The Third Grace (25 page)

The topic of religion would come up now, Aglaia conjectured. Naomi had that earnestness usually preceding exhortation. She'd criticize her for lack of church attendance or some other shortcoming Tina might have shared. Aglaia stirred her soup as if it were still too hot and eluded eye contact.

But Naomi took her off guard. “In fact, it's Paris I need to talk to you about.”

“Paris?” Aglaia asked. This had nothing to do with religion, then? Only one option remained—the subject of François Vivier—and that made Aglaia even more leery. Come to think of it, Naomi, too, became jittery every time they talked about François in any capacity—even as early as when Naomi first heard Tina's request about the Bible delivery. But Naomi had no way of knowing about Aglaia's tryst with François, unless she could read it in her eyes or smell it on her. Maybe Naomi had guessed.

“Did you manage to track down François and give him that Bible, like your mom asked?”

“No, it was… unfeasible.” Aglaia didn't elaborate.

“So you didn't see him then?”

“Did you actually think it was possible?” Aglaia hoped Naomi wouldn't detect her evasion. “Paris is a city of over ten million people,” she said, mimicking Lou's statistic—and arrogance—to cover her own lapse of truthfulness. She sounded more like Lou every day. For many years she'd spoken just like François, she realized with a start—telling his stories to herself, using his voice. When had she lost her own?

Naomi mushed up a dumpling. “You've been standoffish ever since we got back together in Denver. Not the old Mary Grace, that's for sure.”

“Aglaia,” she corrected automatically, and was smacked back into a long-forgotten conversation two nights before the accident, when Joel came into her bedroom without knocking, and caught her kissing François, who made a quick escape.

“You're not the old Mary Grace, that's for sure,” Joel says.

“I'm more like Aglaia now,” she answers, not caring that she's changed. It's for a good cause. It's for love.

“What's with the weird names—Euphrosyne, Thalia? François is full of them.” He shakes his head. “He's using you, Sis.” Joel puts his hand out to her but she veers away from his touch, so different in intent from François's, and flings herself across the bed.

“Mind your own business.”

“You don't really know him.” Joel picks up her brush from the dresser and absently pulls out a strand of her hair as though it were a thread of gold he might use to sew a stitch. He's pensive. “People are talking. Girls are saying things about him.”

“They're jealous,” she says, but she's heard the slander, too.

“And Byron talked to me.”

“You're a gossip.” She wants her hiss to cover the truth.

“Before he left this summer, Byron said something about Naomi and François—”

“You're both stupid, gossiping old women!”

“Mary Grace—”

She gets up from her bed to open the door for him.“Get out. I'm going to sleep.”

Naomi was talking. “It's just that we used to share our burdens with one another, you know?”

Did Naomi really expect they'd be buddies again? Aglaia said, “It's no wonder I'm guarded after what you did.”

“What do you mean? I was the one who took the risk in getting this friendship back on track again.”

“You were the one who derailed it in the first place.”

“Me?” Naomi cleared her throat. “Look, I want to take responsibility for my part, but you've been so indifferent to me. With this scare Henry's given us all, I'd hoped we might lean on each other. You know, talk about things that matter.”

“Okay then.” It was time to take the bull by the horns. “Why did you leave me that summer, Naomi? You never even said goodbye.” She tried to keep her voice tight. This was the crux of the problem with Naomi that had bothered her from the time she was seventeen. Naomi had just up and left when she needed her most.

“Leave you? What are you talking about?”

“You knew I was devastated about Joel's death. Best friends don't jump ship when the water gets rough. You weren't even there for the funeral.” Her words came out ragged, misery tearing at her throat.

To top it off, besides her pain over Joel, the whole affair with François that summer was the kind of trauma teen friends were supposed to help each other through. But what would her boyfriend troubles, back then or even now, mean to Naomi anyway? If she couldn't empathize with her best friend's suffering when it came to a brother's death, how would she understand lost love or Aglaia's attempt at reinstating it again?

But Joel's words resounded in her mind: “Byron said something about Naomi and François.” If he'd been right, if her boyfriend and her best friend had been romantically involved, that would change the whole scenario. Was there any truth to it?

“Oh Aglaia, I'm so sorry. Joel's death must have been awful for you.” Naomi's eyes glistened. “I cared for Joel, too, and there's no excuse for my having moved away without so much as a word to you. I guess I was caught up in my own problems.”

“What was terrible enough to justify skipping his funeral and dropping from my sight altogether?”

A glow pinkened Naomi's face. “That's what I wanted to talk to you about, what I tried to tell you when you called from Paris and what I should have said to you long ago. Maybe we could've avoided a lot of hurt if I'd just come clean then.”

Aglaia had heard the rumors that circulated around the community when Byron followed Naomi up to the city after they graduated, the year she herself moped through twelfth grade. Everyone in the youth group knew how
close
Naomi and Byron got that year, even before they moved away, despite the purity pledge they all took under Pastor Reimer's direction. Everyone found out how fast a wedding could be planned. Were those the problems she referred to?

Naomi confirmed her suspicion. “I got pregnant early that summer and I didn't want anyone to know.” Her chin quivered.

“For Pete's sake, Naomi, it's not that big a deal these days. Byron did the right thing in the end, if that's what's concerning you.”

But even as Aglaia said these words, and as though she'd been insensible to the possibilities before, she saw afresh Naomi among the girls of Tiege pining for a wink from the exotic French student, heard again François's offhand inquiry about Naomi last week in the Tedious Beatnik Taverne: “What about your best friend… the motherly one?” Aglaia felt sick in the pit of her belly, but the discussion had gone too far for either of them to turn back now.

“Byron had nothing to do with this,” Naomi muttered. “Byron never slept with me till after we were married.”

Blood pounded in Aglaia's eardrums, knowing now why the oldest Enns boy looked so familiar. She pictured Sebastian's profile, his hair, the way he rolled on the ground of the field roughhousing with his younger, blonde brother. How had she not admitted the truth to herself before this? She didn't want to hear Naomi's next sentence but the words came at her in a rush anyway.

“Aglaia, Sebastian is François's son.”

A
glaia recoiled from the table with such force that she knocked her chair over. She ran out, almost tripping on the dog's bowl, and reached the cottonwood grove before the nausea stopped her.

Naomi gave birth to François's baby! Despite all his proclamations of love for Aglaia, François chose Naomi first!

Denial, like bile, choked her. She dropped onto her hands and knees and vomited in the grass, as she had vomited by the tractor the day she watched Joel die and vomited the day she left the farm by the side of the burning barrel.

Naomi ran out after her but Aglaia pushed away her disloyal hands.

As a youth François swore his love for Aglaia—for
her
, not for some backstabbing hypocrite who called her friend. And while François had been clawing at Aglaia in the truck on his last night in America, his child was already growing in Naomi's body. All the years Aglaia dreamed about him, François's own son was living next door to Henry and Tina. All the hours Aglaia spent reading his words in the Bible margins, the existence of François's progeny under Naomi's roof proved the lie. And during every moment she was with François last week on the streets of Paris, he and Naomi were still bound in a mutual embrace that neither time nor distance untied.

For years Aglaia had blamed Joel for chasing François away and blamed herself for Joel's death, overcome with guilt that she chose a lover over a brother, losing them both. Just when she reclaimed François again, she found Naomi to be at the heart of the blame and guilt.

Naomi pressed a tissue into Aglaia's hand and held her hair out of the way as she bent over the grass, until she composed herself and marched back to the house to rinse her mouth and sit again, rigid in her acrimony.

Naomi, standing before her, looked perplexed. “I guess you must be angry that I didn't tell you, since we were so close.”

She didn't know the half of it, Aglaia thought. Naomi's unwelcome explanation came at her in a barrage.

“It started in May at a party, the first week François was here, when everyone was gaga over him. You remember? He got in with the wrong crowd. Byron and I'd had a fight, and out of spite I offered François a ride to the party. I stayed and I guess I drank too much, but after that first time, um,
with
François, I couldn't stop. For the next few weeks, every time we got together”—her voice broke—“there was this unspoken threat that he'd tell Byron, and I think Joel had a hunch all along.”

Naomi squatted on her haunches and stuck her face up into Aglaia's, beseeching.

“I have no excuse for being loose. I knew better. I've cleared my conscience before God and Byron, but I've been so afraid to tell you. I was like an older sister, and I should've been a better example.”

“You should have kept your hands to yourself!” Aglaia spat it out.

“But you can't imagine how convincing he was, Aglaia, how he made me feel, the way he looked at me.”

She understood it only too well. Naomi was the one under an illusion, apologizing for her brief lapse of morality without tweaking to Aglaia's enduring obsession with François. Naomi seemed to think Aglaia's response was righteous indignation—not self-reproach, not humiliated disgrace.

Naomi kept talking. “When I missed my first period, I climbed our windmill and almost jumped, but Byron got to me first. He was so mad he wanted to kill François, but I convinced Byron to leave Tiege, like I was doing. When I was almost three months along, I told François but he said I couldn't prove it was his child and that he didn't want anything more to do with me or it.” Naomi pulled up a chair and her voice grew husky. “Byron eventually forgave me and said he'd raise Sebastian as his own, that he'd take the blame rather than see me suffer alone. And he helped me forgive myself. By the time we got married François was long gone. Sebastian knows the truth now. We told him last year.”

“So you got away with cheating, then,” Aglaia said.

“What do you mean? I told you Byron knows everything.”

“I don't mean your cheating on Byron. I mean your cheating on me.”

Naomi's head snapped up. The wind battered against the window, rattling the glass, and the baby in the next room made fussing sounds. Naomi opened her mouth as if to ask a question she couldn't quite articulate.

“Don't you get it, Naomi? I was in love with him—François was
mine
!”

“All the girls had a crush on him.”

“But I was the one he wanted, or so I thought.” Aglaia coughed up a rough laugh. “I was still such a good girl in the beginning, probably reading my Bible while you two were making out in the back seat of some car. Or did François drive Dad's half-ton the back road out to your place for your little orgies?” That'd be the icing on the cake, François and Naomi in the cab as a trial run for her own planned deflowering in the same vehicle weeks later. Had there been other girls in the truck?

“It wasn't like that,” Naomi protested.

But now they heard the whine of a high-performance engine; Lou was tearing up the drive. Aglaia tugged her suitcase out the door without a backward glance, stepping away from the mugginess of the kitchen and into the grit of gravel dust swirling around the BMW. She swallowed the effluence of her emotions and took a deep, arid breath before climbing into the car.

Lou's calves were cramping. Her legs needed a stretch after the long drive but she'd barely applied the brakes in front of the bungalow before Aglaia jumped in and locked the car door against Naomi's exclamations.

“Let's go,” Aglaia said.

But Naomi was pawing at Aglaia's handle and so Lou turned off the engine and lowered her own window. She was curious.

Naomi trundled over to the driver's side of the car, disregarding Lou. “Aglaia, don't leave like this. We need to talk about him.”

“There's nothing left to say.”

“I'm sorry. You were my best friend. I should've guessed.”

“What's done is done.” Aglaia's icy outrage amused Lou, but then she noted a tear forming in Aglaia's eye. What was this about?

“Please stay another night. Byron will drive you back.”

Aglaia didn't answer immediately and Lou thought her resolve to get away might be weakening, so she decided to add another ingredient to the bubbling cauldron. Apparently Naomi had some stake in the whole François affair; she should find the information interesting.

“I have a message for you two from the home of François Vivier,” Lou announced. Both women gaped at her. “I tracked him down through the Sorbonne alumni registry, attained his residential address, and placed a call to his estranged wife.”

“His
wife?
” both women shrilled in unison.

Lou found it gratifying to be the bearer of such news. “The French woman didn't want to talk to me when she learned I was inquiring after François, likely presuming I was one of his
paramours.
Her
patois
was difficult to understand and she hung up when I explained your attempt, Aglaia, to return a prized possession to François.” Lou hadn't told the wife it was a Bible—better to let her think it was something valuable. “No matter,” Lou continued, noting that, in addition to Aglaia, Naomi was hanging on every word as though the story involved her—and maybe it did. “I have the phone number here for you, if you'd like it.” But neither of them made any move for the slip of paper she held up. Lou was aggrieved, after all her effort and the time she took away from Emmanuelle to accomplish her mission for Aglaia.

“Leave,” Aglaia insisted again. So Lou put her Beamer into gear and tore out of the yard, headed for home.

Aglaia's head throbbed with information overload—about Naomi's disclosure and Byron's decency, about François's wife in Paris and the depths of his philandering, about her own willful blindness. Lou plied her with questions until she wanted to scream: What was the cause of Aglaia's argument with Naomi? Did she know if Dayna Yates, their mutual friend, planned on gracing the sociology-arts affair on Friday? Had she ever gotten through her reading—all the way to the
end
, Lou stressed—of that Bible?

Aglaia put off the queries by turning up the volume on her iPod, the most insistent questions arising from her own mind, questions she resolved to ask herself another time. It didn't take her long to retrieve reading material from her bag in the back seat as an excuse for not engaging with Lou—anything to escape the monsoon hitting her from without and within.

The Bible was worse for wear, pages ripped and a few torn completely free, so that Leviticus interjected into Hebrews, a page of the Psalms was stuck in with Romans. Aglaia ignored the pencil marks and flipped past the last down-turned page. The red words caught her eye, and she skipped through the sayings of Jesus, here and there.
You are the salt of the earth… Don't be afraid; just believe… Follow me.

That was easier said than done, she thought. How could she be tasty for others when life itself was so bitter? How could she follow what wasn't in her sights? She herself was as desiccated as salt crystals, as blind as the man with the mudpack on his eyes before he washed in the Pool of Siloam.

Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks
, she read.
This people's heart has become calloused.
Her own heart was hard, her dry tongue stilled.
Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.
What? Never thirst again?
Indeed the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life… If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink… Streams of living water will flow from within him.

But her reading wasn't helping her headache, and she couldn't clarify the meaning behind the words, now that she wasn't heeding François's interpretations. These verses were familiar from her childhood but she didn't know what to do with them anymore, staring into the mirror of them and seeing the dirt of her own blameworthiness but unable to wipe herself clean.

Lou slowed up for speed traps as they neared Sterling and said something she couldn't hear. She pulled out one earphone and asked Lou to repeat herself.

“I said I hope you aren't expecting me to stop at the hospital on the way through.”

“No, Dad and Mom will be in Denver tomorrow, anyway.” Aglaia started to replace her earpiece.

“Shall we discuss the reception Friday?” Lou tried again.

“What's to discuss? I'll meet you at the hotel at six, as we agreed.” Aglaia used a civil tone of voice as she reached for a button to recline her seat and plugged her music in again, though she turned the volume off. She was fighting tears of exhaustion but wouldn't give Lou the satisfaction of witnessing them and, so, turned her back to the driver's side and read for a while, then feigned sleep with her finger in the Bible. She didn't trust Lou—or Naomi either. She'd been putting faith in the wrong people for quite a while. Whom could she trust?

Through the slits of her lids, Aglaia watched the Great Plains fly by, the mountains appear in the distance, and (though her iPod was silent) she could swear she heard someone singing the words of the king and of the prophet and of the apostle:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart… Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord is the Rock eternal… See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone… See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.

That night Aglaia slept late in her own bed, and she decompressed all Thursday morning, wishing she had a farm rooster to stew up
coq au vin
and fill the apartment with the smells of poultry and fresh thyme. She didn't answer the phone when Lou called twice, and was glad after all that Eb had given her the whole week off, and didn't even miss Zephyr left behind at the farm.