The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

by Diane Chamberlain

  “No,” she said, “but Dru’s just little and it would be harder for her than for me.”

  Eve had to pull the car over to the curb, because she needed to hug her daughter.

  “What are you doing?” Cory recoiled a bit from the sudden embrace. “What’s that for?”

  “You’re a kind girl,” Eve said. “You’re a wonderful big sister, and Dru’s lucky to have you.” She pulled back to look at her with a smile. “And so am I.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  1991

  In late August, Eve and Jack finally were able to buy their first house, a quaint arts-and-crafts-style bungalow not far from the grounds. Although the house was on a busy street, it sat in a veritable cocoon of greenery and had a small, private backyard. Jack laid a curved line of pavers from the back door to a bench beneath the boughs of a magnolia, and the yard became a little haven from the hubbub of the university.

  They walked to work every day, since Eve was now a counselor with the Counseling and Psychological Services on the grounds and Jack continued to teach in the Drama Department. It made Eve nervous, though, not having a car at work in case there was an emergency with one of the girls. Still, it was nice to have that time with Jack and the exercise was good for her, though her feet occasionally protested the walk, much as they did when she got out of bed in the middle of the night.

  Their first night in the house brought a terrific thunderstorm that kept Eve awake with its unpredictable thunderclaps and flashes of light illuminating the unfamiliar bedroom. She wasn’t surprised when Dru came into their room at one in the morning.

  “Can I sleep with you and Daddy?” she asked.

  Dru was six and fearless, but for the first time, she had her own room. That, along with the storm, was too much for her.

  “Sure,” Eve said. “Hop in.”

  Dru scrambled into the bed and lay down between her and Jack, who had not stirred once since coming to bed. In a few minutes, Dru, too was sound asleep.

  At three, Eve got up to use the bathroom. Her feet felt as if she were walking on gravel as she crossed the room. The pain had definitely worsened in the past few months and she knew she’d have to break down soon and see a doctor.

  She opened the bedroom door and nearly tripped over Cory, who lay on the hardwood floor, her pillow under her head.

  “Cory?” Eve whispered. “What are you doing here?”

  Cory jerked to a sitting position as if caught doing something wrong. She looked around the hallway as though trying to place her surroundings. “I don’t know exactly,” she said.

  Eve lowered herself to the floor across the hall from her. The hardwood felt cool beneath her aching feet. Summer was coming to an end.

  “Some storm,” she said.

  Cory nodded. She was wearing underpants and a sleeveless pajama top shaped by small, new breasts. She’d gotten a bra in May and her period in June, but Eve had not yet grown accustomed to the changes in her daughter’s body. Cory was still a little girl in her eyes.

  A flash of lightning cut through the bathroom window into the hall, and Cory winced. She hugged her knees. “Mom?” she asked.

  “What, honey?”

  “I don’t want to go to Darby.”

  Darby was the private school Eve and Jack had gotten her into for the fall. They’d used the money in Cory’s secret bank account to pay her tuition.

  “Why not, hon?” The move to Darby was a good one, she felt certain. It would get her away from the kids who had known and taunted her for years and it would put her into a more intellectually challenging environment. She was far ahead of her public school classmates academically, but no one wanted her to skip a grade because she lagged so far behind her peers socially.

  “I don’t know,” she said again, words Eve was hearing regularly from her lips these days.

  “It’s going to be good for you,” Eve said. “You liked it when we visited.”

  “Yeah, but now it’s almost time to go and I’m changing my mind.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid,” Cory said. She balked at that question these days, coming up with excuses other than fear when she didn’t want to do things.

  “Then why don’t you want to go?”

  “I won’t know anyone,” she said.

  “Think of that as a good thing,” Eve suggested. “You can be a clean slate there. You can be the person you’ve always wanted to be. It can be fun to reinvent yourself sometimes.”

  Cory pondered that. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Come on.” Eve winced at the pain in her feet as she stood to open the bedroom door. “Dru’s in the bed, so you’ll have to make yourself comfortable on the rug.”

  As it turned out, Cory liked Darby from the first day. The kids were nice and very smart, she reported, and the teachers joked with them instead of being “all serious and everything.” Eve thought the Darby students were actually a bit nerdy, but then, so was Cory. Her beauty was a front for a hungry, scholarly mind. The classes were rigorous, and that was a challenge Cory could rise to.

  “I have four hours of homework!” she announced when Eve picked her up that first afternoon. She sounded sincerely thrilled by the prospect. And Eve was equally thrilled that she’d received no calls during the day from a teacher or a school nurse, asking her to pick up her anxious, frightened daughter.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Girls,” Jack said at dinner several days after the new school year started. “I have a proposition for you.”

  “Am I one of the girls, too?” Eve asked as she spooned tuna casserole onto Dru’s plate.

  “No, dear, you’re a woman.” He gave her a lecherous look.

  “Ah,” she said. “Just checking.”

  “What’s a proposition?” Dru asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Jack poured iced tea from the pitcher into his glass. “The Children’s Theater is auditioning for a play and there are roles for some six-year-old girls and some thirteen-year-old girls in it.”

  Dru gave a quick intake of breath, her mouth open in a smile. “I could be in a play?” she asked.

  “You’d have to audition first,” Jack said. “That means we would go to the theater and read a little bit of a part on the stage. Other children will do the same thing, and then the director will pick the children he thinks will work best in the roles.”

  “I could be on a stage!” Dru bounced up and down.

  “It’s hard work, being in a play, though,” Jack said. “You have to memorize a lot of lines.”

  “I memorize really well,” Cory said.

  “You do,” Jack agreed. “So I think it’s worth a shot. It’ll be a good experience, whether you get to be in the play or not. So what do you say?”

  “I say, yes!” Dru pounded her fork on the table, sending a dollop of casserole flying through the air to land somewhere on the floor near the pantry. “Whoops.” She giggled, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “How about you, Cory-Dory?” Jack asked.

  Cory paused. “Okay,” she said finally. “What are the lines I have to memorize?”

  Two weeks later, Eve and Jack sat in the back of the community theater auditorium to watch the auditions. Jack had worked with both girls on their lines, and they knew them inside out, upside down and backwards. Eve watched Cory take Dru’s hand and walk toward the front of the theater where dozens of children were seated. She felt anxious, not about Dru, who was sure to sail through this experience with her ego intact, but about Cory, who probably would not.

  And she felt anxious about herself.

  She’d expected to get breast cancer some day. With a mother who died of breast cancer at the age of twenty-nine, it seemed almost a given. Yet that had not happened, at least not yet. Instead, her feet seemed to be her biggest problem. She’d finally seen a doctor the week before.

  “All your blood work and X-rays are absolutely normal,” he reassured her. “There doesn’t appear to be any
thing wrong with your feet.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she’d said. “But why do they hurt when I get out of bed?”

  “Could you have injured them?” he asked. “Are you exercising in a way that might be causing problems?”

  She thought about her activities during the day. “I walk to the university in the morning,” she said. “And I walk around the grounds quite a bit. My feet don’t bother me much then, though.”

  He closed her chart. “Well, I think all that walking’s just catching up with you while you sleep,” he said. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”

  It was all in her head. That’s what he was really saying, wasn’t it? She suddenly felt sorry for Cory, whose anxiety-provoked stomachaches were similarly disregarded by doctors—and, often, by Eve herself.

  “Here we go,” Jack said, and she pulled her attention back to the theater, where Dru was bounding up the stairs to the stage. The last to audition in her age group, she was a standout. She delivered her lines with punch and passion and with facial expressions and body language that had the adults in the theater laughing. She was so clearly Jack’s daughter. People applauded when she bowed and walked off the stage.

  Five thirteen-year-old girls were scheduled to audition before Cory, and Eve knew how agonizing the wait had to be for her daughter. Cory’s anxiety was palpable when she finally climbed the steps, and Eve was certain everyone in the audience was aware of it as the tall redhead walked to the center of the stage. Cory locked her hands behind her back, then moved them quickly to her sides, as though remembering her father’s direction.

  She began to speak, her voice so soft and tentative she was almost impossible to understand.

  “Louder, honey,” Jack whispered into the air.

  If anything, her voice grew softer. Eve watched Sherry Wilson, the director, sit forward in her seat as she tried to hear her.

  “Oh, Jack, I can’t stand this,” Eve whispered. She knew the courage it had taken for Cory to get up on that stage at all.

  Jack took Eve’s hand. “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  As expected, Cory didn’t make the cut, while Dru was given the biggest role in her age group. After the parts were assigned, Dru rushed back to Eve and Jack, while Cory walked toward them with a leaden gait.

  Eve moved forward to hug her. “I was so proud of you for getting up there, Cory,” she said. “That wasn’t easy to do.”

  Cory shrugged her shoulders and looked away. She was quiet as they walked to the car and sullen on the drive home, her head turned toward the window.

  “You both showed a lot of guts today, girls,” Jack said from behind the steering wheel.

  “I wanted Cory to be in the play with me,” Dru complained from the back seat.

  “It’s okay,” Cory said. “I don’t really care.”

  The traffic came to a standstill, and ahead of them, blue lights flashed, the color bleeding into their car in rhythmic waves.

  “Must be an accident,” Jack said.

  “I don’t want to see!” Cory said. “Can we go a different way?”

  “We’re stuck on this road, Cory,” Eve said. Cory hated driving by an accident, afraid of seeing blood or broken bodies. Eve wondered if it made her think about her fictional father’s fictional motorcycle accident.

  “Please, Dad,” Cory pleaded. “Can’t we cut through a parking lot or something?”

  “Honey, just relax,” Jack said. “Let’s sing a—”

  “I don’t want to sing,” Cory said. She lowered her head to her knees, her hands covering her eyes. “Just tell me when we’re past it.”

  Dru craned her neck to look out the window. “It’s okay, Cory,” she said. “There’s no blood or anything.”

  Cory didn’t lift her head from her knees. “I don’t belong in this stupid family,” she said suddenly.

  Her words were a knife in Eve’s heart. “Why do you say that, Cory?” she asked.

  “Everybody’s talented except me.”

  “That’s bull,” Jack said. “You’re smarter than the three of us put together.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of talent,” she said.

  “I couldn’t act or draw or dance to save my life,” Eve said.

  “My father’s family is probably more like me,” Cory said.

  Eve glanced at Jack.

  “Maybe they are,” he conceded. “Maybe that’s where your brilliance comes from.”

  Cory’s head rose from her knees. “Stop talking about how smart I am,” she said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “You’re one-fourth of this family, Cory,” Eve said. “And we love that you’re part of it, whether you like it or not.”

  The next day, Eve did something she would not admit even to Jack. She called Sherry Wilson and pleaded with her to give Cory a small, walk-on role.

  “She needs the recognition,” Eve said. “She needs to feel better about herself. Please.”

  Sherry paused. “I understand,” she said. “I’ve got two kids myself, and one of them is a soccer star and the other couldn’t find the ball if it were glued to her foot.”

  Eve laughed.

  “I could use her in a group scene,” Sherry offered.

  “Thank you!” Eve said. “Will you call her, please? And don’t let her know I called you?”

  “Sure,” Sherry said.

  Cory heard from Sherry that evening. She came flying into the living room after the phone call.

  “Guess what!” she said.

  Eve looked up from the book she was reading, and Jack stopped tinkering with his laptop computer to give Cory his attention. “What?” he asked.

  “That was the director of the play,” Cory said. “She wants me to be in a scene!”

  “You’re kidding,” Jack said before he caught himself. “That’s great!”

  “Wow,” Eve said. “What do you have to do?”

  “Just walk on and cheer with a bunch of other kids.”

  “Fantabulous!” Jack said. “I think you should go wake Dru up and tell her.”

  “Jack!” Eve complained. “It’s a school night.” But Cory’s face was alight with joy. “Oh, go ahead,” she said.

  Cory ran upstairs to wake her sister, and Jack looked at Eve.

  “Did you have something to do with this?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I couldn’t help myself,” she said.

  Jack laughed. “You’re one zealous mama,” he said. “Though I have to admit, I thought of doing it myself.”

  The play was a hit, the audience of relatives and family friends proud and enthusiastic. Marian sat with Eve and Jack, and dear Lorraine even made sure Channel 29 had a cameraman there to give the play a little airtime on the late-night news. Dru was superb in her role as the precocious six-year-old, for which she was a natural, and Cory stood out in the crowd of teenagers for her beauty if not her talent. They were both euphoric afterward, and it wasn’t until two days later that Cory found the note Eve had scribbled to herself pinned to the bulletin board by the phone. Call Sherry Wilson, she’d written, along with the director’s phone number.

  Cory confronted Eve in the living room when she got home from work. “Did you call Mrs. Wilson and tell her to give me that part?” she asked.

  “No, honey.” Eve tried to look surprised.

  “Then why was her number on the bulletin board?” Cory held up the scrap of paper in her hand.

  Eve set her briefcase down on the chair near the door. “I just wanted to have it, since Dru was going to be in the play,” she said.

  “But you wrote that you should call her,” Cory said. “Not just her number. You called her about me.”

  “Cory, I did not.”

  “You forced her to give me a part. That’s so lame. It’s so…do you know how embarrassing that is?”

  “I know you really wanted to be in the play and that there were parts you could—”

  “You did do it!” Cory said. She flopped dow
n on the sofa, head in her hands. “I am such a loser,” she said.

  “Stop it, Cory. You are not and you know it.”

  “My father was a loser and I got the loser genes.”

  “He wasn’t a loser,” Eve said. “He was very smart. He just made some bad choices when he was young.”

  Cory looked at the piece of paper in her hand. “Do I have grandparents I don’t know?” she asked. “Aunts and uncles and cousins?”

  Eve sighed as she sat down next to her. “I don’t know, honey,” she said.

  “Well, I want to know,” Cory said. She looked squarely at Eve, tears in her eyes. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know who I am, Mom,” she said.

  “Oh, Cory.” Eve pulled her into her arms, her own voice thick with emotion. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  “Would you find my relatives for me, Mom?” Cory asked, her head resting on Eve’s shoulder. “Please?”

  “I think you should do it,” Jack said, when she told him about the conversation with Cory. “She has a right to know her relatives.”

  There are no relatives, she thought. How did you find someone who didn’t exist?

  “I never met any of them,” she said. “How am I going to find Patrick Smith’s family in Portland when I don’t know anything more than their very common surname?”

  “I don’t know, Evie,” Jack said, “but I think you should try.”

  The next day, she went to the university library, which had stacks and stacks of phone books for major cities throughout the country. She found the phone book for Portland, Oregon, and copied the two pages of Smiths. That evening, in front of Cory, she began making phone calls as she tried to find the nonexistent relatives of a nonexistent man. She hated the charade, hated that she was setting her daughter up for disappointment after disappointment. There were moments during that week of phone calls that she even hated herself.

  “I think I’ve reached a dead end, honey,” she told Cory as she sat on the edge of her bed that Friday night. She was sick of phone numbers, of pushing buttons, of asking questions of kind people named Smith who tried to help her do the impossible. “It could be that he didn’t even have a family,” she suggested. “Maybe he was an only child and his parents are dead.”