Chapter 29.
1994
The wine was going to my head. It seemed as if Drew pulled the Bullets and Blood masters out with special reverence. I’d laid a towel out to soak up the water, and he placed the boxes on them gently.
I was going to have to tell him that the baby that had split us apart might not have been his. We’d been careless with our bodies then.
But when I saw him pull an envelope out of the box and I felt the bond that he’d had with his friend, I felt a real pull to tell him and a stronger pull to just bury it forever. Why bring it up? To what end would I risk hurting him with his friend’s betrayal? I didn’t fool myself into thinking I meant so much to him that my betrayal was equal to Strat’s. The only thing I risked by telling the truth was damaging his memory of his best friend. I didn’t want to turn that bond into a lie.
I was a coward. I owed him the truth.
“Drew. Indy… I—”
A young man’s voice came from the top of the stairs, yelling in French. Orry shouted back. The door slammed. Feet scuffled along the wood, and a boy barreled into the room, shirt half untucked, ginger hair askew.
“What the—?”
“Jonathan,” I said, noticing his frozen, terrified features.
“Margie. When did you get here?”
“This is Drew. He works with me.”
They nodded at each other, practically grunting like apes. Little Jon was a man already, too tough for his own good.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
He swallowed. The kids came to the wine cellar when they needed to get away from the bullshit of the huge house. Sometimes to hide. Sometimes to sulk. I knew where to find Fiona during report cards’ week, Leanne every twenty-eight days, Carrie whenever Dad was home.
“I’m all right.” He started back upstairs.
Drew thumbed through an envelope.
“Wait,” I said to Jonathan. “Try this.”
I handed him my glass of wine. He was in fifth grade, but he was allowed to sip, and I wasn’t ready to let him go back up to whatever was bothering him. He took the glass. Treating him like a grown-up worked, and he seemed calmer when he handed it back.
“It tastes fine,” he said.
“Come in the storage room with me for a sec. I want to talk to you. Drew, do you mind?”
“It’s fine.” He looked up from a wet, runny note for a second and locked eyes on Jonathan.
I thought nothing of it. Not Indy’s slack jaw or the way his eyes went a millimeter wider. I just pulled my brother into the inner chamber and sat him on a case of ancient vintage.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
“Nothing.”
“Jon.”
“What?”
“Let’s be efficient with our time. You’re going to tell me. Might as well get it over with.”
He pursed his lips, crossed his arms, jutted his jaw. I leaned on a low shelf and waited.
“You can’t tell,” he said.
“You know I won’t.”
“You need to really swear.”
Jesus. To be in grade school again. To make the big little and the little big. To think you had control when you didn’t and adulthood was just childhood layered over with manners and privilege. When lies seemed like easy answers to uncomfortable truths.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. Let’s take a pledge. We hold our hands up and swear anything we say is secret. When we put our hands down, we lock it closed and go back to normal.”
He thought about it for a second, then with a short nod he said, “Okay.”
“But there’s another thing. We cannot lie. Not when the pledge is open.”
“Fine.”
I held my hand up, and he mirrored me.
“Pledge open,” I said. “What happened?”
He took a deep breath and looked at the corner of the room. “Kerry and I were outside when it started raining, and we got stuck in the pool house.”
Kerry was the daughter of one of Dad’s associates. She was a year older than Jonathan and pretty smart.
“Go on.”
“We started doing stuff.”
Jesus Christ, use a condom.
He’s not ready.
He glanced at me, tearing his attention from the corner for half a second, then planting it back. I didn’t answer the glance or egg him on. I knew what was coming, more or less. Mom and Dad weren’t very forthcoming about sex with the kids, thinking my early knowledge led to my early downfall.
He spit out the next line. “I think she broke it.”
“Broke what?” I knew the answer, but my mouth ran before my brain caught up.
He wouldn’t say but pointed at his crotch with both hands.
Do. Not. Laugh. Do. Not. Laugh.
“What makes you think it’s broken?”
“She touched it. It got… it got weird then…” He looked at the ceiling.
I had to finish for him. Putting him on the spot wasn’t working. He was in fifth grade, and though he’d started getting big, he was still a child.
“It got hard then felt tickly then white stuff came out?”
His eyes went wide. “Yes.”
“It’s not broken.”
“How do you know?”
“Aren’t you and your friends talking about this amongst yourselves? Girls? Sex?”
“I didn’t have sex with her!”
I waved it away. “I know. Okay. I’m just going to assure you, it’s not broken. You’re fine. But tomorrow, let me take you to lunch and I can tell you why. All right?”
He took a deep breath of reprieve. “Yes.”
“Until then, keep away from Kerry O’Neill.”
“All right.”
“Tuck your shirt in.”
He did it, jamming the shirttails into his waistband as if Daddy was in the other room. He took a step toward the doorway.
“Jon. Stop.”
“What?”
I put my hand up then down. “Close pledge.”
“Close pledge.”
We went back into the tasting room. Drew leaned on one of the benches, hair flopped over his face like a rock star, shirt dry like a lawyer, with a manila envelope in one hand and a white rectangle in the other. He looked at it then Jonathan.
“What?” I said.
Drew just shook his head as Jonathan bolted up the stairs with barely a wave.
“Strat mailed stuff to Audio City. I don’t know why.” He put down the manila envelope. Old stamps. Crap handwriting. He laid out the contents. “A note for me, and pictures of when we were kids. He was… he was so hurt. He couldn’t show it because you were mine. But…” His voice drifted to silence.
“Drew?”
“When you left, he acted like it was nothing.” He pushed the runny letter toward me.
I couldn’t see much but my name, my real one, and phrases… she was yours but… never wanted this… like a brother to me…
“I knew about you and Strat. He told me in pledge,” Drew said.
“In Nashville.”
“Yes, but I—”
“That’s why you were such a dick when you got back.”
“I regret that.”
“I deserved it.”
He looked at the picture, shook it, pressed his lips together, and gave it to me as if it was the hardest thing he’d had to do in his life. I took it but kept my eyes on his. I had no idea what he could look so distressed about.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just tell me what you see.”
I looked at the picture.
Two boys about twelve years old, arms over shoulders, a suburban sidewalk stretching behind them. I recognized young Drew McCaffrey by the flop of his hair and the shape of his eyes.
And the other boy? I recognized him. I knew who he was. He was Stratford Gilliam, a kid with only a few more years to live, but that wasn’t the kid I recognized. He looked like the three-dimensional kid had been transported from my house onto a two-dimensional surface.
I swallowed. None of this computed.
“It’s a coincidence,” I whispered.
Not unless Stratford Gilliam fucked your mother.
I couldn’t do the math in my head.
Twelve-year-old Strat was a clone of my brother, Jonathan.
No. The other way around. Jonathan looked exactly like Strat.
I looked up from the picture. Drew stood above me, confident and together as if he knew something I didn’t.
“Your family name came up in the Dublin office. Your baby’s adoptive family is suing your father for breach of contract.”
“I don’t understand.”
Don’t you?
“They never had your real name. I presume it was to protect you. It took that long to find him.”
“There would be two babies.”
“We checked the public records. Your mother’s eighth child was stillborn.”
I took a step back, covering my mouth so I wouldn’t scream. The calculus suddenly made sense. A sick fucking sense.
“I didn’t know what I’d find here,” Drew said. “But I didn’t think this. I thought it was simpler. Not until I saw—”
I didn’t hear anything else. Just my little brother’s—
son’s
—voice in my head as he spoke French with a perfect ear for tone. As I saw the lines of his body superimposed on Strat’s—
his father’s
—and the face which was unmistakably from the same gene pool.
I did the math with my senses. Heard the voice and saw the face. Smelled the new baby smell that seemed of my own body and knew, just knew, he was mine.
“I can’t.” My breathing got choppy. I was shaking.
Drew grabbed my wrists. “Margie.”
“I can’t tell him.”
“You don’t—”
“Oh, God.”
“Shh. It’s going to be all right.”
He tried to gather me in his arms, but I pushed him away and I ran. I flung myself up the narrow stairs into the chaos of the kitchen. How many people were in the ballroom? Fifty? A hundred?
“Margie?” Orry asked, a piece of raw fish in his thick hands.
Everyone in the kitchen was looking at me, sauté pans frozen mid-agitation, break knives up, colanders dripping starch-thickened water into drains.
I heard Drew clop a couple of elephantine steps up from the cellar.
Cornered.
Your brother is your son.
I didn’t even know what I was running from. I was a spider in a tub. I couldn’t get up the sides. Couldn’t get away, even on eight legs, from the glass bowl coming down.
“Margie?” Drew called.
A second had passed, and in that second, every feeling I was supposed to have in the past few decades dropped on me. I felt my shell break under the pressure as my insides got bigger than my outside, slowly giving way to hairline fractures. I couldn’t do this here. I couldn’t break with the kitchen staff staring and Drew climbing the stairs.
I ran out of the kitchen, following the map of my childhood.
Through the morning room, the library, the kids’ playroom, and the breakfast room to the back deck. I threw myself down the wooden stairs to the beach where I almost collapsed on the cold sand. I got my feet under me and ran toward the wall of sound and water. The horizon. The darkness on the outskirts of the lights of civilization, where the water flattened the land.
I fell with my knees in the water and the rush of the tide in my ears. I stayed there and wept. I wept for what I’d done to sweet Drew. For acting as though Strat had no feelings. For my son who I was never, ever going to hurt by telling. For my misguided parents who had lost a baby and taken mine into their hearts.
The lip of the next wave reached me, soaking my calves and the top of my head. I wasn’t mature enough for any of this. No one was. But I didn’t cry for myself. I cried for everyone I’d hurt.
The water got louder than I thought possible, blowing at my ears so much that my lungs felt the pain, and the earth went out from under me. I spun in space, clawed the wet sand, tasted rough salt and foam. The sea wrapped around me like a vise, yanking me against it, pulling me to the air, where Drew had me in his arms.
He put me on the sand, and his voice became the sense inside the ocean’s chaos. “Margie?”
He was cloudy and grey. My eyes couldn’t focus. My chest couldn’t hold my lungs, and I coughed. Sucked in a breath. Was I drowning or crying so hard I couldn’t breathe?
His hands on my cheeks.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I know.”
“I want to claw my heart out of my chest.”
I realized I was gripping the front of my shirt as if I meant to literally claw through skin and bone.
He took my hands, leaning over. “It’s all right. Margie. Can you hear me?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I was young. I put you in a terrible position.”
“No. Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever blame yourself. Ever. I was the one to blame. I should have known better.”
“I never admitted I loved you.”
“Neither did I.”
“I was scared.”
“I don’t want you to be scared. Not ever again.”
I reached for him, and he held me on the beach. I was cold, but I wasn’t. I was hurt, but I was healed. I was alone, but no, I wasn’t. Not at all. I pressed my face to his neck and let him encircle me so tightly I thought he’d break me.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I couldn’t see his face in the embrace, but mine was scrunched with the push of sobs.
“I didn’t tell you what I knew the minute I came to LA. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I was afraid you’d shut down. I was afraid I’d still have feelings for you. And I do, Margie. I do.”
I nodded.
“I know you just got blindsided tonight.”
I choked out a laugh. We loosened our hold on each other until we were face to face. I brushed the sand from his cheek.
“Blindsided,” I said. “Good word.”
“I had no idea. I want you to know. I had pieces but didn’t know the puzzle.”
I nodded. “No one would believe the truth.”
“What should we do?”
I knew he’d asked a broad question. He was talking about us, the world, the firm, my family, our past, our future. But I couldn’t think past the tide of feelings. They may have gone back out to sea for the moment, but they’d be back. If I knew anything about emotions (and I didn’t know a damn thing but this), they’d be back.
“Let’s slip around the side and go to my place,” I said.
“You’ve got a crappy track record of sneaking out of here.”
“This time I have you with me.”
He smiled and shifted a strand of hair from my face. “You do. You have me.”
He kissed me with the passion of a promise. We stood and walked off the beach together.