Mine to Tell Read online

  “Where is she?” I finally broke the silence. “If she’s not here, where is she?”

  He settled himself against his seat and ran his fingers around the steering wheel while he thought. “I’ve wondered that myself,” he said, and I knew this was something he’d pondered for years. It had been his idea to come to the cemetery today. It was his way of letting me know we were missing a piece of her puzzle.

  I stared out the front window at the serene rows of tombstones with interspersed trees. All of these people, and my relative was missing. It didn’t seem right.

  “She married Isaac, longed for John, finally gave in and consummated her own marriage when John married, eventually disappeared for a couple of weeks, came back and lived in that house Isaac banned her to, had my grandpa Samuel, Isaac died, and then she…” I thought for a moment how she had left again.

  I watched Kyle’s fingers make their trek around the steering wheel. I didn’t know if he was thinking or if he was trying to not tell me something he already knew. I waited, his fingers silently going round and round, both of our eyes making circles with them.

  “Take me to my parents’ house,” I said suddenly. His fingers slowed and then settled on the wheel. He straightened, reached for the key, and started the car. I wanted him to say something, but he didn’t. We pulled out of the cemetery, and he took me to my parents’.

  When he stopped the car in their driveway, I reached over and put my fingers on his arm before he opened the door to get out.

  “Tell me if you know anything,” I said. I was asking, not demanding. “Is there anything I need to know before I go in there and begin to ask questions?”

  His face was directed toward mine, his features soft and trustworthy. How had I not noticed him when we were growing up? Because he had one of those invisible looks? Not bad, not great, and no boisterous personality that shouted out louder than what he looked like. He looked good, but most of it came from deep within. I wished I would have noticed him sooner. I realized now that I’d missed something, stepped over a hidden treasure by not taking the time to get to know him. I’d been as blind to him as I’d been to my great-grandmother’s grave. I shook my head at my foolishness.

  “I don’t know where she’s buried,” he said, looking altogether sorry that he didn’t have the answer I wanted, and that he couldn’t spare me bringing this up with my family. “But I do think her story may eventually tell us where she went after Isaac died.”

  “I was hoping it would tell us where she went for those two weeks, too,” I said automatically. “I was counting on it, actually.”

  “Most people would have hurried through her book and letters, found out what happened, and been done with it.” He looked at me long and hard. “I like the way you’ve handled your great-grandmother. You’ve treated her with respect. As if she were here, telling her story her way, at her speed. You never interrupt. You’re careful with her for her sake.”

  He made me sound so kind. And he was right, for the most part. I didn’t want to just find an answer. I wanted Julianne to tell me. I wanted her to have the opportunity to say things her way.

  “This sounds odd, I know, but it’s a life, not just a mystery. And it’s a life I needed to share in.” I looked down at my lap and studied my fingers. “That’s why I couldn’t get married,” I added quietly, not sure if I should have said it or not.

  Just as I did there was an explosion on the back of Kyle’s car. We both whirled in our seats and looked out the back window at my brother’s angry face, his fist knotted on the top of the trunk. Fury shot through me. The shock of the noise, on top of my personal indignation and the audacity of my brother, all caused another type of explosion that erupted inside me. I wheeled the other direction and was out of Kyle’s car in an instant, rage coursing through me.

  As I rounded to face my brother, I closed my hands into fists and drew in a deep breath to shout that he had no business behaving like a junior high moron. My gaze was fixed on him and my mouth opened when from behind him stepped another. A taller, slimmer, more handsome figure, with a face equally sour.

  “Trevor.” It came out a squeak. Our eyes locked, fire in his, shock in mine. No one spoke, not even Paul Junior. It was as if the world stopped just for this moment as we stood bound in this stilted communication.

  “Bitch,” Trevor finally muttered, breaking the deadlock, and he turned away. Paul Junior let out a “Ha” with a smirk and hurried behind Trevor as he stalked toward the house.

  I watched them go. I could hear myself breathing short, hard breaths as my chest rose and fell. I put a hand on Kyle’s car to steady myself. I could hear it again and again, over the gasping of my breath. “Bitch. Bitch.” He’d never said anything like that before, not to anyone, not about anyone. I couldn’t believe it.

  “I’ll walk home.” It came out garbled. I didn’t even bend down to make sure Kyle heard me. I shut his door and stumbled across my parents’ front yard, through their shallow ditch, and onto the gravel road.

  “Bitch,” I heard again in my head as I headed to Julianne’s house, the gravel grinding out even more condemnation beneath my feet.

  Chapter 32

  “Nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh;

  for the wishing is present in me,

  but the doing of the good is not.”

  A tiny little piece of me waited for another letter from John. It was a weak remnant of what had been, a tiny fragment of my soul, sad to let go, to say it was over, forever. I suppose it was kind of him to not write again. Even Henrietta stopped writing. I wondered if it was at his bidding or if she blamed me for all that had gone wrong.

  I began going with Isaac to his churches. Not always, but often. The boys and I traveled with him to the closest ones, a nice, neat little family that sat attentively while their husband and father delivered harsh sermons. I was frightened the first time I heard Isaac preach. I’d had no idea what sort of speaker he would be, never thought about it. But he was severe, loud, and stern, and sometimes it seemed as if he was speaking to me, as he spared no sympathy for people who neglected their marital duties, refused to love, or entertained adulterous thoughts. I looked down when he spoke. I’d tried holding his gaze, but it was too harsh. The fire in his eyes burned. He meant it to burn like hell would burn. I was sure of it, so I looked down or away or at the boys instead of in his eyes.

  If what Isaac was trying to say was what God thought, then I was a morbid sinner. I didn’t love my husband the way I’d loved John. And somewhere deep inside of me still flickered a flame for him, for the one I’d first and only given my heart to. That was wrong. John was married to another, as was I. My thoughts were adulterous. And my marital duties? I cooked, I cleaned, I minded his boys. But I recoiled at Isaac’s touch. It’s awful to admit, but I did. I let him touch me, but I was not there when he did. I wondered what John’s wife felt…what John felt.

  If Isaac had ever spoken to me, instead of at me from a pulpit, would it have been better? If those eyes, so full of anger, had come to me in the lamplight of our room and asked me how I felt or why I responded the way I did, could we have reached an understanding? Could kindness have caused another flame to grow beside the one that was being diminished? Would some patience and understanding have fanned that new flame until it grew into trust and desire?

  He never asked how I felt. He never spoke softly to me in the quiet of our room. He never understood how confused I was, how much heartache I had to hide, how frightening his world was to me. He was threatened by John, unable to allow me to grow into who I needed to grow into, preferring I never be someone, that I behave instead as if I had no life at all. He was bitter, he was wounded, and when he felt his worst, he looked at me and cursed.

  Chapter 33

  “Better is open rebuke than love that is concealed.”

  I knocked on Kyle’s door. We hadn’t spoken since we’d seen Trevor at my parents’ house. I’d felt humiliated, too humiliated to face him, and I w
asn’t sure if I could do it now.

  He answered the door, a flood of odors of woodwork and oil spilling out from behind him. He smiled and pulled the door open wider, letting me know all was forgotten.

  I sighed in relief and entered his house, taking a deep breath of his paradise, the scents and the plethora of textures and colors that made it a haven and a home. I loved his house, and if the one I was in hadn’t been Julianne’s, I’d probably have tried to imitate his taste in decoration.

  A teapot was whistling from the kitchen, saving us from the awkward moment of me trying to decide if I should plunge into an explanation of my brother’s gnat-sized brain and ogre-sized ego…and the ugly one-word discourse from my ex-fiancé.

  Kyle ducked into the other room, and I fidgeted with the envelope in my hand, a large brown envelope with my name on it.

  “Tea?” he called from the kitchen.

  “No, thank you,” I replied. “It’s been a coffee morning for me, and I’m sated.”

  He returned with a cup and saucer, steam rising above the cup and a string dangling over the side. He set it down on an old buffet and looked at me.

  “Got something from Jill,” I said, waving the envelope in the air. His eyes lit on the brown paper and brightened, looking even more blue than usual.

  He grabbed his cup and saucer and directed me to his sofa. We sat and I pulled out copies of the photos she’d taken when she’d been with us, and we pored over them again, noticing ones we hadn’t seen before and reliving our wild few days of the odd contradiction of Jill and Julianne, which now in Jill’s visual panorama turned out to be a perfect blend.

  “Her eye is like God’s eye,” he said with quiet admiration when we’d seen all of them. “Not the way people see things, but deeper.”

  Like your eye, I thought but didn’t say. It was all through his house and in the way he saw into people. He didn’t stop at the surface either. He saw the lifeblood of everything around him. He saw things naked, stripped of any pretense, just like Jill did.

  “Oh, and there’s an envelope tucked in here for you.” I reached into the large envelope and felt around for the small one.

  “What’s in it?” he asked.

  “It was sealed, with your name on it, so I don’t know.” I found and extracted it.

  He took it and slid it open. I watched as he drew out a small folded note wrapped around a few photos. He read the note and smiled, then set it aside. I watched from beside him as a panorama of Kyle floated by on Kodak paper. Kyle from the side, Kyle from far away, Kyle watching me, Kyle smiling at the photographer. He was beautiful, and Jill had captured that beauty. She’d exposed the soul of this man on paper, in color, and arrested his heart for everyone to see.

  “You’re remarkable,” I said without thinking. He sighed deeply as he held the photos in his hands. “I mean, Jill did a remarkable job capturing you…your essence.” I felt myself redden.

  We looked at each other. My heart beat a bit harder as we did. There was something about the look that drew up a hunger in me. I wanted to grasp it and enjoy it, but I couldn’t. Trevor and Jill were in the room too, and they stood between me and that deep yearning.

  “And you’re on your way to becoming very remarkable,” he said. “Don’t stop until you get there.” He looked down at the photos again and he smiled. It was a deep smile and a good one. A man’s smile that came from the heart. A rarity.

  “About Trevor,” I began awkwardly. He raised a hand without even looking at me. “Well, then not about him. I just don’t want you to feel badly about what happened. It had nothing to do with you, and he’s never been like that before.” Suddenly I was gushing out way too much information. It was like high school and I was babbling on and on about my bad boyfriend, wishing I could just shut up.

  “It was about me on the surface,” he interrupted, stopping my tirade, for which I was grateful. “He thinks it’s all about me, but it isn’t. It’s about you. You’re not what he wanted you to be, and he’s frustrated. I’m easy to blame. I’m tangible, and proximal to you. But it isn’t about me…it’s about you…in a perversely flattering sort of way.”

  I wasn’t flattered. I tried to relax. If I’d wanted Kyle to be my hero and save me from the villain, it was clear he wasn’t going to do it. He was a better man than that, and for some reason he understood the importance of what I had to go through.

  “Trevor probably thinks you’re my new boyfriend,” I said.

  “Foolish of him,” he said lightly.

  I looked up, a thread of panic lighting its way through me. “What are you?” I asked. “What exactly are you?”

  He looked me directly in the eye. “I’m here,” he said, “and that’s what terrifies him.”

  Chapter 34

  “Better is a neighbor who is near

  than a brother far away.”

  It hurt to hear Kyle say, “I’m here,” and nothing more. I wanted something to hold onto while I grappled with the fragments of my own world as it flew apart. I realized in that moment of honesty that a piece of me was still clinging to Trevor, not the Trevor I saw now, but the one I had covertly hoped I’d find my way back to.

  I looked at Kyle. He smiled bigger. He knew. He clapped me on the knee and stood. He tapped Jill’s photos of him on the open palm of one hand as he gazed around the room. I let him have his moment while he let me have mine to rattle alone through my ragged thoughts and emotions. I stayed on the sofa, wondering if beneath my raw needs there was something there for Kyle, something real and not based on mere longing. I looked up at him as he circled the room, still tapping the photos, his artistic eye trying to decide on the best way to display them. If anyone could take a group of pictures and turn them into something tasteful and imaginative, Kyle could. Or Jill. They were the same that way. But only in that way.

  I stood and waited until he completed his tour and stopped in front of me.

  “You’ve been a good ‘here,’ ” I said. “Helpful, mindful, thoughtful, wise. I couldn’t have asked for better.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said, his expression gentle. “I didn’t do this to be polite or because I felt sorry for you.” He looked away, as if inspiration had suddenly struck about the pictures, and then he looked back. “We’re the same,” he said. “You and I have always been the same. You just didn’t know it.”

  I didn’t gasp, but I almost did. My mouth dropped open, but only for a second, and then I closed it again. “What? What did you say?”

  “I didn’t just fall into this friendship when you came back and opened your great-grandmother’s house. I knew what I was doing when I came over with your brother. I was already a part of your world. It was natural for me. You just didn’t know that yet.”

  I puzzled over this stranger in front of me that I’d lived near all my life. Who was he and what in the world did he mean? It was like standing on a precipice with gravity pulling one direction and gusts of wind blowing the other. I wavered, looking below and looking up, the only two options I had. Before I could decide, Kyle’s arms were around me and my senses were buried in a warm rush of the aromas of wood oil and herbal tea. He smelled as comfortable as he felt. I let all of the air out of my lungs and just melted into him, enveloped in his hug.

  “Your great-grandmother meant more around here than people let on,” he said while resting his chin on top of my head. The vibrations of his throat buzzed against my forehead when he spoke. It reminded me of Trevor, of my head against him. On my sofa, on his. I pulled away.

  “I’m going to Chicago,” I said. I’d been thinking about it but hadn’t decided until just this second.

  He looked startled, not deeply, as if I’d just told him I was dying or something, just that drawing back where a person has to ponder what they’ve just heard. “You mean to look for more of Julianne?” he asked.

  “Sort of. I’m going to look for John and his family. I know Julianne has her story all spelled out, but something tells me there’s more.
And maybe that more is with him.”

  “I could go with you,” Kyle offered tentatively. He wanted to go, I knew that without hearing it or seeing it on his face. But he was being careful. Whether for his sake or mine, I didn’t know, but he was letting me decide.

  “No, I’m going alone,” I said, still surprising myself. I was talking as if everything was arranged, while I was still surprised I was going, let alone that I’d turned down the offer of his company. “Would you keep an eye on Julianne’s house while I’m gone?” I heard myself ask. I was still holding on, creating a tie between us so he wouldn’t slip away.

  “Sure. I could do it legitimately and legally this time,” he said with a sly grin.

  “And if you want, you could continue to transcribe her story.” I wasn’t sure if he’d take this as flattery or as slavery. I hoped flattery.

  He lit up. “I’d be happy to.”

  “Good. I’m leaving tomorrow.” Another shock to myself. While I held my face expressionless, my mind was trying to think what I needed to pack, whether I’d fly or drive, how much money I might need, who the heck I knew in Chicago that I might be able to stay with.

  “That’s soon.” He sounded as surprised as I was. “You already packed?”

  “Yes,” I lied. Well, I was mentally in the process. When I left his house I’d go to my parents’ and break the news to them. I’d use their telephone to check airline fares and decide how I was going to get there. “Do you need a key to the house?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” And he grinned.

  “Okay, I guess not then.” I frowned at him. “I’ll call you while I’m there. Keep you posted as to what I find.”

  “You’re probably going to be surprised,” he said lightly.

  I nodded slowly, my head moving up and down as if I was trying to draw more from him. “You know that already?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Julianne’s story can’t be as simple as a woman wrong or wronged and then shoved aside. Don’t you agree?”