Nearly

by Deborah Raney

  But that truth followed her relentlessly, dogging her until she collapsed on the snowy lawn in front of her house. There, on her knees, unable to get back to her feet, she let the sobs come. They rose from deep within her, wracking her body with soundless, painful shudders.

  Finally, she came to her senses enough to know that she would freeze if she remained outside. She struggled slowly to her feet and staggered to the door, fumbling with the key in the lock. Inside, she shed her wet coat and boots, leaving them in a soggy heap in front of the door.

  She went to the bathroom and hung over the sink, afraid she might be sick. But her stomach finally settled and she splashed warm water on her face and examined herself in the mirror. Her eyes were swollen and red, but her face did not betray the truth she half expected to be painted there like some obscene graffiti.

  Like a dream, a disjointed scene from her childhood taunted her—a memory long forgotten or maybe never recalled until this night.

  She saw her father’s too-bright smile and heard him telling her about the brother who would soon come to live with them.

  “And we’re going to name him Joseph,” Daddy was saying, “Joseph Matthew Anderson.”

  “He’s eight years old and he doesn’t have a name yet?” She was incredulous.

  Her parents both laughed nervously.

  “No, no, darling.” Her father patted her hand. “Of course he has . . . had a name. But we…wanted him to have a new name. A new name to go with his new life. It will be our first gift to him.”

  “And don’t you think Joseph is a beautiful name?” Her mother’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  Claire only nodded. She didn’t think she would like it very much if someone took her name away and gave her a new one. Sometimes when she played house with her best friend, Gretchen, they gave each other pretend names. Claire always became Veronica. It was a beautiful name—elegant and foreign, prettier than Claire and infinitely more grown up than Kitty. But that was pretend. Claire didn’t especially like either of her names, but they were as much a part of her as her strawberry blond, naturally curly hair or her hazel eyes. She wasn’t sure she would like it if someone chose a new name for her without even asking.

  In her mind’s eye, Claire saw the little girl she'd been, reliving again the confusion and the turmoil of that time. Like a drowning swimmer, she struggled to come to the surface of the present. And then, as though she'd broken through the murky water and into the light, the truth began to assemble itself in her mind. Michael Meredith was the Joseph of her past. She’d fallen in love with a man who once, long ago, was her brother!

  All the things this truth implied circled her mind in a frenzy, waiting to be sorted out and comprehended.

  The house was cold and Claire began to tremble from the frigid air and the icy truth she'd just learned. Like an automaton she threw a log on the grate and lit some kindling. She sunk to the floor in front of the fireplace, her back against the sofa, and hugged a plump cushion to her chest to try to ease her trembling. The flames crackled and spat with a dissonant absence of rhythm that mirrored her confusion.

  I knew him before! No wonder the photograph in the newspaper had looked familiar! No wonder the stark sadness in his eyes had made her vaguely uncomfortable in the beginning. I knew him before!

  And poor Michael. It was her parents, her family who had done this to him. They had caused him this awful pain. She was partly responsible for Michael’s agony. How could he ever forgive them, forgive her? And why would he want to? She was nothing to him—nothing more than the embodiment of a painful memory, of a hurtful past. She was a hated sister in a family who had abandoned him like so many others. A sister whose lie had robbed him once more of the chance to belong.

  A frightening thought came to her. I’ll have to tell him. Already she'd rejected him, running out on him as she had at the park. He would not know why she'd fled, would possibly think that she hadn’t been able to accept him once she knew his shameful secret. He had made himself utterly vulnerable to her, and she might as well have slapped him in the face.

  Her head pounded with guilt and regret and confusion.

  Her phone rang again and again before it finally registered with her. Knowing it would be him, she picked up the receiver, her hands shaking.

  “Claire? What . . . what happened? Are you all right?”

  She could hear the alarm in his voice, knew he feared her further rejection.

  “Oh, Michael.” She couldn’t say more for the tears that threatened to choke her words.

  “Claire, what is the matter? What is it? Please, tell me.”

  She heard the garbled sounds that came from her own throat and knew that they were unintelligible, yet she was powerless to emit one syllable that made any sense.

  “I’m coming over, Claire.” The line went dead.

  She sat like a statue at her desk in the dining room, still clutching her phone, her eyes unfocused and glazed over, waiting for him.

  A few minutes later he let himself in through the unlocked front door.

  “Claire!” he called into the living room, urgency in his voice. “Claire!”

  “I’m here,” she squeaked.

  He came to where she was sitting, took one look at her, and pulled her into his arms.

  “What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer your phone? I drove all over town looking for you. Where did you go? What happened? You have to tell me. I… I don’t care what it is. I can take it.”

  She felt her strength returning at his touch, at the sound of his voice, and felt compelled to give her burden to him, to be strong enough to get this over with, to finish it.

  “Michael, I can’t believe this. I don’t even know how to tell you…”

  “Tell me what? What is going on?”

  “You. . .you’re Joseph!” she finally spat.

  “What?” Confusion bathed his face.

  Choked with remorse, Claire told him what she knew. “The family who gave you up—the family in St. Louis—Michael, it was mine! It was us… my mother and father… And me! We’re the ones who . . . Don’t you understand? Don’t you remember? You are Joseph,” she repeated in a dead whisper, trying to make him comprehend.

  She watched recognition dawn in his eyes, and as the news soaked in, revelation registered on his whole countenance.

  “You’re . . . you’re Kitty Anderson?” he choked out, using the name he'd known her by as a child.

  She nodded miserably and broke down, bitter tears her only reply.

  “Oh, dear God…” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t believe it. . . .”

  He reached out and tipped her chin toward the light of the desk lamp. But there was no tenderness in his touch, and she knew he was trying to find the face of the little girl she had been. The girl who had betrayed him.

  “I don’t remember, Claire. I don’t remember what she . . . what you looked like. Are you sure? Are you sure about this?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she spat at him. “Of course I am. Who else could know this? What else could it be?” She sank back into the chair at the desk. “And I. . . I do remember you,” she told him. “I thought you were familiar the first time I met you . . . even before, when I saw your picture in the paper.”

  “Then . . . then you… we are brother and sister?”

  “Oh, Michael!” She felt sick to her stomach.

  “Claire, this is too much. This is going to take some time. . . .” He touched her shoulder tentatively, woodenly, then took a step backward. All the comfort and rightness they'd known in each other’s touch was gone now, evaporated in the wake of their discovery.

  “I have to go now. We have a lot to think about. I have to sort this out, Claire.”

  “What are you feeling, Michael?” she pleaded.

  “I don’t know what to feel.” The warmth had gone out of his voice. “I need to go now. I need some time to . . . to . . .”

  He moved toward the door, his sentence hanging
unfinished in the air. She had to fight the urge to run after him, to beg him to stay, to hold him in her arms, to find the tenderness they'd known with each other only hours ago, to pretend this never happened.

  At the doorway he turned and gave her a sad smile. “Good-bye, Claire.”

  He didn’t say, “I’ll call you.” He didn’t say, “We’ll get through this together.” Just “good-bye.” And she wondered if it was goodbye forever.

  Chapter 15

  Claire sat in front of the fire through the remainder of the night. She had not eaten since their feast of pancakes that afternoon, and she was aware of a gnawing hunger in her belly. But she couldn’t find the strength to get up and fix herself something to eat. As she watched the clock on the bookcase move slowly toward dawn, she wondered how she would ever get through the coming day.

  Finally, with a desperate prayer, she forced herself to get off the sofa and fill the bathtub. She eased into the scalding water and tried to wash away the tears and the sorrow of the day. She remembered thinking only hours ago that this day was the most wonderful of her life. Now she was certain it was the darkest.

  She shampooed her hair and rinsed it under the shower. Then she stepped out of the tub and wrapped herself in a thick towel.

  She went into her bedroom and slipped into a nightgown. Crawling under the blankets of the unmade bed, she remembered how happily she'd been awakened from there by Michael’s call not twenty-four hours ago. Numb of any emotion, she pulled the blankets up around her damp head and burrowed into the pillow.

  The next awareness she had was of the alarm clock blaring on her bedside table. She reached over and turned it off, startled to see that it was ten o’clock. In a moment of panic she threw back the covers, thinking she'd overslept on a school day. Feeling disoriented, she rubbed her forehead trying to remember what day it was. Slowly it dawned on her that it was Sunday.

  She crawled back into bed, knowing she couldn’t face anyone this morning. She lay there reliving the events of the day before, unable even to shed tears for all she felt she'd lost in that one awful moment of revelation. With a heavy feeling of hopelessness, she drifted back to sleep.

  Claire turned off her phone and slept most of the day, barely nibbling at a few crackers and some cheese.

  Late in the afternoon, she got up and went to the living room to sit in front of the fire. Staring blindly across the room, her eyes suddenly focused on the oak bookcase she'd bought. There on the top shelf were two thin photo albums—the only record her parents had left her of her early life. Claire seldom opened the albums because the photographs brought back too many difficult memories. But it dawned on her now that these pages might hold some hint of the connection she had to Michael.

  Lifting the windowed door and taking the unwieldy books from the shelf, Claire carried them to the dining room table and began to leaf through the yellowed pages.

  There were her parents on their wedding day, stiff and formal, posing for the camera. A much younger Nana and Claire’s grandfather, who had died before she was born, smiled beside a sleek forties model automobile. Claire looked carefully at each picture, but it soon became apparent that every vestige of the year Joseph Anderson had shared their home had been removed. It was as though—for them—he'd never existed.

  She paged back to a photograph of herself as a kindergartner, the age she was when Joseph had been with them. She searched the face .of the little girl in the picture. She wore a pale blue dress and a shy smile. Claire ran her hand over the faded picture trying to remember the day. Her fingers detected a thickness of the paper, and she realized that the photo, which rested in the crease of the page, had been folded over. Carefully, she peeled it from the album, the brittle paper and dried glue coming away with it. She turned the picture over in her hand and unfolded it.

  There he was standing beside her in front of the house on Madison Street. The glue had obliterated much of the image, but the face was there, faded but not distorted. It was Michael’s face. The deep cleft in his chin, the dark hair curling around his ears, the steel gray eyes— smoldering even then—were unmistakable.

  It tore at her heart to see the sadness in the little boy’s eyes. She looked at the image of herself standing beside the boy she would come to love as a man, and she was struck again with amazement that they should ever have met again, let alone fallen in love.

  Numb, she tucked the picture back in the page, replaced the album on the shelf, and went back to sit by the fire.

  When evening finally came it was a relief. But when she crawled back into the rumpled bed, slumber eluded her. She lay on her back, staring wide-eyed into the dark shadows a waning moon cast on the high walls and ceiling of her bedroom.

  Over and over she replayed her conversation with Michael, remembered the coldness that had crossed his face when he realized the truth. Oh, how deeply it had hurt her to feel his warmth for her depart. What must he be feeling toward her now? Surely he must feel betrayed and rejected. And who could blame him? And whom could he blame but her?

  The deepest longing she'd ever known gripped her, and she ached with a physical pain, wanting to hold him in her arms, to comfort him. She thought of the young Michael and the anguish he must have felt as he was rejected time after time. It was still difficult for her to incorporate the truth that she'd known that young boy. In her mind, she carried two very different pictures of young Michael and young Joseph. She could not integrate the two, for in her mind the Michael she knew and loved was far removed from the sullen boy who had lived in her parents’ house so long ago.

  Renewed by the things she'd learned last night, a bitter anger burned in her, an anger directed at her parents. How could they have allowed this? How could they have done this to Michael? How could they have done this to her?

  In the deepest black of the night, in the most anguished throes of her turmoil, she suddenly realized she was needlessly bearing her agony alone. Ashamed, she tried to pray. Yet, not having the faintest inkling how she should pray, it seemed at first that her artless attempts were met with silence.

  She began to weep great wracking sobs that shook her to the very core, and she found there was cleansing and release and a tentative peace in those tears—tears of prayer. Suddenly she knew she was not alone. There was a sweet solace in the knowledge that the same God whose grace could comfort her was infinitely able to comfort Michael as well. She prayed that it would be so.

  She slept deeply for an hour before the alarm clock woke her to the reality of a Monday morning. For a brief moment she thought about calling Marjean and telling her that she couldn’t come in today, but she knew she couldn’t stay locked up in the house another minute. Yes, she needed time to try to make sense of all that had happened, to discern where she should go from here. But now she felt almost compelled to go to the school and make this day as normal as possible in the face of her horrible new knowledge.

  She combed out her still-damp hair, not caring anymore whether it frizzed or tangled. She then tried to hide the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, which only seemed to make them more noticeable. She threw on a turtleneck and a long corduroy jumper, grateful for their warmth. She knew she should eat something, but a glance at the clock told her that she’d be late if she didn’t leave the house that very minute.

  She drove zombielike, following the familiar route without thought. When she walked into her classroom, she could scarcely remember how she'd come to be there. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head to clear the cobwebs of confusion that clouded her mind. It would not be fair to the children to allow her mood to rob them of a sharp and alert teacher.

  She prepared a table for a science experiment and greeted her students as they began to straggle in from the hallway. The roomful of third-graders provided a welcome distraction from the raw grief she'd been feeling earlier, and she set about the business of being a teacher.

  She almost broke down when Brianne Sizemore reminded her, “Hey, I remember! You were at the p
ark! That man who’s just your friend is nice.”

  Claire choked back the emotion that rose within her and replied with false cheer as an attempt to change the subject. “Yes, Brianne. It was a good day for sledding, wasn’t it? Looks like we’re going to have another day of sunshine today. Maybe we’ll finally get to go outside for recess.”

  Later in the teachers’ lunchroom, Becky Anderson did a double take when she saw Claire.

  “Are you feeling okay, Claire?”

  “Oh… I just didn’t get much sleep last night.” She attempted a smile.

  “Ah-ha!” Becky shot her a wicked grin. “Did that gorgeous man keep you out too late?” Claire had confided in Becky about her blossoming friendship with Michael.

  From the corner of her eye, Claire could see that several other teachers were listening with interest to their conversation. With the slightest shake of her head and a narrowing of her eyes, Claire begged Becky not to pursue the topic. Her friend caught on immediately and changed the subject.

  After school Becky appeared in the doorway of Claire’s classroom.

  “Hey…” She frowned. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Claire bit her lip and shook her head.

  “Is everything okay, Claire?” Becky pressed.

  “Oh, Becky. . .” Claire’s eyes brimmed with tears, and she swallowed hard, unable to go on.

  Becky’s face reflected her deep concern and she reached out and put a manicured hand on Claire’s arm. “What is it? Claire, what’s wrong?”

  Her friend’s sympathy brought on more tears and she could only shake her head and wave Becky away.

  “Let’s go to my house for a while,” Becky said in her most motherly voice. “Randy is picking the boys up at daycare, and nobody will be home for an hour or so. Okay?”

  Claire just nodded and followed Becky to the deserted teachers’ lounge for their coats.

  They drove the short distance to Becky’s house in silence. Tricycles and forgotten mittens littered the Andersons’ driveway, and inside, the kitchen bore similar evidence of the youngest occupants of the house.