Hope Street (25 page)

“I gotta go,” he said, patting Joelle on the shoulder. “Have fun. And don’t forget that photo.”

Joelle watched him stride through the living room, mumble a farewell to her mother and Mrs. Proski and then swing out the front door. She wished he weren’t so negative about the prom and the Hill kids. He could have gone to the prom with Margie and had fun tonight, too.

If he and Margie went down to the lake, he’d probably have fun, she realized with a quiet laugh. Maybe even more fun than she and Drew would have at the prom.

S
HE DIDN
’
T GO TO THE LAKE
with Drew that night. Instead he and two of his buddies and their dates all drove to a nightclub three
towns away. Joelle was the only one of the six without fake ID, so she’d ordered ginger ale while they’d all gotten tipsy on cocktails, and she’d felt like an idiot. But to her great relief the question of whether to go all the way with Drew never came up.

Two weeks later, they were high-school graduates. Joelle had a job running the cash register at Harley’s, a convenience store where she’d worked the previous summer. She had enrolled in two classes at the community college, which would start in September. Two were all she could afford, and the light schedule would allow her to continue working at Harley’s during the school year.

Drew would be heading to Dartmouth at the end of August. He spent the hot, empty days of summer playing tennis and lounging by the pool with the other Hill kids at Green Gates Country Club. He didn’t bother to get a job. His parents provided him all the money he needed.

Bobby got his draft notice. He’d scored a low number in the lottery and college had been out of the question for him, so he couldn’t apply for a student deferment. “I don’t want to go to Vietnam,” he confessed to Joelle, “but I’m not gonna shoot my kneecap off or pretend I’m queer just to stay out. I just can’t do that.” With a philosophical shrug, he added, “At least Vietnam isn’t Holmdell. Going there can’t be as bad as staying here.”

He had a job doing maintenance at the town cemetery, mowing the grass, trimming the shrubs and clearing away the wilted flowers left by visitors. He spent most of his evenings with Margie and Joelle spent most of hers with Drew. But two nights a week she had to work until 10:00 p.m. at Harley’s, and Drew considered that hour too late for them to get together. On those nights, Bobby would swing by Harley’s in his rattly old pickup truck and drive her down to the A&W. They’d sneak into the
woods beyond the parking lot and share a joint. Once it was nothing more than a wisp of lingering smoke, they’d buy root beers and split a jumbo order of fries and they’d talk.

“You think he’s gonna ask you to marry him?” Bobby inquired one evening while they were satisfying their munchies with hot, salty fries.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to be engaged while he’s in New Hampshire and I’m here.”

“But that’s what you’re hoping for, right?”

“Yeah,” she admitted, feeling her cheeks warm. The Hill girls were all leaving town for college, and they talked about having careers and waiting until they were established before they got married. But Joelle was never going to be “established”—not unless Drew established her as his wife.

She wouldn’t mind having a career, too. She wasn’t afraid of work. Before she had a career, though, she’d have to earn a college degree. Accomplishing that might take her longer than normal if she enrolled in only two courses a semester at the community college, but eventually she’d transfer to a four-year university and graduate. Drew wouldn’t want to have a wife who wasn’t college educated.

Sitting beneath the awning bordering the parking lot at the A&W, Bobby sent her an enigmatic smile and drawled, “You wanna get yourself a big fat diamond on your finger.” He always smiled that way after he’d smoked pot, a mysterious I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile. “You wanna drive a Caddy and wear a mink and have everyone call you Mrs. Drew Foster.” Still smiling, he shook his head. “You should aim higher, JoJo. If you can get Foster, imagine who else you could get. The world is filled with rich guys. Why settle for him?”

“I’m not looking for a rich guy,” she insisted, trying not to let
Bobby rile her. “That’s not why I love Drew. I don’t put Margie down, Bobby. Don’t you put Drew down.”

She never smoked pot with Drew that summer. He preferred liquor to drugs. He seemed to believe booze was sophisticated. He preferred mixed drinks, and he liked to lecture on which brands of vodka or Scotch were the best. At least he never got smashed on a regular basis, like some of his friends.

She wished he would take her to Green Gates some evenings, but he rarely did. He would complain to her that he’d already spent the whole day there and didn’t want to go to the nighttime swim or sign up for the lighted tennis courts. Not that Joelle knew a tennis racquet from a snowshoe, but she would have liked to swim in the pool. She owned one swimsuit, but it was a black bikini. If Drew saw her in it, it might make him love her a little more.

They did go to the lake pretty often in his Corvette—but not to swim. Making out wasn’t easy in that car, since it had no backseat. She let Drew touch her breasts and even slide his fingers inside her shorts, which seemed to excite him more than her. And she touched him, stroked him, let him come in her hand. That always struck her as incredibly intimate, his spurting all his fluid onto her palms. After she cleaned up, using tissues from the portable pack he kept stashed in his glove compartment, he’d always cuddle her and tell her he loved her.

As the summer stretched into August, he began to push for more. “We’re going to be apart for months,” he reminded her. “If we did this, it would make us closer. It would seal our love.”

“I don’t know, Drew…Maybe I’m not ready yet.” Everyone was always talking about free love, but she didn’t get how anything that significant could be free. If she gave in to Drew, would he love her more or less? If she gave in to him, would she love herself more or less?

“We’re high-school graduates, Joelle. How much more ready do we have to be?”

“Sex isn’t exactly like trigonometry,” she argued. “You don’t just take a course and pass.”

Whenever they had these discussions, Drew always worked hard not to get impatient. Joelle could tell; she could see him wrestling with his temper, breathing deeply then holding her hand or wrapping his arm around her. He didn’t yell. He didn’t force. That told her he must love her.

Toward the end of August, he tried a different approach. “It would be like this gift you gave me to bring with me to Dartmouth,” he explained. “This special thing we shared that would keep us close, even when I’m away.”

“If I gave you that gift, how do I know you wouldn’t just leave and forget I ever existed?”

“Because I love you. You know I do.”

The night before he planned to leave for college, she yielded. She still wasn’t sure she was ready or if it was right, but when she imagined him traveling all the way to New Hampshire and meeting all those new, smart, sophisticated Ivy Leaguers, she couldn’t bear the thought that he wouldn’t have something of hers in his possession, something precious, something she would never give to anyone else. So she told him yes.

He borrowed his father’s Lincoln for the occasion because it had a wide, well-upholstered backseat, which Drew carefully draped with a towel because he was aware she would bleed. He brought a condom. They drank half a bottle of Chianti, the kind with straw around the base, and Joelle told him to save the bottle when it was empty and stick a candle in it, and every time he lit the candle it would be like a memory of her burning in his soul. He told her she was a poet.

Despite the wine and the towel and the car’s wide backseat, it hurt. All she felt was pain and Drew’s hot, wine-tinged breath in her face. She’d believed making love was supposed to feel good, but it didn’t. It hurt, hurt, hurt.

At least it ended quickly. Drew tore into her and pounded on her for less than thirty seconds, and then he groaned and shuddered and was done. He pulled out of her so fast the condom remained behind. That was probably the worst part of it, so embarrassing, his poking around with his fingers and dragging the condom out.

“I love you, Joelle,” he whispered. “I love you so much.”

Hearing those words soothed the awful burning between her legs. They’d made love and now they were bound forever. Because she’d given him this, he would never stop loving her.

The next day, he was gone.

J
OELLE STOOD IN THE
open doorway, a silhouette in the light from the mudroom, and stared into the garage’s gloom. Bobby watched her through the windshield. Even with her face in shadow, he could picture her features—the hollows of her cheeks, the pointed tip of her nose, the faint lines fanning out from the corners of her dazzling blue eyes. He’d fallen in love with her face when he was ten years old, sitting three rows to her left in Mrs. Schmidt’s fourth-grade class, before he’d had any idea what falling in love meant. And today, forty-seven years later, he still loved her face.

He wasn’t the sort who ran away from a problem, but as long as Drew Foster had been sitting in his kitchen, threatening everything Bobby cared about, everything that had ever mattered to him, he couldn’t have stayed. Not because Foster scared him but because he scared himself.

His father had been a violent man, and Bobby had sworn he would be exactly the kind of man his father wasn’t. But looking at Foster, listening to him calmly explain why Bobby should tell Claudia the truth about her birth, had made Bobby feel his
own father’s blood pulsing through his veins. He’d had to get the hell out.

Joelle was alone now. He knew she wouldn’t have come looking for him unless Foster had left. She’d probably made some excuse for Bobby, explained that he had a quick temper—which, in general, he didn’t—or invented some other justification for his behavior. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d just let his rage sit there in the room, simmering in the air.

He shoved open the door, swung out of the truck and walked toward Joelle. He felt the cold, hard concrete floor against the soles of his feet, right through his socks. Cold and hard suited his mood.

“He’s gone,” Joelle confirmed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was sorry not for walking out on Foster but for abandoning Joelle. He should have stood by her and made clear to Foster exactly whose wife she was. Instead, he’d bolted, leaving her alone with a man she’d once loved with all her heart.

She gave him a sad smile. “It’s okay.”

No, it wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay.

He followed her through the mudroom into the kitchen. The air smelled of coffee. He wondered if from here on in he would always associate that scent with Foster, if he would never be able to drink coffee again.

His own cup was resting in the dish rack beside the sink, already rinsed clean. The coffeemaker was turned off. Except for the aroma, he detected no sign that Foster had ever been in his house. Yet the atmosphere felt charged. The sunlight streaming through the windows seemed too bright.

In that glaring summer light, he could see Joelle’s face clearly. Her mouth was tense, her eyes tired. Her ponytail hung lopsided, brushing against her left shoulder.

“He can’t have Claudia,” Bobby said. If that SOB wanted to reach Claudia, he’d have to get past Bobby, and Bobby intended to make that impossible.

“He doesn’t want Claudia,” she said wearily. She reached for Bobby’s hand. Her fingers felt like icy twigs on his skin. “He wants her to take a blood test, that’s all.”

“That’s all,” Bobby echoed, then snorted. “How do we ask her to take a blood test without telling her why? And what if she’s a match? What do we tell her then?”

“I don’t know.” Releasing his hand, Joelle sank into a chair, propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her palms. “It’s not a simple situation.”

“It’s simple enough,” Bobby argued, dropping onto another chair. “You and I had an understanding. We based our marriage on that understanding. Claudia is our daughter. That’s the end of it.”

“His son is dying,” Joelle said, her eyes as overly bright as the sunshine pouring through the windows. “Can’t you at least have a little sympathy for the man?”

Not as much as Joelle had, obviously. Sure, he felt sorry for Foster in an abstract way. He’d feel sorry for any man whose child was at risk. Maybe he ought to feel sorry for himself, since right now his own daughter seemed at risk.

“If she had the blood test and didn’t match,” Joelle argued, “she’d never have to know.”

“Of course she’d have to know. What do you think—we can sneak a blood test past her?”

“We wouldn’t have to tell her what it was for. We could say she’s being tested to find out if she matches a distant cousin—”

“Oh, there’s a plan.” Sarcasm soured Bobby’s voice. “You’re an only child and my brother’s gay. My father’s family gave him up long ago. How’s your mother fixed for cousins? How does
Claudia wind up with a cousin?” He crossed to the sink and washed his hands, just because the whole situation made him feel dirty. “Don’t you think she’d ask about this cousin she’d never heard of? Maybe she’d even want to meet this miraculous new cousin of hers.”

Rather than commenting on his sarcasm, Joelle nodded in agreement. “You’re right. Lying isn’t going to help. It’s just that we’ve been lying all along. What’s one more lie at this point?”

Bobby dried his hands on a dish towel, buying time to consider his response. Had they been lying all along, or had they been trying to create a family? Had they been lying or simply figuring out a way to survive, a way to make life work? Had Bobby been lying from the start when he’d convinced himself he could be the father of another man’s child, and the husband of a woman who hadn’t loved him the way he’d loved her?

Everything—his home, his work, his family—had sprouted from a lie. Like a plant grown from a poisoned seed, that lie had broken through the ground and blossomed, but the roots were rotten. Sooner or later the plant was doomed to die.

“Nothing can change the fact that you’re her father,” Joelle said, twisting in her chair so she could look at him. “If I’d conceived her at a sperm bank, it would have been the same thing.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” He flung the towel aside and shoved his hair back from his face. The kitchen was too warm. The streaming sunlight was killing him. “A sperm bank is anonymous. This…” He waved vaguely toward the front door, through which Foster must have entered his house. “This was a guy you were in love with.”

“I was a kid then.”

She didn’t deny that she’d loved Foster. She wouldn’t. Now wasn’t the time for lies. Yet acknowledging that she’d once
loved that bastard—a truth Bobby had managed to avoid thinking about for years—pained him. He wished he were the only man she’d ever loved. He’d married her knowing he wasn’t, but still…the truth hurt.

“All right.” Her shoulders slumped and she glanced away from him. “What do you want, Bobby? What do you want to do about this?”

“I want to tell Drew Foster to go to hell.” Actually, what he wanted was to turn back the clock a half hour. He wanted to drive home, excited about landing a new contract—even after years in the business, every new contract gave him a thrill—and confident that when he got home, Joelle would be waiting for him. He wanted to arrive and find her finished with her housecleaning, sweaty and heading for the shower. He wanted to pull off his clothes and slip into the shower with her and screw her silly while the water sprayed down onto them.

“What do
you
want?” he shot back, dreading her answer even though he had to hear it.

She turned back to face the table and folded her hands, as though praying. “I keep thinking about how his son is dying,” she said, her voice muted but steady.

“His daughter would have been dead if you’d done what he’d told you to do all those years ago.” The words sounded brutal, but he didn’t care. “If you’d done what Foster asked back then, Claudia would never even have existed.”

“Here’s the thing, Bobby.” Her voice remained calm, her eyes dry, but she clasped her hands tighter, turning her knuckles white. “Imagine if it was Claudia who was sick today. Imagine the only thing that could save her was a bone marrow transplant from a sibling.”

“She’s got two brothers.”

“Imagine they weren’t a match.” She seemed to be addressing a molecule of air directly in front of her. “Imagine her life was at stake. If there was the slightest chance that Drew might have gone on to have other children who would be her half brothers or half sisters…You know as well as I do that we’d be hiring a detective to find him. If the shoe was on the other foot, we’d do exactly what he did.”

Bobby opened his mouth and then shut it. Joelle was right. He hated her for being right, but he couldn’t argue. If Claudia was dying, Bobby would try anything, go anywhere, destroy any family if that was what it took to cure her.

“What happened then happened then,” Joelle said. “Now we’ve got to deal with today. A young man is dying, and there’s a chance Claudia can save his life.”

Joelle’s words and all they implied enraged him. He wanted to hit things, break things. He wanted to confront the doctors treating Drew’s son and tell them to come up with some other treatment so he wouldn’t have the burden of that boy’s life pressing on his back.

He wanted to preserve his family. He wanted to protect his daughter. He wanted to keep on living the lie. It had been a good lie. It had worked for all these years.

He gazed down at Joelle. Seated, she should have looked small. But her spine was straight, her eyes clear, her chin raised. A piece of his soul shriveled inside him as he considered his choice.

If he said no, he’d lose her. If he said yes, he’d lose everything his life had been about up to this minute.

Closing his eyes, he saw red.

C
LAUDIA LIVED SOUTH OF
Gray Hill in Fairfield County. Her husband was an attorney—he made too much money to be a
mere lawyer—and Claudia had been a well-paid marketing consultant until she gave birth to Jeremy four years ago. She’d contemplated returning to work when Jeremy was six months old, but she’d been so reluctant that Gary had urged her to be a full-time mother for a few years. They could live well on his income alone. And two years later, Kristin was born.

So Claudia was still a full-time mother, though she often told Joelle she intended to return to paying work someday. “Women who work outside the home can be terrific mothers,” she often said. “Look at you. You’re a teacher, and you were a terrific mother.”

After tonight, Joelle thought, Claudia would hardly think Joelle was terrific. This was probably a huge mistake. She should tell Bobby to turn the truck around and drive home. She should forget that Drew Foster’s shadow had ever darkened her front porch.

It was too late to turn around. Seated beside her in the driver’s seat of his truck, Bobby appeared grim and determined as he steered south toward Claudia’s house. Joelle had done too good a job of convincing him that this was the correct thing to do, that Drew’s son didn’t deserve to die just because Drew and Joelle had been young and stupid.

“Claudia has a right to know the truth,” she said, wishing she could convince herself the way she’d convinced Bobby. “We probably should have told her years ago.”

“Told her what?” He stared through the windshield at the headlight beams illuminating the road. “That I’m not her father?”

“Stop saying that, Bobby. You
are
her father. Even Drew understands that.”

“If Drew understands it, then I guess it must be true.”

His sarcasm implied just how bitter he was. She hadn’t meant to cause him pain—not now, not ever. But she didn’t see how
continuing the lies would help, especially when a young man’s life hung in the balance.

Claudia should have learned about her genetic heritage years ago, for her own benefit. Better for her to find out from her parents than from some doctor should a crisis arise, like the one Drew’s son was facing.

But Joelle and Bobby had never told her. The secret had simply gotten buried by daily life. One year had rolled into the next until the truth had grown invisible, just one blade of grass in a thick green lawn.

“She’ll never stop loving you,” Joelle reassured Bobby. “You’re her daddy. She’s named after your mother, for God’s sake.”

He glanced at her. His hair was too long, but she liked it that way, a remnant of his rebellious youth. Strands of silver had infiltrated the dark waves and the outdoor work he did had weathered his face. Unlike Drew, Bobby hadn’t gone soft at all. His body was still sinewy, his jaw defiant. He’d started using reading glasses a few years ago, but even when he was wearing them, he looked tough and brimming with energy, ready to take on the world.

“Are you going to explain everything?” he asked. “Or should I?”

“I will.”

“What if she kicks us out of her house?”

Joelle didn’t want to consider that possibility. “I’ll tell her it’s all my fault. Let her blame me, Bobby.”

“I don’t want her blaming you,” he muttered. “You’re her real mother.”

And I’m not her real father.
The words lingered unspoken in the snug cab of the truck.

Joelle had already told him countless times that he was Claudia’s father. She wasn’t going to say it again. She felt sick,
her stomach clenching, her head thumping.
Turn around
, she thought, but she couldn’t force out the words.

Just as Drew’s son deserved a chance to live, Claudia deserved her parents’ honesty.

Bobby pulled into Claudia’s driveway, which led to a spacious colonial in a ritzy subdivision. The porch lights had been left on for them. Joelle wondered if this would be the last time Claudia ever welcomed them into her home. Even braced for the worst, she wondered if she’d survive her daughter’s reaction.

Gary opened the door for them. A tall, affable man, he greeted them with a warm smile. “You’re lucky you caught us home tonight,” he said as he ushered them into the house. “Saturday night we’re usually out carousing.”

“Ha!” Claudia commented from the kitchen. “We can barely keep our eyes open after 9:00 p.m. The kids wear us out.” She waltzed down the hall and hugged Joelle. Claudia resembled Joelle—the same slender build, the blond hair, thee legantly hollow cheeks—except that she had brown eyes. She’d always claimed she had her father’s eyes, but now, as Joelle peered into them, she saw Drew as much as Bobby in those mocha-brown irises.