Mine to Tell (12 page)

“It’s not ‘some other guy,’ ” I began, but he’d turned from me, his back to me as he held himself stiff, walking away. “It’s just Kyle, my neighbor,” I said. But he kept going. I could see the tension in his back. I could see it weaken as trembling took over his posture. He was struggling, fighting to go and let go when I knew he wanted to stay.

“Trevor!” I shouted. He walked faster. He didn’t look back. He strode down the road, crumbling as he went.

I backed against Julianne’s house and watched him. Surely he’d change his mind. Surely he’d go to my parents’ and they’d help him calm down. I backed through the doorway. He was nearly out of sight. A tiny figure melting into the dusty road, very little distinction between it and its background. I left the door open in case he returned. I looked at the wadded piece of paper on Julianne’s floor. Its haggard appearance reminded me of Trevor.

I picked it up and carried it to my sofa. Dropping onto the cushion, I smoothed the page across my leg and saw Trevor’s handwriting, almost illegible abortions of his normally clear cursive.

“I can’t go through this any more,” I read aloud. “It hurts too much to have you so far away, to have the wedding in limbo, and to see you changing. You’re not the girl I asked to marry me. I don’t even know who you are.”

I looked around the room, tears filling my eyes. He was right. I didn’t know who I was, so how could he? I was trying to find out, though. Wasn’t it better to do that now, before two strangers tied the knot, rather than afterward? What if the person I truly was wasn’t someone Trevor would want to be married to? My logic was good, it was sane and sensible, but it didn’t erase the agony I saw on Trevor’s face. As I glanced back down at his letter, I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to be the girl we had both imagined me to be. He would be happy if I just acted like her so we could continue the way we had been, a comfortable life for him, his few needs being met. He didn’t understand that to marry now, as I was, would be a death blow to our marriage. He’d be married to a figment of his imagination and not a real person at all. He’d marry a Julianne. My logic was right, but it couldn’t stop the pain.

“You can keep seeing that skinny guy who was at your house,” I read out loud again. “It breaks my heart, but you’ve left me no other recourse. Plenty of opportunities for both of us out there. Guess we should move on and find that special one who can make us happy, right? Yeah, right, I hope your new lover rots in…” I didn’t read the rest. I folded it the way he had, into a tight ball, and threw it across the room. I wasn’t angry at him. I was angry at me. I should have gone through Julianne’s life years ago. I should have answered these questions when I still lived at home, not now, not on the cusp of what was supposed to have been a marriage. I should have been Kyle’s friend as a child and asked and found answers then, with him.

I leaned back on the sofa and let my new single status wash over me with the tears that were rolling down my face. Being without Trevor was terrifying, something I hadn’t really considered. A ripple of panic shot through me, a sudden urge to run to my parents’ house and plead with him. We were used to each other, knew each other’s patterns. We’d been a couple, and now I was just a half.

I jumped to my feet. I slipped on my shoes and dashed out the door. It would be faster to drive, but I couldn’t. I had a head of steam from my panic, and I ran like I did in junior high track, pumping, worrying, hurrying down the road as if I could catch him, tell him “let’s try again,” and that I was sorry. Alarm mounted as my oxygen levels waned, my adrenal system giving me false energy and negative emotions at the same time. My heart, which pounded furiously to keep my legs in motion, silently urged me to slow down, to stop, to go back to my house and think this through. I didn’t listen. I ran. Ran like a bear was behind me. Ran all the way to my parents’ house and into their yard.

“Good going,” Paul Junior spat at me from the empty driveway.

“Where’s Trevor?” I gasped through heavy breaths.

“He’s gone. And if you think
I’m
upset, you should see Mom and Dad.”

“He’s gone?” I bent over, dragging in wind and praying Paul Junior was wrong.

“He’s history now. Hope you’re happy with Kyle the wienie. I warned him about Kyle. Now he’s seen for himself. You just remember Trevor’s still my friend, no matter what you did to him.” Paul Junior wheeled around and stormed toward the barn.

I drew in a deep breath and ran to the house. Mama jumped as I pushed through the door. “Where’s Trevor?” I asked with short gasps. “Is he really gone?”

She didn’t answer. She was patting her chest to still the fright I’d given her, but I could tell he was gone.

“I need to use your phone,” I panted as I rushed past her and reached for the phone.
I’ll leave a message at his apartment. He’ll get it. He’ll…
My fingers were throbbing with the pulse of my heart, jittery from the panic, everything making Trevor’s number elusive. Mama recovered and grabbed the phone from my hand.

“What in the world? Is your house on fire? Are you calling the police?”

“No,” I sputtered, bending forward to lean on the table so I could breathe. “Trevor.”

Her face changed, alarm subsided and judgment took its place. “I see,” she said coldly. “What were you doing with Kyle at your place?”

“Nothing!” I tried to scream. “Just give me the phone.”

She held it out of my reach and her eyes pinned me back. There it was. The look they got when they talked about Julianne. Only now it was for me. I’d done the unthinkable in their eyes, and they didn’t even know—or care—about the truth. I righted myself. My heart rate slowed as I stared back at her.

“Trevor’s a nice young man,” she said, her voice strained. “He would provide well for you. You could make him happy. You need to get all these silly notions about your great-grandmother and that house out of your head and behave properly. Are you ready to do that? If you are, then you can call him.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t need the phone.” I did need it, or at least I thought I did. Just not this way. Not under compulsion, not as a Crouse woman. I turned to go and heard her seat the phone back in its handset with too much force.

“Well you’d better need it soon,” she warned. “And you’d better talk to him right.”

I closed their door behind me.

Chapter 18

“I am weary with my sighing; every night I make

my bed swim, I dissolve my couch with my tears.”

He came. My John came for me, but they did not let me go with him. He stood by my side. He was noble, he was strong, he was sensible as he spoke with them, but I saw it. I saw the despair in his eyes, I saw the heart that was being rent in two. I held his hand and swore I’d never let go as I watched him. It was as if something reached inside the two of us and latched onto our souls and ripped them out, leaving us worse than empty, leaving us like those who scream from the blackness of their sealed tombs.

He offered to cover their debt for my hand, but it shamed them. They had enough humiliation being bound to Isaac. To be bound to the son of their old friends was too much. They couldn’t. Not even for me.

My mother cried. My father looked as if he would rather tear out his own heart than mine, but he didn’t. Maybe it was Isaac’s presence, his nearness we could not rid ourselves of, that kept my father in chains. Isaac came, not as a tyrant, but stern as a man of God, a man who knew what was his right and he stood on it. He was not brutish when he spoke, but neither was he warm. My mother said he was an older man with a family, a man looking for a wife, a man who preached, a man who seemed to be of great hard faith. Her tremors told me what I knew was more true. He was a man who had bought my parents. I avoided him, escaped his glances, shunned his attempts at conversation.

John told me Isaac would be cruel to me. I clung to his arm when he whispered such things. Isaac watched us, his face serious, his eyes searching and ever mindful of those of us around him. I looked away from him. Even if he was a man of God, I only wanted to see John.

Father finally insisted John go. He told him nothing would change, I had been promised to Isaac before God, and our silly promises to each other and our little pretend ceremony bore no weight, meant nothing, just two people playing a game that was over. John stood against my father, he claimed me as his own and said the love he had for me was not silly, not a game, and not the result of gross mismanagement of finances or lives. My father hated what John said, it flashed ashen and red across his face as he ordered the son of his old friend out. “Julianne comes with me,” my darling had said. He took my arm and drew me toward the door. I stumbled out behind John, my mother’s tears loud behind us.

“I’ll have them,” that staid voice said as we passed. I stopped, nearly yanking John over. “And so will God if your mother and father break their word to me.” Isaac stood outside my parents’ front door. He didn’t move and his face was without expression, like a worn statue that held its place by the power of its weight. He must have known John was at his breaking point or that my father was telling him to leave. I looked into Isaac’s eyes for the first time, tiny channels of black bored through watery green irises that wouldn’t cry. My heart stopped, my mother’s sobs tearing it in two. How could he do this to them? I wanted to scream my question, pound it into his hollow breast, but his eyes stopped me, eyes that held onto their God-given right and demanded of me how I could do this to them.

I looked at John, desperate. I whispered his name, tears turning my voice to water. He looked back at me, and I saw his heart the moment mine was reflected in his eyes. He loved me and he would break his own before he destroyed mine further. I watched his face twist as he drove the dagger that hurt him so into his own breast.

“I won’t do this to you,” he whispered. He moved near, his chest brushing mine, his fingers around my face. “I won’t tear you in half. I won’t take you away in pieces. I want all of you, and that’s how we’ll have it.”

He stepped from me, backing away. “No,” I whispered. He raised a finger to his lips, his eyes red and watery. I saw he wasn’t leaving me, yet he was. “No,” I said louder as he moved farther away. My mother stepped to my side. I felt her trembling, and I could hear her muffled sobs. John held my eyes as he nodded toward my mother.

“You need to go,” my father said to him from behind me.

John stopped then, as the battle to salvage me waned. I saw it in his face, the desperation to run back and snatch me from here and make me his own. My mother’s sobs crushed me; my father’s strained hoarseness broke my heart. With one last look at me, John turned. He hurried away, taking my heart with him.

“No!” I screamed. I broke from my mother’s arms only to be stopped by stronger ones, my father’s and Isaac’s. One set quivering, the other thin and grasping. John paused, but when my mother cried louder he moved on, tall and straight, too straight, trying too hard to make his legs move forward. I watched his strength drain as he moved farther away. By the time he was out of sight, he was small, weak, and a part of the horizon.

“John!” I fell to the ground, my father’s arms letting me slip, the others holding on. I shrugged them off and tumbled forward into the dirt. My tears made mud beneath my face while my body convulsed with pain. I was not ashamed. I was wounded. John would come back or I would go to him. Surely this would be settled. It was in his eyes. He wanted to take me with him, but not this way, not with me grieved over my mother’s and father’s plight. This would soon be settled. But still I sobbed, incoherent utterances of pain spewing into the dirt. The feet near me slipped away. “Farther,” I whispered to them. “Go farther away.”

Chapter 19

“For it is not an enemy who reproaches me…

it is you…my companion and my familiar friend,

we who had sweet fellowship together.”

I walked to my parents’ house at their bidding to eat with them, something we did fairly often, but something I knew I should do especially now that I’d been eating so little on my own recently. My mother had served us well all these years, feeding us wholesomely and tastily, and my stomach growled for the first time since Trevor had called off the wedding. As I neared their home I realized what a beautiful evening it was. Crickets and other small creatures serenaded me from the ditches and pastures, promising me that all was well and my world would be as it should someday. A whip-o-will cried invisibly from the nearby woods, heralding in the evening with its melodic call. I paused and listened, wishing for a moment that I was a poet instead of a journalist, someone who could find the words to do justice to the picture of a wounded heart framed by this beautiful farmland.

My articles so far to my newspaper had been received with relish, my editor writing often, begging for more. As fragments of the truth I was uncovering eked out, my story of Julianne had evolved into a love tale, something on the order of Romeo and Juliet, and the readers back in Cincinnati were devouring it. To Cincinnati, Julianne was an unknown woman who had loved and suffered with passion. To my parents, she was just an unknown, safely tucked away in their history. I let them believe that, protecting her and them behind the lie that nothing had been published yet except the chronology of a young woman’s progress restoring an old house.

I walked up the steps to their kitchen door and let myself in, taking in the heavy aroma of freshly baked bread and roasted chicken. “Oh, Mama, that smells so good.” I swept into the middle of the room with my head tilted back and drew in all of the wonderful odors of home. Mama said nothing. No one did. I righted my head and looked around.

My mother shoved a tray of our best silver into my hands. “Here, go set the table,” she commanded. Confused by her abruptness, I turned toward the dining room and stopped short as I looked into the glaring eyes of Paul Junior.

“Excuse me,” I said, starting to brush around him. It was then I saw Trevor, silent and stoic, frozen in place. I whirled to my mother who looked quickly away, bending over to draw her bread from the oven. I turned back to Trevor, the tray of silver biting into my ribs as I gripped it against me.