Natural Love

by S. Celi

  When I woke and found a spot by the pool the next morning, I again decided it was all in my head. Avery and I didn’t need to worry. Linda and Dad didn’t know anything about us. They didn’t suspect; we’d hidden it well enough that we could tell them in our own time and manage the message when we did. Confident, I adjusted the level on one of the wicker lawn chairs that rimmed the pool, threw my towel on it, and flopped on the chair so that I could deepen my tan on one of the last Saturdays of the summer.

  All I needed, I thought, was a beer to make the morning perfect.

  I don’t know how long I lay there. I dozed on and off to the dull buzz of the lawn mower from one of the gardeners. The sun beat on my face, and the sweltering August heat didn’t bother me much.

  But then, a few hours in to the relaxation, Linda yelled my name.

  I shot up from the lawn chair and pulled off my sunglasses in time to see her storm across the yard. From half a football field away, I saw the anger on her face and heard the frustration in her voice as she repeated my name over and over again.

  “Spencer Lawrence Chadwick! Get up! Get up right now!”

  “What’s going on?” I said as I stood.

  She didn’t answer me until she reached the pool deck. Her face was deep red, as if all of the blood in her body had rushed to it in some kind of preparation for her coming fury. I’d never seen her this mad.

  Never.

  “We have a problem,” she said with narrowed eyes and gritted teeth. “A major problem.”

  “I can see that.” The words fumbled around in my mouth, and beyond Linda, I saw Avery appear in the sliding glass doorway of the house.

  “I had my suspicions,” Linda said. “And last night stirred them up.” She shoved her hand in the pocket of her black sweatpants.

  “Then what?”

  Linda pulled her hand out of her pants and I saw a hint of red fabric in her balled fist. In an instant, my heart leapt from my chest to my throat and I felt it pounding in the back of my neck. Avery must have known, too. She had followed her mother’s path and now stood only about fifty feet away from the entrance to the pool.

  Linda opened her hand and shook out the red fabric—a lacy, expensive pair of red women’s bikini underwear that showed off everything about the wearer.

  “Recognize these? Found them in your room this afternoon when the sheets were changed during laundry.”

  She shook the panties again, and as I looked past my stepmother, I could tell that Avery’s face had lost as much blood as Linda’s had gained. She shook some, and her eyes were so wide I saw her entire pupils.

  This was not the way we had expected our secret to come out. Not at all.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said to Linda, hoping that would stall time. “Never seen those before in my life.”

  She answered me with a rueful laugh. “I can tell when you’re lying to me, Spencer. Do not lie to me right now. That won’t end well. I promise.”

  Behind her, Avery took two more steps closer to us, and opened her mouth as if she wanted to speak.

  But then she didn’t.

  “Who found those?” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Was someone snooping around my room? Looking for shit?”

  “No,” Linda said. “And like I just told you, it doesn’t matter who exactly found them. What matters is that they were there. You know, the uncanny thing about them is that I was there when my daughter bought these at Nordstrom during the anniversary sale last year. I remember them.”

  “If they came from Nordstrom, then dozens of women have underwear like that.”

  “Spencer.” Linda’s voice got louder. “Don’t argue with me.”

  “Look, if I’m being accused of something, I’d like to know what it is.”

  “Oh, I think it’s obvious.” Linda gave the panties a disgusted glare. “If I find out that you seduced my daughter—”

  “He didn’t seduce me, Mom. He didn’t seduce me at all.”

  Linda whirled around to find her daughter just steps behind her. I stepped forward too, and opened my mouth to say something, but closed it when Avery continued. “He didn’t. That’s not how it happened. I can promise you that.”

  “Of course you would defend him.” Linda gave me a withering glance. “After all the times I defended you, Spencer. All the things I said to your father about how you wanted to help our family. All the times I called you responsible and trustworthy.” A pause. “You weren’t trustworthy at all.”

  “You’re overreacting, Mom,” Avery said.

  “No, I am not! I know what’s going on here, and you can’t hide it from me. You two are sleeping together, aren’t you?”

  “They must have wound up in my room by mistake,” I said. “I’ll bet Janet got them mixed when she folded the laundry last week.”

  “They were in a heap on the floor by your bed. Under your own pair of boxer shorts, Spencer!”

  “Who found them?”

  “Stop dancing around my question! Are you fucking my daughter?”

  “No,” Avery said. “He’s not fucking me.” Linda and I both looked over at Avery. “He’s not. I wouldn’t call it fucking at all. It’s a lot more than that.”

  My stepmother sighed. “Here we go.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “It’s a lot more that fucking.”

  Linda just stared at me.

  “This isn’t how we wanted you to find out, but we did plan on telling you,” I said as my eyes traveled back and forth between two of the most important women in my life. “It’s not fucking.”

  “I love him,” Avery said. “And that’s the truth.”

  Linda blew out a long, frustrated breath. “You don’t know what love is.”

  “That’s so wrong.” Avery said. “You’re so wrong.”

  “Oh really? I think I know my daughter pretty well, and you have no idea what’s at risk here.” Linda clawed her right hand through her hair. “This isn’t a game.”

  “Avery,” I said, but both she and her mother weren’t listening to me anymore.

  “You don’t know anything about me, Mom.” My stepsister’s voice shook with emotion and I immediately knew what she was referring to. “You don’t know anything at all.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Linda said.

  “You think I have some kind of halo around my head.” Avery’s voice broke a little. “But I haven’t been your sweet little girl for years, Mom. Years.”

  Linda glanced at Avery’s underwear again. “All I know is that this is unacceptable.”

  “Unacceptable,” Avery said. “Of course you would use that word. God forbid anyone in this esteemed family do anything unacceptable.”

  “Sleeping with your stepbrother is always unacceptable. I don’t care what family you come from or where you live. It’s never okay. Never.”

  “It would be if you knew the truth.”

  “No,” Linda said. “I don’t think it would be, Avery. This is wrong. This makes me sick. Sick!”

  Avery shut her eyes and shook her head. The blood still hadn’t returned to her face, and when she opened her eyes, I saw only resignation and sadness. “Jesus Christ . . . You just . . . I can’t deal with this.”

  Linda nodded at me. “As far as I can see, you and your stepbrother here have a lot of questions to answer.”

  “Linda,” I said, trying to keep the anger, relief, annoyance, and frustration from exploding inside of me. “You need to watch it. You might have the evidence. But you don’t want to know what’s really going on here. Trust me.”

  “He’s right,” Avery said. “We don’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves. And I’m certainly not going to talk to you right now about this.”

  “Why?” Linda sounded not just surprised, but shocked. “Why won’t you all just tell me? Why? Why are you keeping secrets from me?”

  Avery shut her eyes. “Because I want to talk to Spencer. Just Spencer.
Alone.”

  Then Avery opened her eyes, turned on her heel and stormed away. Linda screamed Avery’s name and then mine, but I ignored her and rushed after Avery. There was no way I would let her be alone. Not in that state. Not when I knew how screwed the truth really was.

  And not when she was the only person on earth whom I really loved.

  “GET IN THE car,” Avery said. Anger coated her voice, and when I didn’t comply with her orders, it got thicker. “Get in the car. Now.”

  “Okay,” I said, then opened the door of the new Lexus and slid in. She got in the driver’s seat and slammed the door. “Where are we going?”

  She didn’t answer me. She didn’t look at me. As soon as I closed the passenger door, she turned on the engine and roared out of the gravel lot in front of the garage attached to Chadwick Gardens. Before long we’d left the neighborhood, heading south on I-71 again. Avery’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly I thought she might break it. She held onto the top of the wheel, and her elbows stayed flexed. The car purred and hummed as we zoomed through traffic, but the way she drove unsettled me.

  Still, I didn’t bring it up. Something told me I shouldn’t.

  “I need you to understand something.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t leave me again,” she said as she pulled the car off the highway and onto the exit for Taft Road. “Not when I just got you back. Not after this summer. You can’t leave me.”

  “Avery, please. Try to calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down,” she said. “I’m so damn tired of people telling me to be this way or that way. So sick of everything. So sick of pretending I’m okay when I’m not.”

  “I know,” I said, and rubbed my hand across my forehead. If only I could wipe the last 24 hours away, send them down a drain or light them on fire. If only Linda hadn’t walked in on us.

  “I haven’t been okay in three years,” Avery said when the car pulled up to a red light a half block off the exit. “I’m tired of fucking pretending.”

  Shit.

  She never talked this way, never used this tone. This tone was dangerous, unsteady, out of control, and too quiet for comfort. I thought about replying, but then I looked at the neighborhood around us.

  And I knew exactly where she was driving.

  “AJ,” I said as the light changed from red to green. “Don’t do this. Let’s not go there.”

  “Shut up, Spencer.” She still didn’t glance in my direction. And now her eyes had narrowed and she popped her jaw back and forth.

  I pulled away from her and decided not to argue. She drove the car on the twisted streets of the inner city, past a wide mural painted during a long abandoned city beautification project and a long row of houses now turned into medical offices and clinics. Soon we turned down that street. The one I once swore I would never drive on again. The one that brought me to the site of a day I wish had never happened.

  She pulled the Lexus into the driveway of the large medical building and flipped off the engine. From the way she parked, we had a full view of all the metal, concrete, steel, and glass that made up the place. No one came in or out for a long time, and we didn’t speak either. I knew why she wanted to come back, though. I didn’t have to ask. Instead, I just waited for her to talk.

  “Mom and David still don’t know about this,” she said. She took her hands off the steering wheel and her shoulders slumped. “You’re the only one who knows, I think.”

  “No one else has to know what happened, Avery. Not if you don’t want them to. I told you that then, and it’s still true now.”

  Her voice broke. “I’m still so embarrassed.”

  “How many times do I have to say this? It’s not your fault. It’s not. It was never your fault.”

  She shook her head and then let it fall back against the headrest. “But that’s just it. It is my fault. It is. I think that every day. Every time I look in the mirror. I hate myself.”

  “I wish you didn’t.” I paused, thinking about that day, so long ago. “We should have gone to the police, though. We should have.”

  “I didn’t want to,” she said. Her voiced sounded so flat, so emotionless. “I should have never gone to that party. I’m the one who woke up and didn’t know what had happened.”

  I closed my eyes, wishing I could shut this memory out, but it didn’t help. The whole thing still haunted me, no matter how much I wanted to ignore it. Three years hadn’t been nearly enough time to get away from the awful memories. They still hovered in the background like cockroaches I couldn’t squash in my mind. First, the phone call Avery made to me the morning after the party at Omega Tau Epsilon, when she woke up in the dorm room missing her underwear. She’d sounded hazy and lethargic in a way that couldn’t have just been from cheap beer. Then, the way she’d cried and begged me to come to her dorm room. When I got there, I found her panicked and shaking.

  Over and over again, she told me she’d been date raped, and she wasn’t sure who did it.

  “You can’t blame yourself for what happened,” I said in the car three years later, my eyes still closed. “It was a crime. Do you hear me? A fucking crime.”

  She sniffled. “I’ve thought about it a thousand times. I still don’t know what happened. I still don’t know who—”

  “I would have called the police if you’d let me,” I said and opened my eyes again. “And God help me, if I ever figure out who did it.”

  “I know you’d kill them,” she said, and turned her head to me. “You’ve told me a hundred times.”

  “I wouldn’t think twice.”

  “That’s why I told you. You were always watching out for me.”

  I grimaced. “But I failed.”

  “No,” she said. By then her face had flushed I knew she’d cry any second. “You’ve never failed me, Spencer. Other people have, but not you.”

  “I know I failed, Avery. I didn’t protect you enough. I didn’t help you enough. I didn’t insist—”

  “Stop. Stop blaming yourself. You have to stop blaming yourself.”

  “What about this?” I nodded at the building in front of us. “Why did you want to come here right now, after all of this time? You never had to come here again. Not after that day.”

  She sniffled, then wiped one tear away from her right cheek. “Do you think I made the right decision?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t always know,” she said, crying a little bit harder. “Sometimes I think maybe I didn’t. Maybe I should have kept it.”

  “You didn’t have to. You didn’t need that reminder every day of your life.”

  “But it was a person . . . I mean . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. Was it a person?” She sniffled. “I try not to think about it that way, but then something reminds me, and I just can’t stop thinking about it. How old it would be. What it might look like.”

  “You made the only decision you could. Every option was bad. Every one.”

  She sighed. “Don’t you understand, Spencer? I’ve been faking everything. Everything. Acting like I’m fine. Pretending I’m the perfect daughter. Telling myself every day in the mirror that I can forget about it and move on. And I can’t. I can’t forget about it at all.”

  “It’s in the past.”

  I pulled her toward me, and she sank into my body. Her head found a place on my shoulder and she cried for a few minutes. I just let her. A light rain began to fall outside the car. “That’s my stupid luck,” she muttered into my shoulder. “Only I would get raped and wind up pregnant.”

  “That’s why they have Planned Parenthood,” I said, trying to think of anything that would make this better. “So you had options. So you didn’t have to live with it every day.”

  As usual, when it came to this topic, I came up short. In fact, I could never handle this very well. Not only did it kill me to see Avery so broken, but every time we talked about it, my own regrets swelled like a tidal wave. I should have
prevented this. I should have been there. I should have saved her.

  Damn it. Damn it. Goddamn it.

  Three years ago, Avery told me about the pregnancy while our parents were in Palm Beach on a long a weekend at The Breakers, about six weeks after the rape. She cried so hard and so long about it that I wondered if I’d have to take her to the hospital, or if she’d hurt herself. By then, she’d lost so much weight just from the stress of it all, stress she told our parents had to do with final exams and a grueling school schedule. They believed her because she never lied.

  “This is the kind of thing people go crazy over,” Avery said. “People think abortions are unforgivable.”

  “Not everyone.” I pulled her closer and rubbed her shoulder, trying to get her to calm down and worried that she wouldn’t.

  “It’s a sin.”

  “Not in your case.”

  “It is. Can’t you see?”

  “Avery, please.”

  She wiped her cheeks. “The only person who won’t judge me for this is you.”

  “I didn’t want our parents to know,” she said, her voice still muffled and choked from the crying. “I thought it would be easier if I just faked that I was okay. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t easier. It doesn’t work.”

  “You’ve done a good job of acting like you’re fine,” I said, then flipped on the Lexus’s wipers. The rain now pelted the windshield. “A really good job.”

  “Have I?”

  “If I didn’t know what happened, I wouldn’t have any clue,” I said. “Me on the other hand, well, everyone knows I’m the family screw up.”

  “But you’re not.” Avery still cried, but not as hard. I wanted more than anything for her to stop. “You did such a good job in the Peace Corps, and now you’re in the company.”

  “I think, after this morning, the right word is ‘were’.”

  “She’s going to tell your dad.” Avery wiped her nose. “I know Mom. And that look on her face.”

  “I don’t know if I care anymore,” I said. “They were going to find out anyway. You and I both knew that.”