When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  “How do you know these things?”

  He shrugged. “I had time, Jonesey. Eons of time to put it together. You haven’t had time.”

  She read the plaque again. Her stomach turned.

  “Oh my God.”

  * * *

  She staggered up. Leo stood too and took her hand.

  Joey knew he took her hand because she saw it, but she didn’t feel it. Suddenly she threw her head to the side and vomited up her morning omelet. She felt Leo scrape back her hair.

  “Lily’s Place,” Leo said. “They were having their affair at Lily’s Place.”

  “Lily Pad,” whispered Joey, and pressed her face into her palms.

  * * *

  Now Joey was irate.

  “Not only do they have an affair,” she ticked off, pacing the sea in front of Leo. “Not only did they freaking arrange all of it in advance. Premeditated. It was all so disgustingly premeditated. Not only did they trash their marriage vows. My poor dad. My poor, sweet dad who probably had some sort of Rand STD but didn’t think to get checked.”

  Leo didn’t say, Hey, now. He just seemed relieved she wasn’t going off the deep end. Joey didn’t know what going off the deep end would look like. She wasn’t opposed to it.

  “Maisy!” she said. “Sweet, innocent Maisy. She didn’t deserve this.”

  Leo grimaced. “No, she didn’t.”

  Joey stomped the sand. It felt good to stomp her bare feet. Stomp, stomp. Joey stopped. The anger went as fast as it came. A desolate sadness swooped in. Anger was far better. She stomped a few more furious stomps to summon it back.

  “Not only all that. No. They conceived a child. They conceived Lily and passed her off as my father’s.”

  “Scott is a better father than mine,” said Leo softly.

  Joey didn’t know what to say. Rand was fine. She’d always thought Rand was fine. A bit aloof. Okay, a lot aloof. Obsessed with sailing and stock markets. Not super obsessed with his wife or son. But fine. Not, like, an abuser or something.

  “Maybe she’s not really Rand’s. Maybe she’s my dad’s and the Lily’s Place thing is a coincidence.”

  “No, Jonesey. She’s Rand’s. When I confronted him, he confirmed it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, think of Lily. She has those blue eyes.”

  “My mom has blue eyes. So does my grandmother.”

  “But I swear if you look at my father’s and Lily’s side by side, you’ll see the similarity. And Lily’s birthday, J.”

  “May twenty-second.”

  “May twenty-second. That’s a late August conception date. Your mother—”

  “My mother was the only one of us who stayed longer in August. To do gallery stuff.” She was going to throw up again.

  “There’s something else. She has this smirk face, you know? Or she did. I remember it about her.” Leo drew circles in the sand with his tennis ball, and Joey had an astounding revelation. Lily was Leo’s sister. “Her smirk face is my father’s face when he’s negotiating and he’s waiting for the other party to cave.”

  “Oh.” How hadn’t Joey seen it? It was so strange and twisted. Lily was to Leo as Lily was to Joey.

  “I’m sorry, J. I wanted to tell you, all those years I wanted to tell you, but why should I ruin your life too?”

  “You should have told me.” A sob shuddered through her. “I had a right to know.”

  “But then what? We’d stay together with this huge secret? It would have eaten us alive. I know that because it was eating me alive. So at least I could spare you. And it would have gotten out somehow to Scott and Maisy, and I just didn’t want that, to ruin their lives too. And especially…I didn’t want the whole thing to affect Lily. I know what Rand was like as a father, Jones. I wanted better for her.”

  Joey absorbed it. His explanation made sense on its face, but something in her—maybe something illogical—couldn’t forgive him. “You don’t think?” She had a sudden, vile thought. “You…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “Me?”

  “No,” said Leo quickly. “Of course not. They’re not that disgusting of parents. We were sleeping together. And besides, there’s a whole backstory about why they got separated after they first met and then ran into each other before we started coming to Corfu. My father wrote Bea letters that she never got. You’ll have to ask your mom for all the details.”

  “Oh, I will. Trust me, I will.” Joey stared at her legs adorned with late-summer souvenirs: mosquito bites and sun freckles. “What about us, Leo?” she whispered. “Why didn’t you take us into account in your whole calculus? Did you ever think about destroying us? About destroying me?”

  “It tore me apart to do that,” Leo said quietly. “I just didn’t see another way. I was trying to protect Lily. And trying to protect you.”

  “What if I didn’t need to be protected?” Joey heard herself shout. “What if what I needed was someone to tell me the house of cards my life was built on?” She wanted him to know what it had been like for her in the aftermath, really, really know, but how could he possibly understand? Those years couldn’t be distilled into sentences. And anyway, she knew now on some level that she’d needed those years to teach her how to be happy by herself. She wouldn’t have broken if she hadn’t already had so many of her own cracks.

  Joey stood. A wave slapped her calves.

  “Joey, I…we need to do the right thing. Lily just turned eighteen. I’ve had that date in my head since I found out, as a deadline or something. She got her childhood with Scott, but I’ve always felt like she deserved the truth. And I’ve always wanted to know my sister. So when I found out it was your wedding, and Lily was finally eighteen, I don’t know, I just leaped. Booked a trip here. Maybe it…I don’t know, when I hear it out of my mouth, it sounds impetuous and selfish. But it felt like what I needed to do. We need to tell Lily, you do agree, don’t you?” Leo reached for Joey’s hand. The one with her engagement ring. Their fingertips brushed.

  Joey jerked back her hand. She was light-headed from his betrayal. And especially from her mother’s. “I have to go.”

  “Joey, please. I’m sorry. I truly am. I wish I could take this pain away from you. That’s why I kept it from you all this time. Please stay, and we’ll figure all this out. Igloo seedok.” He tried a weak smile to disarm her.

  “No. No secret language.” Joey backed away and started running. Her calves burned. The footsteps behind her quickened. This was always going to be the fucking scene in the movie where he caught up to her.

  Leo made it astride. Joey bent over, hands to shins, panting. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “I’m staying at the Boca Beach Club.”

  “I lifeguarded there in high school,” she managed as she stared into her knees.

  “I know.”

  Joey felt something close around her throat. It was a sensation that had surfaced for years after their last summer, that had arisen on every date she’d pep-talked herself into going on. She’d be drinking a frozen yogurt shake with a guy at that place on campus decorated with the goofy customer Polaroids, and all of a sudden, the panic—like the arc of a dive into a pool with no water. After a decade enduring it, she’d finally gotten a therapist who’d prescribed anti-anxiety meds.

  As Joey returned herself upright, an unexpected sentence dangled on the cliff of her tongue, trying to scramble back to safety. But then unwittingly, it tumbled down.

  “I saw you everywhere, Leo.”

  “What’s that, Jones?”

  Joey could pretend she hadn’t said it but suddenly she needed it out, needed him to know how much she’d been affected. “I saw you everywhere after our last summer,” she whispered, and felt herself slowly deflate.

  Was she really going to be vulnerable like this to him, after all the secrets and lies? She attempted to pull the sentences back down her throat, but already they were sliding out. “I walked into a convenience store in Philly, and there you were, picking out deodorant. You were at all the
big milestones. My graduation from college. From law school. I’d chase you around the corner, and I was always heartbroken when a stranger peered back at me. You know, I once…once I went to Nice.”

  “You…came to Nice? You knew I lived there?”

  “Yeah. I convinced a few girlfriends. I promised them glitz and glam. We’d go to the casino. We’d find hot French lovers.” Joey burrowed her foot into the sand. “It was the worst trip of my life. The last night I pretended I was sick so I could stay behind at the hotel. It had been ten years since I’d seen you. Ten. And I hated myself for still thinking about you, after you broke up with me so abruptly like that. I hated myself for the real reason I’d orchestrated the trip.”

  “Jones…”

  “But the worst part was that I didn’t see you! Facebook said you lived there, but you were nowhere. I made my friends walk the harbor. I had all the excuses—exercise, scoping celebs. But of course I was just hoping to…I don’t know…accidentally-on-purpose bump into you.”

  Joey paused, reliving every beat. She felt utterly transported, and dizzyingly sad.

  “But eventually I had to fly back to New York. Without you, Leo, but also without me too, in some ways. Am I even making sense? Anyway. Yeah. Sorry if I’m ruining some fantasy you had, that I sailed off from that last summer into some un-fucked-up life.”

  Leo’s smile was achingly sad. His mouth opened without words emerging, like trying on different things to say. Finally, he said, “You’re not the only one who saw ghosts, Jones, but I—”

  Before he could say another sorry, she put a hand out. “I can’t do this. Talk about telling Lily, before I’ve even processed this myself.”

  “Okay. Of course. I get it. I—”

  “Do you, Leo? Do you get it? Dropping this on me before my wedding? I’ll talk to you when I talk to you. You’re on my timetable now. For once.”

  Joey gathered her sandals and walked to her car. She looked back only once to see Leo standing in the same place she’d left him, just like the last time, watching her go.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  Joey maneuvered her Jeep past a park where mothers pushed children on swing sets—mothers who probably did not have lengthy secret affairs and children with falsified paternities. With a quick left after the park, there it was: Joey’s childhood home, one of the last remaining traditional Southern-style houses in Delray, with her mother inside it.

  Joey parked beside the row of hedges and switched off her ignition. She could see Bea in the living room window by her easel, absorbed in her latest canvas, oblivious to Joey’s arrival. Writers needed a room of their own, wasn’t that the saying? Well, Bea had appropriated the whole main floor as her art studio.

  For Joey’s entire life, she’d thought her mom a bit loud, a bit out there, but talented and gregarious and confident. Joey had been proud that Bea was her mother, and proud of her mother’s art, no matter how offbeat. Joey knew intimately the vulnerability it required to create something from the truest part of you and then splash it out into the world. For a long time, Joey had been too distraught and disconnected from herself to create anything real. But since leaving law, she’d bonded with Bea again about the passion they both shared. Only now the varnish had gone. Her mother had taken everything Joey held dear—Leo, her art, and her family intact.

  Joey bit her lip, white-knuckling her steering wheel. She so desperately didn’t want to cry. But her chest refused to obey and gave a heaving convulsion.

  The tears came fat and hot. When they’d finally petered out, Joey lifted her head from the steering wheel. She slowly rearranged her Cousin It hair. She wiped her face with a makeup towelette and surveyed herself in the visor mirror.

  Well, the glowy effects of her pre-wedding facial had gone, that was for sure.

  Joey forced herself out of her car and across her parents’ driveway. As a child, she’d found her home magical, starting with its romantic origins—purchased in the loved-up throes of early marriage because Bea had a thing for Gone with the Wind and Scott had a thing for Bea. There was the yellow stucco box-style house, its Palladian windows framed by hunter-green shutters. The expansive front yard with the two stately sycamore trees. The cracked tar driveway and the basketball hoop with the off-kilter net on which Joey and her father used to play endless games of Horse. The garage where she’d once scraped her Jetta going in and then told her parents that someone had keyed her car.

  Joey stepped atop the gray-brick porch and inserted the key she’d retained, even after so many years in New York.

  “Hi, JoJo!” Her mother swept open the door before Joey could push it open. Bea dove in for a hug, but Joey sidestepped it. The scent of pumpkin spice stormed Joey’s nostrils. Her mother had never met an autumnal room diffuser she didn’t snap up for year-round use. Bea wore black leather leggings and a black lace camisole, purple paint smeared up her right forearm. Her skin was, as ever, an I-spent-a-week-in-the-Riviera caramel, owing to a mix of genetics and spray tans.

  “I’m so glad you wanted to come over. We have a few wedding things to discuss! And I made banana bread. How about a slice?”

  Joey took an unsteady step forward. “Dad’s at work, right?”

  Her mother’s eyebrows raised. “Yes, Dad’s at work. And Lily’s filming content in Miami. What’s going on, JoJo? Why are your shorts wet?”

  “Leo came to town to see me,” Joey said without preamble. “He told me about you and Rand. And Lily.” She could barely get it out, it was so vile. “He told me about Lily. How could you?”

  Bea’s face crumpled in like quicksand. “Joey…oh my God…Jo—” She stretched out a hand, catching Joey’s forearm.

  Joey flinched at the touch. “Don’t ever touch me again! Don’t fucking ever.” She wasn’t a huge curser but now all she wanted to do was pull variations of fuck out of a hat. Fuck you! Fuck both you and Rand! Go fuck yourselves. Literally, I’m sure.

  They stood in silence, like the panting aftermath of a race. “I owe you an explanation,” Bea eventually said. “A big explanation.”

  Joey caught a flash of the scrunched lines between her mother’s eyebrows that had survived the latest round of Botox. “You owe me a lot of explanations.”

  Bea nodded as an Academy Award–worthy tear rolled down her cheek, cutting a swath through her blush. “I know. I do.”

  * * *

  Bea sat slumped on the living room couch. It was rare to find Bea just sitting like a normal person. Usually she arranged herself in a very conscious way. Cleavage aimed. Stomach sucked. Lips pursed. Face on. Face always on.

  “I can’t believe you know,” Bea said softly, more to herself than to Joey.

  “You can’t be so stupid to have thought you’d keep your secrets forever,” said Joey, and she almost gasped at her vicious tone.

  “I deserve your anger, Joey. I deserve it. I can take it.”

  Joey sat beside her mother on the couch. She slid left so she hugged the armrest, putting more space between them. She balled her fists and her nails dug into her palms. “I need to understand. I need the whole story.”

  “Yes.” Her mother fixed her eyes on a family picture framed on a side table. Her father holding a smirking Lily. Her father looking like he might explode with love for his girls.

  Joey felt her heart constrict.

  “I met Rand even before I started dating your father.”

  “On Corfu.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Leo told me, Mom.” The word that was Joey’s first, her most familiar, felt sour on her tongue.

  “Right. I can’t…so Leo’s actually here? In Florida?” Joey didn’t reply. “Okay. Well, when I was going into my last year of college, I went to Corfu with your grandfather. You know, my parents grew up there, and despite the tragedy of their lives, I always held rather romantic notions of Corfu.”

  “I see. Romantic.”

  “Yes. Your gra
ndfather didn’t despise it like G. Even though his whole family was murdered, somehow he could separate it from the happy times of his childhood. G can’t. She had, and still has, no desire to ever go back to Corfu.

  “So after years of begging, Grandfather said he would take me. We planned to go for three weeks, and I was so excited. It was my first time out of the US other than Jamaica. And you know G. She hovers. My dad was different…”

  Bea lit up in that way she used to around Grandfather. He would kiss her forehead, and she would look soft and lovely. That’s what Joey had always thought—her mother had looked her loveliest around Grandfather.

  Fuck her mother looking lovely! Her mother was a horrible person.

  “Grandfather got a place for us on the water, right by Markas. He showed me around, and I was besotted. It was the first time I fell in love, and it was with a town. We wandered the alleys, and he got me this wide-brimmed hat with a pink grosgrain ribbon and, I don’t know, I felt like some sort of princess wandering around.” Bea gave a wistful smile. “He showed me the synagogue where he met G, and the street he grew up on, and the place where his dad was a butcher. He even showed me the spot at the Old Fortress where the Nazis took them, at gunpoint, to wait all day under the scorching sun. Then those monsters squeezed them onto death boats and sent them to Auschwitz.”

  “The Old Fortress?” Joey flinched. That was where she and Leo had gone to the meadow sometimes. She suddenly remembered being there one summer on a day Leo had decreed that every fifth word out of their mouths should be mulberry. She wasn’t sure she’d laughed as hard since. That such a day shared a history with the extermination of her grandparents’ families made her body jerk with a shiver. Maybe their whole island had been cursed.

  “On our second week of vacation, I went to the beach without Grandfather. I wore this pink polka-dot bikini with my new hat, and I felt very fresh.”