asked, busily mopping up gravy from my plate with a piece of bread. My vegetarianism didn’t yet extend to gravy. One step at a time, I figured.

  He shrugged. “Joanne works during the week.”

  Something about the way he said it made me pay attention. Beside me, I could feel Seth’s energy shift also.

  “Who’s Joanne?” I felt unaccountably wary.

  Dec leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on the table before looking at us. “She’s a woman I’ve been seeing.”

  Seth and I exchanged a glance. “So she’s your girlfriend?” he checked.

  “Yes, she is.”

  It wasn’t a complete surprise, really. I thought back to Dec’s frequent absences the year before, and how I’d speculated that he was seeing someone. At the time I’d been too wrapped up in my budding relationship with Jaden to spare much thought for Dec. Since then his overnight absences had dwindled and were usually explained by work, so I suppose on some level I’d thought the relationship was over. I was wrong, apparently.

  “They’re coming for lunch, and spending the afternoon,” he added.

  “They?” I said.

  “Joanne has a daughter.” Now that part was a surprise.

  “What are they like?” Seth had stopped eating to focus on Dec. I wondered if he was going into some kind of minor shock.

  “They’re very nice. Joanne has been very... patient. For a long time, I wasn’t ready for a relationship and she respected that.”

  I frowned. “You mean you’ve known her for a long time?”

  He nodded. “About three years.”

  I tried to hide my shock. Three years! My mother had died four and a half years ago. How could Dec even have been thinking of another woman so soon after my mom’s death?

  “What’s the daughter like?” Seth asked. The tightness in his voice let me know that he’d noticed the timing, too.

  “Her name is Dana, she’s fourteen and a bit shy.” Dec gave me a small, wry smile. “She’s not the handful you were, that’s for sure.”

  When I came in before lunch on Saturday, Dec was freshly showered and I could smell aftershave as he moved around the kitchen. He frowned when he caught sight of Seth. “Go change your shirt, would you?”

  Seth peered down at his yellow T-shirt, which was decorated with a long trail of green. He’s obviously been slimed by a horse rubbing its face against him while it was eating. The grass or hay left green stains; it was an almost daily occurrence for us.

  “Why? I’m just going back out to the barn after,” Seth protested.

  “Just do it.”

  Dec turned his gaze on me and I automatically looked down at myself, searching for the usual marks of our trade. He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it. I sighed and went to the bathroom. I’d already washed my hands, but I did it again and included my face this time. I brushed and re-tied my hair into the short ponytail I could now manage. Then I went back to the kitchen to help set the table.

  We had a doorbell but it hadn’t worked in years. When we heard a knock Dec answered the door while Seth and I hovered uncertainly in the living room. Dec took Joanne and Dana’s jackets before herding them towards us.

  The only remarkable thing about them was how very unremarkable they seemed. They were both taller than me, but of average height. Joanne was a little bit overweight, had average shoulder length brown hair, and wore glasses. She was wearing a beige blouse tucked into black dress pants. Her daughter was a younger, slightly slimmer replica of her mother, minus the glasses.

  Blue wandered in to join in the introductions, and Dana drew back behind her mother.

  “Dana’s nervous of dogs,” Joanne said worriedly, looking up at Dec. Seth and I exchanged a glance. A stable probably wasn’t a good place for her to be then, because there were invariably dogs around. Besides Blue, there were several boarders’ dogs that frequently came to visit.

  “It’s no problem,” Dec said. “Téa, can you put Blue in my office please?”

  I gaped at him. Blue was part of the family, and we never excluded her from anything. Okay, so she had a bed in Dec’s office and spent a lot of time there anyway — that was different from being banished there.

  When I didn’t move Dec gave me a pointed look. I snapped out of it. “Come on, Blue,” I murmured. I led the way into the office and knelt down to hug her. “Don’t worry about it, girl, they won’t be here for long.”

  We sat down to lunch. Joanne sat in Jaden’s usual spot across from me, and Dana was next to her, across from Seth.

  “It must be very interesting to live on a ranch,” Joanne said as we started on our soup.

  I did a mental eye roll. “It’s not a ranch, it’s a stable.” It was one of my pet peeves — if you don’t see any cows or cowboy hats, it’s not a ranch. Unless you lived out west, maybe.

  “Oh. Well, it must be quite exciting, all the same.”

  Seth peeked at me. “It has its moments.”

  Yup. Hot moments in summer and cold moments in winter and moments like now, where Dec’s expression forecast ‘tense, with a chance of storms’. I sighed. I didn’t want to make things difficult for him, so I plastered on what I hoped was a friendly smile.

  “What do you do for a living?” I inquired.

  “I work in accounts receivable. Not as exciting as what you do here. We’ve heard all about you and your adventures,” Joanne said.

  I smiled and nodded in a noncommittal way, since saying, ‘we never heard of you until two days ago’ didn’t seem politic.

  “We’ve wanted to meet you for some time, but you know how busy Declan is,” Joanne went on, “and Dana and I have a lot of activities, too.” She gazed fondly over at her daughter.

  “What kinds of activities do you do?” Seth asked politely.

  Dana said nothing. She ate her sandwich and looked around in a bored sort of way, so her mom jumped in again.

  “Well, on Tuesdays I have my book club, and Thursday is Dana’s choir practice, and on Saturday morning there’s our knitting club. That’s one that we enjoy together.”

  I couldn’t keep my brows from creeping up, but I nodded and tried to look interested. I was careful not to look at Seth because laughter wouldn’t be a polite response, and I knew laughter was unavoidable if I caught my brother’s eye. I examined my plate. So their pastimes aren’t what you would consider exciting, I told myself. So what? To each her own. More surprising was that they considered themselves ‘busy’ with three activities a week. If I only worked three nights a week I’d feel like I was on vacation.

  After lunch, we went out to the barn and Seth went to greet some of his students.

  “Come on, I’ll give you the tour,” Dec said to Joanne.

  “Do I get to ride on a horse?” Dana asked suddenly, speaking up for the first time.

  She hadn’t asked very politely. She hadn’t even said ‘please’. If Seth or I had asked for something that way at that age, we would have gotten a resounding ‘no’ on a good day and a cuff on a bad one.

  Dec smiled wa
rmly and put an arm around her shoulders. “Of course, I wouldn’t think of sending you home without a ride.”

  “I’d think of it,” I muttered.

  Dec shot me a look. I had a momentary, childish impulse to show them the man Dec could be — the angry, violent one, the one who didn’t belong in their safe, small little world. It wouldn’t take much, I knew. If I pushed him the wrong way he’d erupt, yell, maybe even get physical. Wonder how excited they’d be about him then. I gave a mental sigh. I wouldn’t do it, but it was a satisfying little fantasy for a second.

  I was all set to be indignant when Dec asked me to take Dana for a pony ride when he turned to look at her.

  “Let’s go get Beau ready,” he said

  I felt my jaw spring open. Dec taught lessons sometimes, but he didn’t touch the beginners. And he was putting her on his own horse. Okay, so Beau was ridden by students a lot more than he was by Dec — it still felt weird. I was watching the three of them turn the corner when Julia flounced up next to me.

  “So do you hate them, or what?” Julia asked sotto voce.

  I thought about it. “Nah, they’re too bland to hate.”

  “Bland isn’t the word. That outfit is a crime,” she pronounced. “Let’s hope he doesn’t marry her or the fashion police will bust the wedding.”

  She grinned at the look on my face. “Just kidding, T! Half the women in this barn would jump at the chance to marry Dec. There’s no way he’s gonna tie the knot with Mrs. Beige.”

  I smiled back and let her tow me to the tackroom. It was probably true, I thought. Dec was popular with the women in the barn, although he’d never dated any of them.

  When he came in to get Beau’s tack I watched him, trying to fathom it. He was about five foot ten, with a wide, solid build. There were a few wrinkles around his eyes and lines around his mouth. Under a full head of dark hair his features were fairly regular, with the most arresting one being those ice-blue eyes. Julia was right, I realized suddenly. Despite his bossiness, he could probably find a number of women willing to marry him. And I didn’t know how I felt about that.

  I busied myself with work until Joanne and Dana left. When Jaden arrived shortly afterward I was even more relieved than usual to see him. I watched his tall, straight body striding toward me in the gathering gloom and wished, for the thousandth time, that I could run to him the way I wanted to.