Relatively Honest (17 page)

I stood up. They looked at me, startled. “You all right, Daniel?” Dad asked.

“It’s my allergies. I feel sort of icky. Think I’d best go and lie down.”

“Sorry, dear. I’ll make you some tea, all right?” Mum said.

“Maybe later.” I stumbled up the stairs and shut myself into my room, and leaned back against the door.
No way out now, mate. This ship’s sinking and you’re going down with it.

I closed my eyes and whispered, “Oh, Jules, please don’t hate me.”

Of course
I didn’t do anything brave like tell her myself. I cowered until she rang me on Saturday. And when she asked, “Are you alone?” all I said was, “Yeah, no one here. Drop by if you like.”

She drove over. I brought her inside the house for the first time, and showed her my room. She spent about ten seconds complimenting the view before smothering me in a kiss. Half an hour later we rested naked on my bed, with the door closed and the window-blinds pulled. The breeze through the open window pushed the blinds in and out; the pull-cord dragged along Julie’s thigh. She flicked at it. I held her and tried to think of words to warn her of what might soon be knocking on her parents’ door.

She let the cord alone and hugged me. “I thought I’d get you out of my system long before now.”

“I know what you mean.”

“But I’ve only gotten more and more addicted.”

“Me too, babe.” I said it solemnly now.

She slid out of my arms and pushed the sheet away. Her hair, damp with sweat, stuck to her forehead. She moved it back with one hand and gazed at the ceiling. “How come you’ve never told me to leave Patrick?”

“Why haven’t you left him yourself?”

Her gaze drifted to me. “I think you know why.”

My heart started thudding in my throat. “I know my ‘reputation’ might have scared you off…”

She lifted her hand from her forehead, reached out, and smoothed back a lock of my hair. “Monsieur de Bergerac,” she said, “I am…your…” She was whispering by the end, and let the sentence hang.

“What?” I said, trembling, astonished. We didn’t take our eyes from one another.

A car door slammed outside, then another, and another. Happy voices chirped back and forth – my parents’ among them. “Fuck,” I hissed, and leaped up onto my knees to peer between the blinds. Julie scissored open two blinds beside me to look too. My parents were getting out of their car in the driveway, and another couple emerged from their car at the curb. A pickup truck pulled up last, and Patrick hopped out of it.

“What’s
he
doing here?” I said. “Who are they?”

“Oh, God,” she whimpered. “My parents.”

As we abandoned the blinds and started frantically throwing our clothes on, I heard a woman say, “But that’s Julie’s car! She must be here.”

“Must have come to visit,” Mum answered. “How lovely! Daniel? Are you home?”

“Hullo, Dan?” Dad shouted.

Their voices moved from outside to inside the house. I was into my shorts, but still without a shirt. Julie had just got her bra fastened, and was buttoning her shirt up as quickly as she could, swearing with every buttonhole. I scarcely had time to think of what she had almost said to me. Footsteps thundered up the stairs.

“Julie?” called a man’s cheerful voice – her father.

“Julie?” Patrick’s voice joined in. Then, turning reverential: “This is a really nice house. Which one is Daniel’s room?”

“Thank you, Patrick! There, that first door,” said Mum, evidently just behind him. “Perhaps they’re in there? Or the garden?”

And before you could say
What the fuck is going on here?
someone was knocking on my door, then opening it. Mum’s head peeked in. “Daniel, are you here?”

Her perky smile and the glow on her cheeks slid away when she took in the pair of us: us, smoothing down our disheveled hair. Us, getting our shirts back on. Us, our lips mashed from kissing. Us, her son and her niece, alone together and speechless in my bedroom, with the blinds closed and the sheets rumpled.

I swallowed. “Hi, Mum. Yeah, er, Julie’s here, just visiting, and…”

Someone pushed the door open further. Patrick stood there, taller than my mother by a head. The curiosity he had been wearing mutated into horror. “Julie? What’s going on?”

Julie got her last shirt button fastened. Her face was scarlet. “Nothing. Can I please talk to you alone?”

“Do you know who this is?” he demanded of her, pointing to me.

“Of course I know who he is,” she said.

Meanwhile, my father and Julie’s parents – a tall strawberry-blonde man with white eyebrows, and a short curvy woman with plum-colored lipstick – had also congregated at my doorway. They all looked scandalized. Guess they knew about the old family tree, then
.
My life was officially over.

“Daniel,” my mother said, “tell me you weren’t doing what it appears you were doing – with your
first
cousin
!”

I shut my eyes.

“It’s between him and me,” Julie pleaded. “We’re adults.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. “
What
?”

She glanced at me. “So you did know.”

“Hold on.
You
knew?”

“Come on, Daniel, I know my mother’s genealogy.”

“Well, when in this bloody lifetime were you going to tell me? I’ve been agonizing over…”

“Daniel!” my father shouted.

Julie and I stopped bickering and looked at our audience.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s back up. What are you all doing here, together? Could you at least tell us that?”

They seemed to consider my question irrelevant, to judge from how they stared at us, but Julie’s step-mother finally cleared her throat and answered, “Your parents came over to visit us. They explained about us being related, and we were talking and having coffee, then Patrick came by looking for Julie. She wasn’t in, so we all decided to come over here and see you, since…” She glanced at her husband, who still looked appalled. “James and I were looking forward to meeting you,” she finished, sheepishly.

“Oh,” I said, chastened. “Indeed. Pleasure’s mine.” I stepped forward and held out my hand. She shook it, limply. I turned to James French, but he refused to touch me. I stepped back.

“Now your turn,” Mum said. “An explanation, Daniel, if you please.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “I suppose we ought to sit down and discuss this.”

“Come to the parlor. Now.” She turned away.

Our four surviving parents trailed down the stairs. Patrick lingered, eyes flinging not just daggers but whole cutlery sets at the two of us. “You’re sick,” he snarled at her. “I can’t believe you. Cheating is bad enough, but with
him
?”

“Look, Patrick,” I said. “I understand you’re disgusted, and I’m sorry you had to find out like this. But when you have an open relationship, I don’t think it’s quite fair to call it ‘cheating,’ all right?”

“We don’t have an open relationship!” he said.

“Don’t be stupid. Julie told me you –” I stopped. My shoulders drooped. I looked at Julie, who was cringing. “Oh. Is that how it is, then.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, apparently to us both.

“We are so over,” Patrick told her. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were hot. After this, I can’t even look at you.” He stormed down the stairs, ran past our parents, and flung himself out the front door. It slammed behind him. His pickup’s engine roared to life, and the truck zoomed off.

Julie and I stood at the top of the stairs. “You lied,” I said.

“So did you.”

“No, I hid the truth. You actually lied.”

Before she could answer, Dad shouted, “Daniel! Down here, now!”

I put out a hand to stop Julie. I jogged halfway down the stairs, just far enough to see the four of them. “Sorry, Dad,” I said, “but it’s true what Julie said. We’re adults. Give us ten minutes alone, all right?”

Mum rose to her feet, ready to deliver me some massive piece of her mind, but Julie’s step-mother waved her down. “Let them talk,” she said. Mum sat down, though never stopped glaring at me.

“Thanks much.” I ran back up, hauled Julie by the arm into my room, and shut the door. “All right. How long have you known?”

“Since fall term. A little before Halloween. You?”

“Halloween? Bloody hell. I didn’t find out till winter holidays. So, hang on – when I told you about the investigator after Thanksgiving, and my parents acting weird, you went right along with it and pretended you didn’t know?”

“I wasn’t sure. It could have been adultery.”

“Fine, all right. So how did you work it out, us being related?”

“Your name sounded familiar when we met. But it wasn’t because of the town in Canada. I’d done a genealogy project in middle school, and it occurred to me maybe there were Revelstokes on it. I had my dad send it to me in October. I didn’t tell him why.”

“I see. And there I was, Daniel E. Revelstoke, your cousin, whom you
opted not to tell
.”

“Oh, you should speak! When you found out over Christmas, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I, darling, was in love with you by then. And Mum told me not to ‘approach’ the delicate French side of the family, who undoubtedly hated us because of my parents jilting your mum, et cetera et cetera.”

Julie grimaced, glancing aside at the wall. “Dad used to feel that way. I’d asked him a few times if we should ever write to the Revelstoke clan and introduce ourselves. But he always said, ‘From what I’ve heard, we’re better off without them.’”

“Well. Lovely.”

“Still, he did tell me over Christmas…” She gave a dry laugh. “That since I was all grown up and going to college now, I could try contacting my biological mom’s side of the family if I wanted. He wouldn’t stand in my way. He’d even be nice to you guys, he said.”

“Yes, I’m sure he would have been the nicest man imaginable, except today he’s learned you’ve not only found cousin Daniel, you’ve been playing doctor with him for months. Which is rather the main point, isn’t it, so answer my question: why didn’t
you
tell
me
, back in October?”

“I didn’t tell anyone! Why? Same reason as you. Because I was already falling in love with you, and I didn’t know what to do. Remember Halloween? The frat party? I was trying to forget you, trying to get over my huge embarrassing crush on my own cousin! Then you made it worse by rescuing me.”

“Oh,
sorry
.”

“Then, since I couldn’t get over you, I hoped I could be one of your girls, pretending I didn’t know, figuring it would be over before you even found out. But then I wanted more. I wanted you to love me. At the very least I wanted us on good terms – especially since we’d be seeing each other at Thanksgiving in the future. So I let myself get close, and…couldn’t get far away again.”

It sounded dreadfully familiar. It wasn’t fair to be angry with her when I was equally guilty, but bitterness drenched me anyway. “Reckon I see why you didn’t leave Patrick. Needed a respectable choice to fall back on, didn’t you?”

“I was about to break up with him.” She sounded miserable. “I would have, even if he hadn’t found out today. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I haven’t loved him for ages.”

“Then what? You would’ve gone public with me? We still could.”

“No, I...I was going to confront you about the cousin issue, see what you thought.” She bowed her head, her disheveled fringe falling forward to her lips. “I still would’ve wanted to keep it quiet. Even though it isn’t incest, legally.”

“Yeah. Guess you must have looked that up too.”

She tried to smile. “We can even get married, in your country.”

“Or about twenty of the States.” I tried to smile back.

A little laugh escaped her. She wiped away a tear. “All that Cyrano ‘cousin’ stuff…”

“You played it so cool,” I said in admiration. “I was a wreck.”

“I’ve been a wreck. Inside.”

“You knew I knew. Didn’t you? What you almost said today…”

“I was pretty sure,” she said. “You’d made some remarks.”

“Same here. Sometimes I did wonder…”

“Daniel!” Mum shouted from downstairs.

“In a minute!” I shouted back. I looked at Julie. “So what do we do? Run off to California?”

She lowered her face. “Well…you and I may believe it’s okay, but we have to talk to our families.”

“I’m getting the impression they’re not chuffed. Planning to change that?”

“I’ll try, but…Daniel, they come first. I’m not going to disown them, or make them disown me.”

“What am I, then?” I pleaded. “The affair you hid from everybody?”

“Well – yes. You were that.”

“
Were
?”

“But you became more. I love you. I do.”

“And I love you, so what’s it matter what they think?”

“I don’t do things to break up my family,” she said. “It’s happened enough in our family’s past. Don’t you agree?”

Our family.
It was the first time one of us had put it like that. Disconcerting, to say the least. “Yeah, but if you and I break up, then that’s a break in the family too, isn’t it?” Miserable joke at a time like this, but a valid point in its way.

She smiled sadly. “Let’s go down and see what they say.”

I advanced, took her hands, and rested my forehead on hers. “Stay with me. Please. We can work this out.”

She squeezed my hands. “Don’t make it hard on yourself. You could have anyone.”

“What?”

She walked past me and opened the door. “Come on.”

“Jules…” I followed her, but now we were going down the stairs, and facing our four parents like they were a jury.

They stayed silent and waited for us to speak. Mum looked the worst. Her hair, normally so sleek and tidy, had got all disarrayed somehow. Dad wore a guilty sort of look (probably not unlike mine) but anger gleamed in his eyes when he looked at me. Julie’s dad, who seemed like he might be a pleasant guy in normal times, now looked ready to castrate me and fling my bleeding body into a tank of sharks. Only Julie’s step-mother seemed to carry any degree of sympathy – though she did appear to have some trouble breathing properly, which didn’t indicate the most perfect calm.

“We’re very sorry,” Julie said, her hands folded in front of her. “We both hid the truth from each other, and from you and Patrick, just to be together. It was wrong.”

“How long did you think you could get away with it?” her father asked her.

“This is a rather sick low, even for you, Daniel,” my father added.

“Come on, it isn’t so awful,” I said. “There are web pages –”

I stopped when Julie gave me a forbidding look.