Mine to Tell (23 page)

“I wanted to see you,” I said, not giving way to apologies, defenses, or clichés that worked as ice breakers. He’d touched me once when he’d defended the house I was now living in. I was hoping it had been for reasons better than proving he wasn’t a bastard child. It had to be.

He nodded. He studied the table between us.

“Grandpa,” I began, but I stopped when he looked up.

“I didn’t want you to open up that house,” he said dryly, his voice cracking.

He was the one who had left it there intact, defended it, had never been quite as embittered as Simon. I looked at him, knowing there were silly arguments that I wouldn’t say. They would start the disagreement I didn’t want to have. We didn’t need to argue. We needed to agree. I waited and said nothing.

“This wasn’t the right time.”

“There’s a right time?” I asked.

“Would have been,” he said.

“Grandpa, you need to tell me what you mean. No one’s ever said anything good about your mother or that house. How can there be a right time to open it up?”

He ran his hands over his face, the dry skin of his palms raking over the stubble of white whiskers. He looked exasperated, worn from being lost for too long. “Maybe there never would have been. Maybe I’m wrong.”

“I’ve started it now, Grandpa. I’m sorry if it’s the wrong time, but maybe it will turn out to be right.” I stood and walked to his side. This time I put my hand on his shoulder. “She was okay, Grandpa. We’ve nothing to be ashamed of, because I don’t think she did anything that warrants it.”

He sat there letting my words and my touch go into him, his face softening, his eyes like those of a little boy who remembered a loving touch.

“There are things you don’t know,” he finally said, his words watery as he looked away.

“You could tell me,” I offered. I stopped myself from squeezing his shoulder and begging him.

“Not now.” He kept his head turned as he focused across the room.

“It’s okay, Grandpa. I’ll see you later.” I lifted my hand from his shoulder, knowing the touch he was fighting would remain. Julianne was with him, too. Maybe he was why I had to open her house. For her son, the second man she’d ever loved. I opened the kitchen door while my grandpa continued to stare at the far wall. I closed it behind me as I left.

Chapter 41

“Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children,

on the third and fourth generations.”

He no longer touches me. I’m relieved in many ways, but because of this loss he feels toward me, his anger has increased. Are men so passionate that their expression of it must be so strong? Can’t they reason within themselves and find an avenue of less intensity? Can’t they reason with each other, or their wives, or with God, and find some less volatile release?

I’m sorry for Isaac, but I cannot make his choices for him. I made my own. Even when passion ruled my heart, I chose. I chose to be gentle. I chose to allow myself time to hurt, to grieve, believing that was a way to heal.

In his fury, Isaac still shouts to me from the pulpit. No longer am I afraid of his words. I’ve faced my guilt and given up my shame. Now I see the truth and understand forgiveness. I went forward one Sunday after one of his fiery sermons. No one had ever gone forward before. He was shocked, as was the congregation. But I went forward to settle my errors, seek forgiveness, find cleansing and a right heart.

He summoned an elder to the front with the wave of a hand as I knelt before the altar. The elder shuffled forward and knelt beside me, and I felt his hand on my back. He said nothing. I was already praying, whispering my regret, spilling out my pain, exchanging my sorrow for what I hoped would be relief. I don’t know where Isaac was. Embarrassed, maybe, that a pastor’s wife would suddenly repent, making her life and his look like a mockery.

I finished praying. I’d confessed my adulterous attitude, my wrong attitude toward my husband. The elder stood and slowly moved away. I could hear the congregation slip out, silence hanging heavy in the small sanctuary. I was alone, on my knees. Not really alone, though. Not any more.

~*~

“That’s why she used the Bible,” I said, confounded. “She wasn’t making a mockery of Isaac’s giving it to her when he demanded she repent. She wasn’t mocking him at all.” I marveled at the brilliance, the miracle of a woman healed. Kyle looked equally bemused as he sat at the opposite end of my sofa, the two of us going over the decoding he’d done while I was away. “It makes the question all the more intriguing now,” I finally said, breaking into our silence. “Why would a woman leave who’d found relief with God? Certainly not for something scandalous.”

Kyle didn’t readily agree. He wasn’t judgmental, either. He just sat there allowing Julianne to tell her own story the way she wanted to, ready to accept her for whatever path she took as she found her way.

“You’re right,” I said, understanding his silence. I felt a tremendous weight lift off me. I wasn’t responsible for her. No one was, except she and the Redeemer she’d found. I was overwhelmed with a glimpse of the freedom she must have felt, the freedom to suffer, to make mistakes, to hurt, to defend herself, to say she needed help, and to finally step forward without the burden to have to please anymore. She was free to walk or fall, and whatever she did, her value would remain the same.

“Tell me about John and Chicago,” Kyle said. I hadn’t done that yet. I’d returned home and visited my grandfather. Then I’d settled myself for the rest of the day, torn over my grandfather and Julianne, wondering if the agony I saw in him had looked the same in her. Then I’d gone to my parents the next day and told them it was Trevor who’d exposed Julianne, not me or the newspaper. It hurt me to say that, because it was a knife to their hearts. They’d loved him and taken him in as their own, and now he’d betrayed them in a most brutal way. I didn’t tell them I’d told him to stay away. It seemed wrong, once I saw the hurt on their faces. I couldn’t feed that hurt. They would end up like him, like Isaac, if I did, and I didn’t want that. This was their choice, not mine, and now I wished I had left it that way.

“John married a woman named Ellen shortly after he’d written my great-grandmother that he was going to marry,” I said to Kyle. “I saw the church they were married in and learned the names of their two boys who were baptized there.”

Kyle was attentive, a glimmer in his eye that said he could imagine vividly everything I was telling him. Seeing that, I slowed down and elaborated about the church, the feel of the antiquated sanctuary, describing just how I thought it must have looked, felt, and smelled the day John married.

“And I saw the home they lived in,” I added next, my voice reflecting the awe I’d felt at such closeness to John. “It’s still standing, still in use, in fact, and charming. Large, especially for their day. An elderly woman lives there now. I thought she was deaf or maybe uncognitive when I first told her who I was, but when I said John’s name she came to life, brought me inside, and told me the rest of what I know.”

A normal person would have scooted to the edge of his seat at this point, waved his arms frantically to draw out the rest of the story. But Kyle just sat there, no urgency at all. It was as if he already knew what I was going to say and he was letting me spill this whole tale for my sake, not his. I cocked my head and gave him a narrow look. He grinned.

“Go on,” he said.

“That woman’s not part of John’s family, but she showed me their names on her deed. Those old deeds are like history books. They tell a story rather than just list a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo.” Mumbo and jumbo weren’t words I normally used. I was a journalist, after all, and we didn’t allow ourselves the leisure of using words that were non-specific, lazy ways of avoiding detail. I reddened.

“So you read the deed?” he asked.

“It was amazing. I skimmed the history before John’s name appeared. It told when he bought the house and a bit about the government at the time, who was who. But that wasn’t the amazing part.” I wondered how I had managed to keep this to myself for so long. The shock over my family’s trauma, Julianne’s exposure, my grandfather’s agony, and Trevor’s cruel betrayal had effectively sidetracked me. “What surprised me was the next section of the deed. The people who took the house after John and Ellen. Apparently John wasn’t involved in the sale, only Ellen, and because of that the document said she had no rights without him.”

“It didn’t say he died,” Kyle stated, rubbing his chin, and I figured he was asking.

I shook my head. “No, it didn’t. He just wasn’t involved, so maybe he did die. She left after the house switched owners, and I don’t know where she went. It happened quite a few years after they’d moved there, so the kids would have been older, maybe even leaving home by then.”

Kyle leaned back on my sofa and thought. I let him, wondering what was going through his mind, what pieces of the puzzle he was correctly deducing in that uncanny way of his.

“I found one of his sons,” I said eventually, “and that’s who I was planning to see when I left for Cincinnati instead. I don’t know that he would even have spoken to me, but I was going to try.”

“When did the house sell?” Kyle asked.

“March 1917,” I said.

He stood and walked across the room to my desk, where Julianne’s letters were stacked. He picked up the next one in sequence and looked at the date.

“July 1915,” he said, waving it my direction. He carried it to the sofa and sat down again. “It’s important. Even though it’s before their house sold.”

“Read it,” I said.

Chapter 42

“The way is broad that leads to destruction…

the way is narrow that leads to life.”

July 14, 1915

Dear Julianne,

I found your name amongst some things John had tucked away in his desk. I’ve always known, without knowing, sensing you nearby even though you weren’t. I’m Ellen, by the way, I’m John’s wife.

We’ve been married for seven years, and not one of them has been without you. He’s never said your name, never mentioned you or any other woman, but I’ve always known his heart was somewhere else. And now I know it’s with you. I knew it the second I saw your name, and it was confirmed when I read your letters.

You’ve not written to him since we’ve been married, from what I can tell, and I’m not foolish enough to put our address on this so that you might resume, in case it’s a simple matter of you not knowing where he lives. My hope is that you’ve truly left him alone these several years and that I’m not just being naïve. If I am being naïve, I beg you to please discontinue all contact with John. It’s been painful having three in our brief courtship, three at my wedding, and three in my bed. I don’t think I’ve ever known my husband in any real way, and I don’t think I can bear any more of this. I fear that he can’t, either.

For his sake, for our children’s sakes, and for mine, please leave us be if you’ve any contact with him at all.

John’s wife,

Ellen Baxter

~*~

Kyle put the letter back in the envelope.

The house was quiet. Too excruciatingly quiet. “I can’t go on with this story,” I shouted, destroying the solitude. Kyle looked up at me. “It’s going to have a bad ending. I promised my grandfather it wouldn’t, and now I don’t know. I feel in my heart my great-grandmother did nothing that wasn’t justified, but the circumstances are so…so…”

“Suggestively incriminating?” Kyle finished for me.

“Kind of like that.” I glanced away. This wasn’t helping. If I had just moved here quietly and not tried to justify my actions to everyone by saying it would make a good renovation story, I could have discovered the truth about my great-grandmother and then put the story away quietly. But now…now that Trevor had exposed my great-grandmother to the world, well, to my hometown, and the truth wasn’t panning out the way I’d planned… “I may have made a huge mistake,” I said in one breath. “I should have let everyone think what they wanted and not added fuel to their fires. My poor grandpa!”

“Mine to tell,” Kyle said, breaking into my wallowing.

“What?”

“That’s what your great-grandmother said about her story, and that’s what you should call it.”

“Call it? Call what?”

“Her story.”

“I’m not going to finish it. I can’t!”

“You don’t have to finish it. She already did. All you’re doing is discovering it.”

I was breathing hard, the kind of short deep breaths you take before you hit someone. My eyes narrowed as I homed in on my victim.

“It’s not yours,” he had the audacity to continue, oblivious to the danger he was in. “It’s hers. Mine to tell. Don’t you believe she had a reason for it? Let her tell it. You’re just a vessel.”

I released an exasperated burst of air. I wanted to argue with him, but I couldn’t. He was right. Again. She wouldn’t have told her story if there was nothing to tell other than what the rumor mongers were already pedaling.

“So, title her story and publish it for her.”

“I can’t do that!” My eyes grew wide. “My family has suffered enough. They’d never approve of that. I haven’t even been able to get up the courage to ask them about letting AP have it, and my editor’s waiting for an answer.”

“You ever notice how the ones closest to you are the hardest obstacles to overcome? Or at least they create them.”

I thought of Paul Junior and Trevor and nodded. I looked at Kyle and wondered who in his family was his obstacle.

“I’ll ask them tomorrow,” I conceded in a sigh. “And I imagine after that I’ll have to burn my birth certificate and change my identity. They certainly won’t want me anymore.”

He laughed a gentle laugh and scooted over next to me. “You want to go back to Chicago together?”

He caught me off guard. Yes, I wanted to go, but with him? What did he mean by that? My female psyche kicked in, analyzing his motives, worrying whether my hair was combed. I opened my mouth, hoping the right answer would magically come out.

“Good. When should we go?” he asked, grinning.

I couldn’t believe this shy, retiring young man was taking charge of me this way. I opened my mouth again, not sure what I was going to say.