Thirty Sunsets (19 page)

I wrap my arms together and shiver.

“Your mouth’s bleeding,” Brian persists. “Did you fall?”

Mom shakes her head and mouths “
later
” to him. Then she takes my hand and leads me toward the master bedroom before firing a parting shot at Olivia’s mother: “I trust you can make yourself comfortable.”

“ … and then the ice cream was shooting out of my nostrils.”

I giggle uncontrollably.

Mom and I have lain in bed all night talking, and at some point our Earnest Conversation degenerated into full-blown giddiness.

Mom tries halfheartedly to shush me, but she’s giggling too.

“We’ve never done this before,” I say wistfully when our laughter dies down. “Just hung out and been silly together.”

Mom’s jaw drops in mock indignation. “Are you forgetting Tipsy the Tootsie Thief?”

I explode into a new round of giggles. When I was little, Mom would wake me up in the morning pretending to be Tipsy the Tootsie Thief, sneaking in to steal my toes. I always wear socks to bed (weird, I know), and Tipsy’s job was to snatch a sock off my foot and grab as many toes as she could wrangle, one by one, which made me squeal with laughter, howling as I tried to retrieve my sock while individual toes were tickled and “plucked” from my foot.

“
Tipsy
,” I say now. “What kind of name is that for a kiddie game? Tipsy means drunk, Mom.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” she huffs playfully.

And truly, I didn’t know what tipsy meant until, like, middle school. Mom’s right … she protected Brian and me with the ferocity of a Fort Knox guard, so I was always approximately a zillion times more naive than my friends and classmates. Mom and Dad never had more than an occasional glass of wine, so my only association with “tipsy” growing up was “tootsie thief.” God knows it’s been annoying as hell, being treated like a hothouse flower while my worldlier friends were explaining the intricacies of French kissing to me during sixth-grade gym class, but I kinda love Mom for it right this moment. I’m sure lots of sacrifices were involved to raise spectacularly clueless kids. Mom rose to that challenge like a prize fighter.

Her overprotectiveness was grating enough by adolescence to make me spurn tootsie thieves and other lame stabs at silliness, so the kid stuff fell by the wayside. Curled lips and eye rolls moved in to fill the void. I know, I know, that’s what teenagers do, but my stomach tightens a little with the sudden realization that my snottiness must be hard on Mom.

So it feels good to be silly with her, even at four o’clock in the morning. It’s nice to shake off the intensity of the past few hours. We’ve tackled some pretty tough topics, and we’ve debriefed about our ever-evolving feelings toward Olivia.

But as much as I’m enjoying the giddiness that’s slipped in through the cracks, there’s one more Earnest Topic I need to broach. I pull the down-filled comforter tighter under my chin.

“So,” I say, “Brian knew, and I didn’t. What’s up with that?”

Mom’s eyes skitter away. “I didn’t want
either
of you to know,” she says softly. “I wanted to create a perfect, complication-free world for you both.”

“So … how did he end up finding out?”

Mom purses her lips. “Your father insisted. He’d wanted to be honest with both of you from the beginning. Well … as honest as you can be about something like that. He said secrets always have a way of spilling out, and that you both deserved to know, and it would be easier if … ”

She clears her throat. “Anyway. He was right, of course. But I fought him every step of the way. How do you tell a precious little boy that the man raising him, his
hero
, isn’t really his father? And besides, misleading him didn’t even seem like a lie. Your father
is
his father. Brian’s more like Dad than you are!”

“So … when did he tell him?”

Mom sighs deeply. “Right around his birthday. Dad always said age eighteen was the latest he would postpone telling him. He knew how hard it would be for Brian, but he said Brian would never trust us again if he found out from someone other than us, and he wouldn’t let him start his adulthood with this albatross hanging around his neck.”

“His birthday … ” I say to myself. “Last summer …
when he started dating Olivia … when he started breaking out in rashes … .”

Mom nods, her eyes pained.

“I said to your dad, ‘See? Still think it was such a great idea?’ I’d have given anything if we could all have just gone to our graves without—”

“A few rashes, but that was it,” I say, still talking to myself. “I mean, it’s amazing Brian was so strong about it. He never said a word to me.”

“He wanted to protect you,” Mom says. “We all did.”

“So at a time when his whole world explodes into a million pieces,
he’s
worried about protecting
me
.”

Mom smiles. “That’s our Brian. Like I said: just like Dad.”

I take a deep breath. It all seems so clear now. I
knew
something was off with Brian, I
knew
it. I blamed it all on Olivia, and god knows she was a handy target at the time, but this buzz of anxiety has haunted me for months now:
Something’s wrong with my brother. Something’s wrong with my brother.
Yes. It all makes sense now.

“Was anyone ever going to tell me?” I ask Mom. “Not that it wasn’t a total delight to have Olivia’s mother tip me off.”

Mom touches my forehead with cool fingertips. “I hate that she did that. That
woman,
who couldn’t even be bothered to raise her own child, coming into
my
home and shaking up
my baby’s
world … ”

My eyes fall. “Like Dad said: secrets always end up spilling out.”

“Still,” Mom says. “I think we could have made it to the finish line with you.”

I laugh in spite of myself. “Any other secrets you were planning on taking to the finish line?”

Mom raises an eyebrow. “No, that one pretty much consumed all my energy. Well … there
was
that one time when I told you Grandma was sick so I could avoid having you go to the mountains for the weekend with Gina Preswell’s family. I’d always heard her mother had a drinking problem … ”

“And the time you told me we were buying a piano to rope me into piano lessons!”

We both start giggling again, sputtering into our fingertips.

“You are such a control freak!” I say, still laughing.

“Oh,
you
try making it through motherhood without an occasional white lie to grease the wheels,” she says.

I stick my tongue out at her and she narrows her eyes, and we start giggling again.

I gaze into space. “Think Brian and Olivia have a shot at this family thing?”

Mom sighs. “I guess we’ll find out. She’s a nice girl … she’s just so young … ”

“Not much younger than you were when you got pregnant,” I observe, glancing at her quickly for a post-facto sensitivity check.

“Exactly,” Mom says quietly. “I know too much. Even with your father in the picture, it wasn’t easy. I know their intentions are good, and heaven knows Brian will be a wonderful father. But Olivia, growing up without a mother … I do worry.”

“Maybe it’ll make her a
better
mother than she would have been otherwise,” I muse. “I mean, nobody understands a mother’s importance better than someone who hasn’t had one.”

“Mmm,” Mom says noncommittally.

“Mom,” I say firmly, “you gotta give them a chance.”

Mom waves her arm expansively around the bedroom. “Uh, hello, she’s spending the summer
in our home
. Does that qualify as a chance?”

“Not if you’re plotting behind her back.”

“Oh, enough with the ‘plotting’! Everybody’s making me sound like Mata Hari for having the common sense to explore a couple of options.”

“I have no idea who Mata Hari is.”

“Well … you should read more.”

“Yeah,
that’s
my problem: I don’t read enough.”

We start giggling again.

“I think Olivia’s gonna be a good mom,” I say after a moment. “And of course it goes without saying that I’m going to be a spectacular aunt.”

Mom taps her fingers together lightly. “Ready or not … ”

twenty-nine

I rub my eyes, squint at the clock, then gasp and jump out of bed.

One fifteen?
In the afternoon
? Have I really slept half the day away?

Yes. Bright midday sun is peeking through the closed bedroom blinds and voices waft from the family room. After a couple of minutes, I hear Olivia and her wackadoodle mother say goodbye, shutting the front door behind them.

I get out of bed, strum my hand through my bedhead, brush my teeth with my finger in the master bedroom, pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and walk into the family room.

Mom is in the kitchen, singing cheerfully despite the fact that she probably only got about ninety minutes of sleep last night. Dad and Brian are watching baseball.

They smile when I walk in. “Hi, Yogi,” Dad says.

I flash a peace sign and ask, “Where’d Olivia and Cruella go?”

“Lunch,” Dad says. “Her mom is headed back home from there.”

Brian jumps up from his seat. “Sit here, sit here,” he tells me.

I look at Dad and groan. “He knows.”

Dad shrugs apologetically.

“I just want you to get comfortable,” Brian says.

“It’s okay, Bri,” I say.

He claps his hands together. “Okay then. Wanna take a walk on the beach?”

“I’m okay,” I repeat softly. “Really.”

“I know,” Brian says, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I just feel like walking on the beach.” He eyes me warily. “Okay with you?”

I sigh. “Sure.”

He and I walk out the back door, across the deck, and down the stairs. I take a deep breath. It’s okay …
I’m safe now
.

As we head toward the ocean, I say, “So … anything interesting happen in
your
life lately?”

Brian laughs lightly and kicks the surf with his bare foot.

“I dunno … things have been pretty slow. I might have to take up bungee jumping.”

We keep walking.

“I’m so pissed that jerk put his hands on you,” Brian finally says in a brittle voice. Like Dad, he tries his hardest to sound casual when he’s least inclined to be casual.

“It’s okay. I’m fine.”

Brian smacks a fist into his open palm. “If the police don’t find him, I will. I swear to god, if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll—”

“Chill, okay?”

We walk in silence for a couple of moments, occasionally making way for a hurtling toddler or a doddering old couple all done up in floral prints and floppy hats.

“So,” Brian says when our path is clear again for the foreseeable future. “I hear the big family secret is out of the bag.”

Again with the casual.

My first instinct is to make a wisecrack, but the remark gets stuck in my throat. Brian reaches over and takes my hand, squeezing it gently. He’s still looking straight ahead, still loping along, still committed to casual. But I’m so touched by the gesture that I impulsively stop in my tracks and hug him.

And he lets me. He even hugs me back. We listen to each other swallow hard.

“You should have told me,” I finally whisper when I trust my voice not to crack.

“Nah,” he says as we pull apart. “That would have messed up my master plan: getting Olivia pregnant and having her crazy mother show up on our doorstep to let the cat out of the bag. That was definitely the way to go. Just took a little planning and patience on my part.”

I laugh and he laughs back. It feels so good to laugh.

We resume our walk, our forearms brushing lightly together. Twinkly beads of sunlight glisten on the breaking waves.

“What was it like?” I ask Brian. “Hearing the news … what was that like?”

In my peripheral vision, I see him shrug. “Kinda sucked,” he says. “Can’t say I saw it coming. It was near my birthday—right before or right after—and I thought Dad was about to launch into some kind of ‘Son, you’re a man now’ speech. Either that or a ‘By the way, have I mentioned lately that drugs are bad?’ speech.”

I laugh lightly at his totally-bogus-baritone Dad impression.

“So … what
did
Dad say?”

Brian shrugs again. “Just … ‘Son, you know how much I love you, but I think there’s something you should know … ’”