“I’m just going to get my things,” I muttered, feeling Cole’s eyes on me as I walked away. When I was back at the top of the stairs, I grabbed the top sheet from the notepad he kept on the nightstand along with the pen, and I tapped my chin thoughtfully. Whatever I told him, it had to be perfect. Giving up for a moment, I set the pen on the bed. Dressing in my yellow half-marathon t-shirt, I pulled on a pair of denim cutoffs and slipped on a pair of navy boat shoes. With my suitcase in hand, I walked back to the bed, staring at that pen. Picking it up, I bit my lip to try to decide what to write, and I decided to go for something along the lines of those stupid songs he liked to make up.
Dear Cole,
Roses are red, coal is black,
I love you to the moon and back.
Yours forever,
Camdyn
Settling it on his pillow, I proceeded to drag my suitcase down the stairs, finding Cole and Charlie exactly where I’d left them. Cole looked like a wounded puppy, and it was hard for me not to giggle at him. Even though I felt the exact same way about leaving that he did, it felt good to know he was going to be as miserable as I was. Recognizing the look passing between me and Cole, Charlie offered to take my suitcase to the car and told Cole he would take good care of me.
“You better,” Cole told him, “because I will hunt you down, Charlie.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Charlie laughed, stepping off the porch. When Cole pulled me against him and stared down into my eyes, I swallowed against the lump in my throat.
“Please don’t make this difficult,” I whispered.
“As if I could make it worse,” he lamented, setting his forehead on mine. “What am I going to do without you? I’ll go crazy.”
“You’ll be fine, and I’ll be back before you know it.”
“I’ll miss you with every breath,” he whispered, and he might have had me emotional at that one, had it not been for the fact that he leaned down to kiss me as though we would never see each other again. By the time he was finished, my stomach was in knots, and I seriously thought about telling Charlie to get lost. Instead, I just squeezed my eyes shut and stomped my foot a little, which made Cole laugh.
“Go on,” he muttered, giving me a little pat on the backside, and I made sure he witnessed me pouting before I stepped off the porch. As I slid into the passenger seat of Charlie’s black sedan, I glanced back up at my husband on the porch and wanted to burst into tears. Instead, I stopped myself at the boundary of getting slightly teary-eyed, at which point Charlie looked over at me with a teasing grin on his face.
“Shut up,” I ordered, causing him to turn and start the ignition. As we backed out of the driveway, I couldn’t take my eyes off Cole, and I knew without a doubt that this trip was going to be absolutely miserable.
Chapter Twelve
Charlie graciously gave me about a five-mile respite before he began talking to me, but even at that I was fighting my emotions. Every fiber of my being wanted to order my brother to turn the car around and take me back home, but I also knew that Charlie’s five-hour drive through the wee hours of the morning meant that he was anxious to meet our grandfather. I couldn’t blame him for that – had I been in his shoes, I would have been going half insane. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have minded Charlie’s enthusiasm at all, had it not been for that handsome man we left standing on the porch a few miles behind us.
When he started glancing over at me, though, I knew he was about to interrupt our silence. Attempting to prepare myself mentally, I gave him a slight smile.
“Don’t bother pretending for me,” he laughed. “I can tell you’re having a rough time.”
“I’ll be okay,” I informed him. “Just help me get my mind off Cole, please, before I jump out of the car and take off running.”
“Newlyweds,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Tell me about the BM.”
“The BM,” I repeated with a chuckle, remembering our childhood nickname for our mother. “I’m trying to turn over a new leaf as a responsible adult, Charlie. I’ll have to insist that your call her Rita. Or Darlene. Heck, you can even call her Darlita if you want.”
“That’s just weird. I guess I’ll keep calling her Rita. So, she was forthcoming with you then, I guess?”
“I don’t know if I would say that,” I told him. “She didn’t have any reservations about admitting to being Darlene, really, other than the initial surprise that I knew. There was a moment there when I thought she had let her guard down, but it didn’t last long. She only talked long enough to tell me about the baby, but then she puffed back up to her normal self.”
Stretching my legs, I slid off my shoes and pulled my legs up into the seat, while Charlie wrinkled his nose at me and laughed a bit.
“Just make yourself at home,” he joked. “So did you figure out why she’s here?”
“I doubt she’ll ever really tell the truth about that,” I speculated. “She told me Gianni died, though, and his kids wouldn’t give her anything. Oh, that was new, wasn’t it? Gianni had been married before, and he had kids with his first wife. So, apparently Rita isn’t very well-loved by her stepchildren, either.”
“Gianni had kids and they didn’t mention that while you were in Italy?” he asked, giving a puzzled expression. As he came to a fork in the road, I directed him to the left.
“Not unless they mentioned it in Italian, in which case I wouldn’t have understood,” I teased. “Anyway, I’m not sure I can tell you anything worthwhile about Rita, other than the fact that she is Darlene. She wasn’t willing to tell me much, and after she said something about Grandma, I told her to shut up pretty quickly. When she said she wasn’t finished talking to me… Well, I told her I was finished, end of story, and I might have ordered her never to talk to me again.”
“Always the dramatic one,” Charlie laughed. “We go to Jackson, right?”
Jackson. Where I was headed when I got lost – the night I met Cole.
Cole.
“Yeah, Jackson, and then take 40 to Nashville,” I muttered, trying to push Cole from my mind. Thinking quickly, I grabbed one of the red journals that I had stuffed into my purse. If I focused on that for a while, I could forget about that incredibly gorgeous man we’d left standing on the porch, with those unbelievable brown eyes trained on me like he would be lost without me.
Would he be lost without me?
I so don’t want to leave him.
Ugh, Charlie, I despise you right now.
“What did I do to you?” Charlie suddenly shot at me, looking over at me like I had grown an extra head.
“What?”
“You just said you despise me.”
“I did?” I asked sheepishly. “I was trying to keep that to myself.”
“Well, then you thought-vomited all over me, if that’s the case. Am I bothering you that much? Because I can turn around and take you home.”
“No, of course not, it’s not you,” I assured him.
“Well, between Cole giving me a lecture as soon as he opened the door and you acting all miserable, I’m not sure I want to go through with this.”
Really looking at my brother, with the scattered freckles across his nose, it was hard not to see the boy that tormented me growing up. He protected me too, though. How could I look at that man sitting next to me, who had been my best ally for the majority of my life, and not feel compassion for him when he was on the verge of a major life discovery?
You’re a jerk, Camdyn.
Try saying that one out loud.
“I love you, Charlie,” I said, offering him a smile.
“Oh, gross, here we go.”
“No, I’m serious. You’re a wonderful brother, and you don’t deserve to put up with me being a brat today. As of right now, I’m going to be a perfect angel the rest of the day. Let’s really make this like one of our old-fashioned road trips. We can find something totally bizarre to do, and we’ll load up on snacks and stash them in the back seat.”
“That sound
s like a disaster waiting to happen,” he muttered.
“I know, doesn’t it sound just marvelous?” I teased. “If you’re really lucky, I’ll spill something in your seat and we’ll have to stop at the car wash, trying desperately to remove the stains.”
“You’re such a goofball,” he laughed.
“Then cheer up already,” I instructed. “Let’s make the most of it.” With a slight nod of his head, he took his eyes off the road for a second to glance at me, and then he smiled.
“You’re right,” he managed. “The only person who should be miserable is Cole, since I apparently ruined his morning, his day, and his week, in that order. He told me I might as well rip out his heart, while I was at it. All of a sudden he’s as dramatic as you.”
Rip out his heart? Cole, really?
Charlie Taylor, I oughta…
“Cam?”
“Leave me alone.”
-§-
I was in bed before Papa came home, which was not unusual anymore. Since he had to take the job so far from home, his commute was such that we barely saw him most days, if we saw him at all. Mama had suggested that we move closer to Papa’s work, but he was insistent that we not change anything. We were proud Americans, he said, and soon everyone else would realize the mistake they made in calling us anything less.
Papa was very proud – of that I was certain, but I doubted the bit about others realizing the error of their ways. Believing that my attempts at remaining aloof and unaffected were making things worse at school, I actively focused on being friendly with the other girls my age the day before, smiling at them and asking them questions about some of the subjects of our classes. They had responded kindly during the day, and I honestly believed I was making some headway. On the way home, however, Anna cornered me against the side of one of the brick buildings, asking why I was suddenly trying to “butter her up.” When I insisted I didn’t know what she was talking about, she whistled and two of her friends stepped around the corner. Before I knew what was happening, the three of them managed to pummel me about the stomach a few times, and one of them had stolen a chunk of my hair. (CHANGE ANNA’S NAME – HER DAUGHTER GOES TO CHURCH WITH ME.)
No, Papa’s dream of this land being a single-minded country felt like a fantasy as I tossed in bed that night with the bruises on my ribs.
Mama didn’t believe him, either. In hushed tones I listened as they talked of the music director for the symphony orchestra and how he had been interned. “This can’t happen in America,” Mama muttered, crying, while Papa shushed her and tried his best to console. She wondered why they came to this land, if they were going to be treated so shamefully, and Papa told her to bite her tongue.
“Don’t you remember where we came from?” he whispered. “Things will be better, you will see. This is still the land of opportunity, and we will come out stronger than before.”
If I was stronger, though, I felt it would be because I had to learn to fight back. Freddie had even taken to scrapping with some of the boys from time to time, as the teasing had finally managed to trickle down to him as well. When he came home with a large scratch beneath his eye, Mama had ordered me to watch him more closely. I decided then that she was just attempting to make herself feel more at ease about the situation, because she knew as well as I did that Freddie would not listen to his older sister, no matter how I threatened to report him to Papa.
Freddie and I were resigned to our fate, and it seemed Mama was too, even if Papa chose to believe that tomorrow would be the day he was waiting for. Every morning it was the same optimism, and every night it was one more smidgen of despair, ever growing until one day I felt certain it would swallow us whole.
Letting out a sigh, I leaned my head back against the seat and stared out the passenger window, listening to the quiet sounds of the radio humming through the speakers. How fascinating that I was a descendant of this little girl who had stood up against so much, and how utterly unbelievable. Rita was her descendant, too, and she obviously never fought for anything in her life. It was a strange feeling to think that my grandmother could have spent her days writing this information in the journal, and her nights praying for Darlene/Rita to return. Surely they didn’t happen at the same time, but if they had…
It was sad, really. I didn’t want to think about it.
Instead, I started singing along with the hits from the 90’s that were coming from the speakers. At first Charlie tried to ignore me, and then he turned the radio up to drown me out, but by the end of the second song, he was belting it out with me. Charlie and I were cut from the same cloth, after all, even if he refused to admit that fact.
After we finished our rendition of a terrible hip-hop disaster, we both laughed as the song faded away to a commercial, and he turned the radio down.
“So, what are you reading?” he wanted to know, motioning to my red book.
“Our grandmother Isabel’s journals.” Squinting his eyes, he let the car veer to the right a little and then jerked the wheel when he realized he should be paying attention to the road.
“Hold up a second,” he said forcefully. “That’s the first I’ve heard about any Isabel.”
“Haven’t I mentioned her?” I asked halfheartedly.
“Um, no, brainless. I think I would have remembered that. Why didn’t you say anything about her before?”
“I guess because it just didn’t feel like she was real, somehow,” I offered pathetically. “I mean, people kept talking about her, but since I didn’t get the chance to meet her… I don’t know, it felt like she was a character in one of my books.”
“So what’s the story there?”
Staring out the window, I thought about the fact that I would never know my grandmother and let out a huge sigh.
“She has Alzheimer’s. Meg - Rita’s sister - said she doesn’t know who anybody is anymore. Grandpa and Hannah had been taking care of her, until a little over a week ago. Now she’s in a care facility.” When Charlie didn’t say anything, I ran my hand across the red book, pondering its author. “Grandpa gave me her journals. She wrote that book, the one you gave Cole for my wedding present - the one that was with Rita’s stuff in the attic. It was about her mom, our great-grandma – she was the little girl in the book. The journals are all their interviews, basically.”
When Charlie started chuckling, it struck me as so callous and rude that I gawked at him with my mouth slightly open. Instead of apologizing, he only lifted his eyebrows at me and smiled to himself.
“Somehow the universe just aligns for you to have all of this fall into your lap,” he observed. “It’s almost as though you’re the only person clumsy enough to stumble into it. I mean, the odds of that book you were fanatical about being written by your own family member… You’ve got to admit, it’s pretty crazy.”
“Crazy doesn’t even begin to describe it,” I muttered. “Can we stop soon? I need a break.”
“Do we have to? We’re making good time.” Slightly exasperated, I turned to stare at my brother.
“Well, if I get tired of holding it, I’ll just go in my seat.”
“There’s no need to be disgusting,” he argued. “I’d personally rather hold it, because gas station restrooms are even worse than airplanes.” Laughing, I shook my head at him.
“I know this might come as a surprise, but I don’t need you to hold my hand. You’re welcome to stay in the car.”
Charlie decided to pretend that I was getting on his nerves, but I had been through this routine enough times to know that wasn’t the case. We would pull into the gas station, I would go inside, and then when I emerged a minute later, Charlie would be inside waiting for me. He figured he might as well take advantage of the stop, he would say, since I was making him waste time anyway. I was always his pit stop scapegoat.
When we pulled up at a convenience store about ten minutes later, Charlie predictably insisted that he would wait outside, so I swung the car door shut behind me and made my way across the p
arking lot. It occurred to me that he could have opted for one that looked a little cleaner, but I figured that was his way of punishing me, so I wouldn’t complain. Instead, I resolutely pulled that glass door open, asking the woman behind the counter where the restroom was. She shot me a dirty look for interrupting her phone call and pointed toward the back.
The bathroom door was painted black and had a few wood splinters out of the bottom, and the “ladies” designation was slightly askew. Having second thoughts, I nearly turned and walked back out to the car, but I knew Charlie would let me have it. Surely it wouldn’t be that bad – I could tough it out. I had done my business in the bushes at the river, after all, and this couldn’t be worse than that.
When I flipped the light on and closed the door behind me, I changed my mind pretty quickly. The room was dingy in the soft light, the floor was slightly dirty, and there was no way I was getting near that toilet. I decided to turn around and walk out, but just the fact that I was standing in there made me feel gross, so I wanted to wash my hands. Moving to the sink, I pushed the soap dispenser and watched as the blue goop dripped into my palms. Spreading the soap across my fingers, I reached down to turn the water on, only to find that nothing happened. With a grimace, I twisted the knob on the other side of the sink, still getting nothing. Frantically I turned and turned the knobs, with the same result. Stepping back from the grease-smeared mirror, I went back to the door and grabbed the handle with my soap-covered fingers, only to have them slip around it without grasping it in any fashion.
With a sigh, I held my hands in front of my face and stared at my blue appendages, trying to figure out a way to remove myself easily from that room. Realizing I was going nowhere with those slippery hands, and that the hand blow-dryer would do me no good, I resigned to smearing that soap across the front of my yellow shirt, making an ugly blue streak that faded into green in spots. The sides of my fingers were sticking together, so I wrapped the end of my t-shirt around them one by one trying to clean them. Looking down, I whimpered a little under my breath at the sight of my clothes.
A Reason to Forget (The Camdyn Series Book 3) Page 16
