by Beth Rinyu
Then there was the age factor—I had just turned seventeen and Tommy had just turned twenty. My papa was twelve years older than my mama. I so wanted to tell them they were being hypocrites when they’d throw Tommy’s age into the mix among their hundreds of other reasons why I was forbidden to see him, but I didn’t dare. They’d say he was a bad influence on me because I had begun to take on his viewpoints. Tommy was into making the world a better place by fighting for peace. That all changed when he was drafted into a war he so vehemently opposed. A war his well-connected father tried to keep him out of. His younger brother, Dominick, jumped at the chance of using his father’s power to keep him safe. Tommy, being the noble guy he was, refused to allow his father’s political hacks to keep him from going to a place that so many other young men had been summoned to.
I was so angry at him for leaving me. The four months since I had last seen him seemed like an eternity. I remembered sitting on the beach with him on his last night before he shipped out to boot camp. He held me in his arms while I cried a million tears.
“If they have to go, then so do I. I realize I look like a hypocrite, but I’m even more of one if I stay in my safe little bubble promoting peace and love while others have no choice but to go and fight for it, even if they don’t believe in it.”
As I looked into his chestnut brown eyes on that eve of his departure after we had made love for the first time, I had foolishly believed he only saw me when he stared back. At seventeen years old you believe a lot of things, like the boy you give your heart to will come back from war as the same man he was when he left. Like everything he was about to witness over there would be unseen, just by the sound of your voice or the touch of your hand. Little did I know back then, but my parents were right, I was just a child who really was so naïve when it came to the world.
Now here I was alone, afraid, and terrified of what the future held for Tommy, and as I looked down at my belly, I was terrified of what the future held for me. I was always tiny and still wasn’t showing any signs, even at four months, but it was only a matter of time before I could no longer hide the consequence of our actions. I wanted to write to him and tell him, but didn’t know where to send the letter. Would he be angry at me for distracting him with this worry while he was in a foreign country, fighting for his life, or would this give him more reason to come home safely? Then there were my parents. They’d never forgive me for bringing shame to the family.
“Frankie.” My attention jolted from the words on the paper to the familiar voice calling my name. I hastily folded up the letter and placed it in my pocket as Dominick, Tommy’s brother, stepped into the gazebo where I had been sitting. I felt as if I was being disloyal to Tommy by allowing another guy to be sitting beside me in our spot at the park located right across the street from Tommy’s house.
“Hello,” I murmured, wiping away the teardrop rolling down my face. Dominick was two years younger than Tommy and fiercely competitive with him. Their looks were the only thing they had in common. Both were tall with dark eyes and dark wavy hair, and both were handsome, but to me, Tommy would always be the more attractive of the two.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m well.”
“Want some?” he asked, holding out the joint he had just taken a hit from.
“Actually, I was on my way home.” I stood up and walked past him, not much in the mood for making conversation—especially not with him.
There was something about Dominick Cavlan that got under my skin. He had asked me to a dance before I started dating Tommy, and I had turned him down. It seemed to be a blow to his ego when I rejected him and even bigger one when I started going out with his brother just a few months after. He was the son who always did the right thing or shall I say did everything his father expected him to do. Tommy wasn’t into politics, and as much as his father wanted him to be, Tommy wouldn’t bite.
When Dominick graduated from high school a year ago, he allowed his father to groom him into the political world that defined the Cavlan way of life. At eighteen years old, Dominick was already attending political fundraisers, with his short hair perfectly groomed, wearing a three-piece suit. He was so different than other kids our age. Most of the guys wore their hair long and unkempt and wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything remotely resembling a suit. But as he stood there inhaling another hit of his joint, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, I had to wonder, was that the real Dominick? The one who behaved and dressed more like most of the people my age and not the one who was a puppet for his father’s political aspirations of him?
Tommy was always fiercely protective of his younger brother, and in a way it bothered me. I understood the importance of being close as brothers. I was the same way with my own, but if I would make even the smallest critique of Dominick, Tommy would rush to defend him. I knew if Tommy and I were going to be together forever like he had promised, I would have to learn to get along with Dominick a little better.
“I got a letter from Tommy today.” I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to face him. The letter from Tommy that I had etched into every crevice of my mind was over three weeks old, so any news Dominick had from him that was more recent was welcoming.
“What did he say?”
“He actually sent me a photo to give to you. He said he didn’t have time to write two separate letters, so he asked if I could give it to you. If I’d known I was going to run into you here, I would’ve brought it with me.”
“What’s it a photo of?”
He shrugged. “It’s in a sealed envelope. I didn’t open it. If you want to take a walk back to the house with me, I can give it to you.”
“Umm…” I knew I was the last person his parents would want to see showing up at their house.
“My mother and father aren’t home if that’s what you’re worried about. Janine is, though. I know she’d love to see you.”
Janine was Tommy and Dominick’s little sister. Besides Tommy, she was the only one in that family who accepted me. She was only twelve years old and not yet jaded by her family’s pretentious lifestyle, and I wasn’t sure if she ever would be. Tommy would always tell me how his parents really never paid her much attention, always leaving her with her nanny to tend to her while they went off and hobnobbed with people they deemed important to his father’s career. Tommy was super-close with his sister, even given the big age gap between them. In a way he kind of became the father figure she had been lacking in her own dad. Dominick, on the other hand, would tease her relentlessly, and she would avoid him at all costs—another reason why she and I got along so well. Even though I knew I had to get home, my heart led me in the other direction toward the Cavlan estate, a decision that changed my life and my future forever.
Chapter 23
I WAS SPEECHLESS, reaching over the table and grabbing her hand as the tears rolled down her face. “His brother raped you?”
She nodded. “Then he wrote to Tommy and told him I was the one who had come on to him.”
“Did you tell him what really happened?”
“I poured my heart and soul out in a letter to him, telling him everything. He wrote back to me and said to never write him again. He called me a liar and a tramp.” She dabbed her eyes with a napkin, reliving the moment as if it were yesterday.
“Did he know you were pregnant?”
“Yes, but he never even acknowledged it in his letter back. He was just so enraged in thinking I cheated on him with his brother. He refused to believe he raped me. He allowed Dominick to have this pull over him. I knew he’d never take my side over his.”
My heart ached for her. She was just a kid at the time, and I couldn’t imagine how sad and alone she was. “Did you tell your parents what had happened?”
She nodded and another surge of tears streamed down her face. I offered her my napkin and gave her time to pull herself together. “I don’t know what hurt more, Tommy not believing in me or my mother and father.” She stared up at the ceilin
g and blinked hard before finally locking eyes with me once again. “They told me I was making the rape up as an excuse for disgracing the family by getting pregnant.”
“But you were pregnant before he…” I couldn’t even say that ugly word.
“Yes.” She reassured me. “Tommy was the father. You were conceived in love or at least what I thought was love at the time.” It all started to come together. The man in the ocean—Thomas Cavlan was Tommy, my father. If there was any positive in this entire heartbreaking story, it was at least my father wasn’t a rapist. Instead he was an irresponsible asshole who had no faith or commitment to the girl he was supposedly so in love with. He was no better than his rapist brother, in my opinion.
“My parents were so angry. They sent me to live with my aunt in Massachusetts, far away from California, where no one knew me. Once I started showing, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house because my aunt didn’t want people talking. It was a whole different world back then.” She sighed. “If it had happened fifteen or even ten years later, then maybe I could’ve…” She let out a deep sob and pulled it together quickly. “Maybe I could’ve kept you,” she finished.
“Please don’t feel guilty about what you had to do. You were just a child yourself, and I swear to you, I had the best life ever.” Her eyes brightened with that affirmation.
“I talked to you every day while you were in my belly. I just knew you were a girl. There was never a doubt in my mind. I even named you…Annie.”
I suddenly remembered the locket on the beach that day with the name Annie etched on it. I cleared my throat, wanting to get to the bottom of how her past had come full circle to that day on the beach. “Thomas Cavlan…he drowned in the ocean. I watched him take his life.”
She nodded. “He had tracked me down a few months ago. I didn’t want to see him, much less talk to him after the way he had just dismissed me all those years ago, but I needed to hear what he had to say.” I was hanging on to her every word, just as enthralled by this as I was about her past. “Seems like his brother still can’t keep it in his pants. There were rumors of him raping one of his interns swirling around months before the media broke the news. I don’t know why, but something made Tommy actually believe it could be true and maybe his brother who he had been so protective of all those years wasn’t the man he thought him to be.”
My phone beeped with a text message, and I instantly became angry with whoever it was trying to reach me. I was so into this conversation, and I didn’t want her to lose the courage in telling it. When it beeped again, I held up my finger for her to pause. “I’m so sorry, just one second.” I pulled my phone from my purse and read the message.
Kara: Just checking to make sure you’re ok.
Kara: Just reply with a yes or no, please!
I typed out the word “yes” and hit the send button, throwing my phone back into my purse. “I’m sorry, that was my daughter checking up on me. I don’t know when I became the child and she became the parent.” I smiled.
“She sounds like a wonderful girl.” She smiled back.
“She really is. I’m very blessed.” The emotional connection to her that I had been trying to block since I had sat down was slowly taking over me as I listened to her story, and it finally occurred to me for the very first time, Kara was also a part of her as well.
“Okay, so where were we?” The angst that was on her face before we were interrupted gradually returned.
“He had tracked you down after his brother had been accused of rape,” I reminded.
“Right.” She sighed. “Out of the blue, a few months back, I got a phone call from him asking if we could meet up for coffee. I had moved back to California after you were born, but not back to the town I grew up in. I had family in the northern part of the state, so I stayed with them while I went to school to become a hairstylist. Once I got a job, I got my own place, met my husband, and I never saw Tommy again. All those years he had to find me, I couldn’t imagine why he was so desperate all of a sudden.”
Her coffee mug shook when she brought it to her lips for a sip, and I felt awful for making her continue a conversation that was causing her so much distress. “I think maybe we may both need a little chocolate to get us through the rest of this.” I tried to lighten the mood a bit. I signaled to Rita and asked her to bring us two chocolate croissants.
“This looks lovely,” Francesca remarked when Rita walked over to the table and placed them in front of us.
“They are. They’ll heal whatever ails you.” I grinned. She studied my face, and the effect I was hoping the croissants would have on her seemed to be doing the exact opposite.
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “You looked just like Tommy for a split second when you smiled.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing, given how he had treated her.
She took a bite of her croissant and snapped out of it. “You were right, this is exactly the fuel I needed to carry on. Now back to Tommy. I agreed to meet him for coffee, not knowing what to expect. When I saw him for the first time after all those years, he looked so different than the boy who was my first love. Of course, I knew he would. I’m sure he felt the same about me. We were both almost a half century older, but there was something in his eyes that looked like a man who had given up, and I guess in the end, he really had.”
Chapter 24
Francesca
Four months ago…
I WAS WELL aware of how foolish I was being, comparing myself to that seventeen-year-old girl I once was. I was sixty-five years old. The smooth, taut skin of my teenage years was now like a map on my face of my life from the years that had passed. The laugh lines indicating the happy times, and the frown lines marking the sad ones. I was no longer the ninety-five-pound shapeless girl who Tommy could pick up with ease. Giving birth to two children, menopause, and my love of cooking and eating said cooking had caused me to pack on a few pounds.
As I sat in the coffee shop, waiting for Tommy to arrive while questioning my sanity for agreeing to the meeting, I couldn’t help but wonder what his first thought of me would be. My shoulders stiffened and my stomach rumbled when a man hardly recognizable as Tommy in looks but identical to him in mannerisms entered. He carried himself tall and proud in the same self-assured way he had way back when. His eyes locked with mine right away, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to throw up, cry, or run away.
“Frankie,” he spoke my name in a gruff, gravelly voice when he reached the table. I was impressed that he had still maintained that thick wavy head of hair I remembered from so long ago, when he removed the baseball cap he was wearing. It was still dark with gray strands mingled in. His skin was sallow and wrinkled, and the cough he expelled as he took a seat sounded as if he was still smoking a pack a day like he did when we were younger. He was dressed casually in khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt, displaying a surf shop logo on the front.
My fingers clutched so tightly around my coffee cup, I was afraid it would break. “I don’t know why I even agreed to meet you, but I’m here, so what is it you needed to talk about?” I managed to get out.
“I appreciate you showing up, after everything that happened between us. I know it’s been a long time coming, but I’m sorry for the way I treated you.”
I shook my head. “Don’t. Don’t come here looking for forgiveness from me because I’m not going to give it to you.”
“That’s fair.” He nodded. “I guess you’ve heard. Dominick is thinking of throwing his hat in the ring for president.”
“I try very hard not to keep on the current events of your family—especially not your brother.”
“Well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you.” He bowed his head for a few moments before making eye contact with me once again. “There’s this woman who interned for Dominick and she’s making some pretty serious accusations against him.” He paused for a second before continuing. “She’s saying he raped her.”
“Oh, a
nd let me guess, you’re still playing the protective big brother who rushes to his defense.” I couldn’t listen to this anymore and began to get up. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I don’t know what any of this has to do with me, so—”
He reached over the table and grabbed my hand, taking me totally off guard. “Please just hear me out.”
I drew my hand away from his with vigor, lowering myself back into the chair. He reached into the pocket of his shorts, pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, and slid it across the table. The pinkish hue on the stationery may have been faded, but I recognized what it was immediately. “What you wrote in this letter. It was true, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. It took him almost fifty years and a lifetime of heartache on my part for him to come to this realization.
“And…did you…” He dropped his gaze as if he was trying to muster up the courage to finish his question. I would’ve been lying if I said I wasn’t taking a little comfort in his ill ease. “Did you have his child?”
My eyes widened. “His child?” I scoffed.
“You said you were pregnant, in this letter.” He held up the piece of paper, then placed it back on the table.
“I was pregnant with your child, Tommy. Your brother raped me while I was carrying our child.” My voice rose a little louder than I had intended as I tried desperately to ward off my emotions. “None of what I wrote in that letter was a lie. You just chose to interpret it the way that best suited you.” His eyes clouded over. I wanted to see him cry. I wanted him to feel even one ounce of the pain I had felt back then. “I was basically disowned by my family, then had to give away a part of me that I had grown to love for nine months without ever getting to touch her.” My wish had backfired. It was me who had the tears rolling down my face instead.
