by Molly Ringle
Julie had admitted, “Something like that. Don’t tell Patrick,” and Clare had snorted and said, “Why would I?” Having both roommates thereby clued in, we could sleep in either room together, and often did. The other dorm inhabitants caught on too. They saw us emerge in the morning from the other person’s room, or caught us in a hallway kiss, or, being individuals bright enough to get into a state uni, simply deduced we wouldn’t spend every possible waking minute together if we didn’t fancy one another.
I didn’t dare say the word “love” again the first week of the term. But after one of our sex-that-wasn’t-technically-sex encounters, she melted around me and sighed into my neck, “I love you.” Why did I hug her as tight as I could without breaking her ribs, and murmur the same words back, when that very sentence had sent me sprinting from the country when Miriam had spoken it? Because you’re one fucked-up bloke, mate, my conscience helpfully supplied.
And the cousin question? Interesting, that. One day in April I got a letter from my grandmother in England. It began with the standard, “Dear Daniel: My, you’re a university man already! How time flies! I remember your grandfather’s tales of Oxford. Back then, tuition was only sixteen shillings a year.” (I exaggerate a tad.)
Toward the end was this skinny paragraph: “I hear your mother has found Evelyn’s family, though hasn’t approached them yet. I rather suspected she might look up those people. She tells me you already know your cousin, who sounds nice, but I feel too old to take on a new teenaged granddaughter.”
Abruptly, the letter turned into “study hard, don’t drink” admonishments, then ended with Nanny’s loving signature.
I felt uncharitable resentment against Nanny and my deceased Granddad these days, for their role in alienating their youngest daughter and, with one thing and another, putting me in this cousin-shagging predicament. Having Nanny dismiss my precious Julie as a granddaughter not worth “taking on” made me even angrier.
Rather than answer the letter or do something smart like throw it away, I left it on my desk, where it got buried beneath a pile of notebooks.
One Sunday morning Julie, wearing a pair of my shorts and a T-shirt with no bra, leaned across from the bed to fetch a book I had asked for. She paused, elbows on the desk, then tugged the envelope loose from under the pile. “Ooh. British stamps. Cool.”
Panic electrified my fingers and toes. “Yeah – here. Give me that. I’ll put it away.”
She flexed herself back to the bed, book and envelope in hand, but examined the return address. “T. Smith. Ex-girlfriend?”
“Grandmother.” I plucked it from her.
“Huh.” She settled down beside me, on the pillows we had lumped against the wall. “I have grandparents named Smith in England. Biological ones. We’ve never spoken, though.”
I rose up on my knees and shoved the letter between two books on the shelf over my head, resolving to shred it into tiny bits later today. My hand shook slightly. “Do they even know about you?”
“I doubt it. My dad says he didn’t get in touch with them. My mother and her folks weren’t on good terms, or something.”
“Oh.” My knees wouldn’t hold me up anymore. I slid down against the wall and stared at my blankets. A sense of doom, and the hatred of all this lying, darkened my sight. I can only assume it was my conscience, and Julie’s silence, that made me say what I said then: “Maybe we’re related.”
She smirked. The mattress shifted as she leaned toward me. Our sides touched. “I’d want you anyway,” she said, and caught me up in a long kiss.
I was foolish enough to seize onto it as unspoken forgiveness. Really, it’s okay, see? I let myself think. On some level she knows, and it’s okay. And even if she doesn’t know, she won’t mind when she finds out. The flimsy reasoning sustained me for another month.
Another Sunday, in late May, I felt brave and tried to draw the truth out.
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone,” I invited. It was a hot day and we were sitting under a willow downstream of the Autzen footbridge, dipping our bare feet into the Willamette River.
“Okay.” She leaned back on her fingertips and looked at the sky. “I’ve kind of been meaning to tell you this anyway.”
Oh, God, she found out. Here it comes. “What?”
“You know how I said I’m technically a virgin? Well, I’m not actually sure of that.”
Unexpected, but intriguing. “What do you mean?”
“The way I discovered I have no head for alcohol was at a party about two years ago. Patrick was with me, and he was drinking too. We crashed in a spare room at the girl’s house – I had told my parents I was spending the night with her – and later he claimed we had sex. I don’t remember a thing, so for all I know, we did.”
Sometimes the violent things I wanted to do to Patrick’s genitals surprised even myself. I broke a willow twig into a few dozen pieces instead. “And there was no proof, one way or the other?”
“There was a used condom. But we had played with those before.” She shrugged. “Plus, I felt like such crap the next morning, I took a shower first thing, in the hopes it would make me feel better. So any evidence got washed away.”
“How reliable is his memory?”
“For that night, slightly better than mine. But not by much. For a while he kept saying we did, then later he said he wasn’t actually sure. So there we are.” She kicked her foot, sending up a splash of river water. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”
“Fuck,” I said, in sympathy and bitterness.
“I bet you remember your first time.”
“I’ve told you about that.” (Rachel Denker. I was fifteen, she was seventeen and quite the expert. Ten minutes in her bedroom, after school one day. Quick but memorable.)
Julie put a cold wet toe on my leg. “Then tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something you haven’t told anyone.”
I let the willow twig fall into the river, and twined my fingers into the long grass hanging over the bank. Even then, though it was awful, I thought, There, I can’t tell about the cousin thing, because I’ve already told Sinter. So it doesn’t count. But that was all right. I had another secret, almost as humiliating.
“Okay. The summer when I was fourteen, I had this job in a hotel in Harrogate.” I rolled back into the grass, covered my eyes with my arm, and told her the whole thing, just as I had typed it in the never-sent email.
At the end, she was silent a while.
“Ouch,” she said.
“Yeah.”
Her fingers threaded into mine. “Five pounds, that’s, what…seven, eight dollars?”
“More like ten now.”
“Hm.” She lay down beside me. “You might want to start delivering pizza or something, or else raise your rates, because as an income...”
I grinned, and peeked at her from beneath the shelter of my arm. “You of all people should know I’ve raised them. It’s a full twenty quid now, for the first ten minutes.”
“Five quid for every minute afterwards.”
“Or a cool hundred if I’m to stay all night.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m wasting my life savings on you.” She kissed my hand.
I kissed hers back, gratefully.
Now, if only the other secret would go over so well.
“WHICH AIRPORT is better to fly into?” Sinter asked in early June. “Heathrow or Gatwick?”
We were studying in our room – or, at least, I thought we were.
“Wherever the airfare costs less,” I said. “Any reason you ask?”
“Remember I told you I was going to escape and fly to the UK one of these days? Well, I’m going to.”
That was certainly more interesting than a history review sheet. “When?”
“The week after finals. There’s this work-abroad program through the university. You can stay a few months. Figure I’ll get a summer job and live in a tiny London flat, and enjoy being five thousand miles away from my parents.”
“You’re serious?”
Sinter held up a thick folder, with a bright yellow “Work/Study Abroad!” logo on it. “Looking up airfare on the web right now.”
An unexpected twinge pressed my heart. The image of my old house and its iron fence, the street out front wet with summer rain, the red buses swooshing by, had made me homesick for the first time in a long while. “I envy you, mate. Say hello to the old place for me.”
“You could come with. Show me around.”
“I have my reasons to stay.”
He lowered his eyes, and swung back to his computer. “Yeah. That’s okay.”
About those reasons: they were a bit flimsy really. Julie drove that point home the next day, as we met in her room while Clare was out.
“I guess Patrick called your parents,” she said.
I felt an instinctive panic. “Why?”
“Got another summer job at Whitecrest. Working in the office, this time.”
“Oh. Right.”
She plucked a sticky note from her desk, and concentrated on gluing it across all the knuckles on her right hand. “So…probably I’ll have some chances to come into Sunriver, at least. Even though it can’t be…” She waved her fingers. The note fluttered. “Like this, all the time.”
“I understand.” Still sucked, but I understood.
The end of the term arrived before I expected it. I took one final after another, and then, hey presto, my first year at university was up. I had to pack my stuff and get out of Spiller Hall. As for next year, Sinter had agreed to live with me in a flat – or rather, apartment – somewhere in Eugene. We stood in our stripped-bare room, surrounded by bits of litter and scraps of tape, and shook hands.
“I’ll come back in time to look for a place with you,” he said.
“I can start searching early, if you like. I’ll need something to do, on those ‘Patrick’ days.”
“Okay. Email me. I’ll check whenever I can.”
“Will do. Have fun in England, mate.” I dispensed with the handshake and hugged him.
“I’ll be phoning you a thousand times before I leave. ‘Can I take the Underground to the airport? How much do I tip taxi drivers? What’s in black pudding again?’”
I grinned. “You don’t want to know that last one. Well…this is me off, then.”
“This is me waving goodbye.” He demonstrated.
I went downstairs and got into Julie’s car, which awaited me at the curb, and off we went to Sunriver.
“Welcome home, darling!” Mum hugged me so tight my sunglasses fell off.
“Ow. Hi.”
“Isn’t it glorious here? The sun! Everything so green!”
The green Oregon everything, bursting out all over with blooms and shoots and pollen, had in fact made me sniffly and sneezy over the past few weeks, but I nodded. “Very nice.”
Julie stepped out of the driver’s seat and moved to open the hatchback. My stomach twisted in anxiety as she and Mum entered conversational distance. “Hello,” she said to Mum. “Nice to see you again.”
Mum turned to gaze fondly at her niece. “Hello, Julie. So good to see you as well. We do appreciate you driving Daniel round all the time.”
Julie took one of my boxes out of the back and handed it to me. “Oh, it’s no trouble.”
Mum pulled out my plastic-wrapped cube of bedding and stacked it on the box. “Please, come in and have some iced tea. Something to eat, perhaps?”
“She can’t,” I cut in, almost in a yelp. “She was just, uh, telling me how her family’s impatiently waiting for her and all.”
Julie gave me a lift of the eyebrow, but smiled. Hopefully she’d chalk up my weirdness to general embarrassment with one’s parents, or to my being uneasy about cheating with their employee’s girlfriend, or something. In any case, she took pity on me. “Yes,” she said. “I do have to rush off today. Sorry. I hope I can visit over the summer, though.”
“Yes, please do,” said Mum. “Anytime at all.”
Julie waved to us both, her glance lingering on me as she returned to the driver’s side. “Talk to you later.”
“Bye.”
We watched her drive down the road and turn out of sight at the curve.
“She really is lovely, isn’t she?” Mum said.
“Yep.” I bent and picked up a box, and swiftly carried it inside.
Dad wandered in from the verandah. I greeted him as a way to change the subject, and got him to help me bring things into my room.
However, they weren’t done talking about Julie. At the dinner table that evening, Mum said, “I’ve been thinking of contacting the Frenches.”
I nearly spewed my macaroni. “Really,” I coughed.
“Well, since you already know Julie, it’s a bit silly to keep our distance, isn’t it?”
“Um, I don’t know. I mean, as you said, it’s an awkward situation.”
“All happened so long ago,” said Dad, chewing on a piece of bread. “I reckon they’ll be happy to bury the hatchet, for the sake of the kids. Assuming there’s any hatchet to bury.”
“I suppose so, but…”
“Besides,” Mum added, waving her wine glass toward me, “with you and Julie so friendly, she’s bound to mention your name at some point, and when her father hears ‘Revelstoke’ I’m sure he’ll wonder. They may end up approaching us.”
I pushed my chair back a few inches. The table was restricting my breathing. “Good point.”
“So, I don’t know.” She rested her cheek on the curve of the wine glass. “Over the weekend, perhaps? I shall have to think about what to say.” The weekend, incidentally, was in two days.
I stood up. They looked at me, startled. “You all right, Daniel?” Dad asked.
“It’s my allergies. I feel sort of icky. Think I’d best go and lie down.”
“Sorry, dear. I’ll make you some tea, all right?” Mum said.
“Maybe later.” I stumbled up the stairs and shut myself into my room, and leaned back against the door. No way out now, mate. This ship’s sinking and you’re going down with it.
I closed my eyes and whispered, “Oh, Jules, please don’t hate me.”
Chapter 20: The Lovers Who Knew Too Much
OF COURSE I didn’t do anything brave like tell her myself. I cowered until she rang me on Saturday. And when she asked, “Are you alone?” all I said was, “Yeah, no one here. Drop by if you like.”
She drove over. I brought her inside the house for the first time, and showed her my room. She spent about ten seconds complimenting the view before smothering me in a kiss. Half an hour later we rested naked on my bed, with the door closed and the window-blinds pulled. The breeze through the open window pushed the blinds in and out; the pull-cord dragged along Julie’s thigh. She flicked at it. I held her and tried to think of words to warn her of what might soon be knocking on her parents’ door.
She let the cord alone and hugged me. “I thought I’d get you out of my system long before now.”
“I know what you mean.”
“But I’ve only gotten more and more addicted.”
“Me too, babe.” I said it solemnly now.
She slid out of my arms and pushed the sheet away. Her hair, damp with sweat, stuck to her forehead. She moved it back with one hand and gazed at the ceiling. “How come you’ve never told me to leave Patrick?”
“Why haven’t you left him yourself?”
Her gaze drifted to me. “I think you know why.”
My heart started thudding in my throat. “I know my ‘reputation’ might have scared you off…”
She lifted her hand from her forehead, reached out, and smoothed back a lock of my hair. “Monsieur de Bergerac,” she said, “I am…your…” She was whispering by the end, and let the sentence hang.
“What?” I said, trembling, astonished. We didn’t take our eyes from one another.
A car door slammed outside, then another, and another. Happy voices chirped back and f
orth – my parents’ among them. “Fuck,” I hissed, and leaped up onto my knees to peer between the blinds. Julie scissored open two blinds beside me to look too. My parents were getting out of their car in the driveway, and another couple emerged from their car at the curb. A pickup truck pulled up last, and Patrick hopped out of it.
“What’s he doing here?” I said. “Who are they?”
“Oh, God,” she whimpered. “My parents.”
As we abandoned the blinds and started frantically throwing our clothes on, I heard a woman say, “But that’s Julie’s car! She must be here.”
“Must have come to visit,” Mum answered. “How lovely! Daniel? Are you home?”
“Hullo, Dan?” Dad shouted.
Their voices moved from outside to inside the house. I was into my shorts, but still without a shirt. Julie had just got her bra fastened, and was buttoning her shirt up as quickly as she could, swearing with every buttonhole. I scarcely had time to think of what she had almost said to me. Footsteps thundered up the stairs.
“Julie?” called a man’s cheerful voice – her father.
“Julie?” Patrick’s voice joined in. Then, turning reverential: “This is a really nice house. Which one is Daniel’s room?”
“Thank you, Patrick! There, that first door,” said Mum, evidently just behind him. “Perhaps they’re in there? Or the garden?”
And before you could say What the fuck is going on here? someone was knocking on my door, then opening it. Mum’s head peeked in. “Daniel, are you here?”
Her perky smile and the glow on her cheeks slid away when she took in the pair of us: us, smoothing down our disheveled hair. Us, getting our shirts back on. Us, our lips mashed from kissing. Us, her son and her niece, alone together and speechless in my bedroom, with the blinds closed and the sheets rumpled.
I swallowed. “Hi, Mum. Yeah, er, Julie’s here, just visiting, and…”
Someone pushed the door open further. Patrick stood there, taller than my mother by a head. The curiosity he had been wearing mutated into horror. “Julie? What’s going on?”
Julie got her last shirt button fastened. Her face was scarlet. “Nothing. Can I please talk to you alone?”
