The House on the Gulf

  Bran was shutting the front door against the stifling heat outdoors.

  “You can’t lie to me anymore,” I told Bran. “I know the truth. Mr. and Mrs. Marcus are Mom’s parents, aren’t they?”

  Bran turned around, totally startled. He seemed about to deny it, but then his gaze fell on the paper in my hand. Several emotions danced across his face at once.

  “Aren’t they?” I said again. I took one more step toward him. I shook Mom’s grades in his face.

  He slumped against the door, giving up. Giving in.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Mr. and Mrs. Marcus are Mom’s parents.”

  For a long time I couldn’t do anything but stare at Bran. I still couldn’t make all the puzzle pieces fit together in my mind.

  “Why—why didn’t you want me to know?” I whimpered. “Were you and Mom . . . ashamed of me?”

  I was working on some strange explanations in my mind. Like maybe I wasn’t really Mom’s kid, I’d been switched at birth or something, and maybe I was the real reason Mom and her parents had stopped speaking, and that was why Bran hadn’t wanted Mr. Marcus to see me. But he had seen me, he knew I was staying here. . . .

  My thoughts were beginning to make about as much sense as the National Enquirer. I just needed to throw in an alien abduction or two and my customer Mrs. Tibbetts would love reading all about it.

  But Bran was shaking his head.

  “No, no, nobody’s ashamed of you,” he said impatiently.

  “Then why . . .”

  Bran was biting his lip. He started to speak, stopped, then finally muttered, “Mom doesn’t know either.”

  “What?” I exploded.

  “She doesn’t know whose house this is,” he said, grimacing. “She doesn’t know who the Marcuses really are. That’s why I said they spelled their name M-A-R-Q-U-I-S, and pronounced it a little differently. I didn’t dare change it too much, just in case you or Mom talked to the neighbors. But I wanted to . . . to throw Mom off. You could tell—she was kind of surprised. Jolted, when she heard the name. But I’m sure she doesn’t suspect.”

  So that was why Bran had gotten so panicked about the junk mail. That was why he’d ripped the page off the Eckerd’s ad and torn the furniture ad to bits. But that didn’t explain everything.

  “But. . . Mom talked to Mr. Marcus on the phone,” I said. I emphasized the last syllable, the cus, without even thinking about it. “Didn’t she recognize his voice? Didn’t he recognize hers?”

  Bran sighed.

  “That wasn’t really Mr. Marcus she talked to,” he said. “It was this kid I knew at school, from the drama club, who always got all the old-man parts in all the school plays. I, uh, kind of set him up. I bet him five dollars he couldn’t fool my mom into thinking he really was an old man on the phone. I told him what to say. And then he almost blew it, making the old man funny.”

  I remembered how Mom had said she’d nearly laughed at Mr. Marquis saying, “Eh?” and “What’s that?” And I sort of remembered how carefully Bran had arranged the phone call: “Mom, are you available at four o’clock Saturday? No? How about Sunday afternoon? I’ll have Mr. Marquis call you” I’d thought it was just because the Marquises were busy so much. I hadn’t known Bran was trying to fool her.

  “But—why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell Mom the truth?”

  “Remember how much she hates her parents?” Bran said. “She wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with them. And we needed this house. Don’t you see how awful Sunset Terrace was? Didn’t you hear the gunshots?”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said vaguely. I was still trying to make sense of everything. I remembered telling Mrs. Stuldy that Mom’s parents had never forgiven her for eloping with Dad. But they evidently had. It had just taken eighteen years.

  How many years would it take Mom to forgive them?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted her to forgive them. I thought about the pictures I’d seen in Bran’s closet the day before—all those Christmas dinners and Easter egg hunts and birthday celebrations that Bran and Mom and I had missed. Had anyone ever looked around during those gatherings and sighed, OK if only Becky and her kids were here . . . ? Had they ever wondered what we were eating while they gobbled down their holiday feasts? Had they ever wondered if we had enough presents under our Christmas tree?

  They must have, if Mr. and Mrs. Marcus had ended up loaning us their house. But I still didn’t understand how that had happened.

  “So—did they call you because they knew Mom wouldn’t talk to them?” I asked. “Or did you find them? Isn’t it weird that we ended up in Florida, in the same town as them? Or—was that the reason you talked Mom into moving here? Because you’d talked to Mr. and Mrs. Marcus?”

  Bran didn’t wait for me to put everything together. That was a good thing, since I was having trouble thinking clearly.

  “They didn’t call me,” he said cautiously. He still sounded a little strange, but I barely noticed. I almost felt relieved that they hadn’t contacted him—that they hadn’t picked him as their emissary over me.

  “Then how—?” I asked.

  “Remember that special computer course I took last fall back in Pennsylvania? The one on Saturdays, at the college?” Bran said.

  I nodded. I remembered Bran trekking off to the college while I slept in or watched TV.

  “The teacher, Dr. Sprague, had a thing about privacy on the Internet,” Bran said. “So he challenged us to find out everything we could about him. You wouldn’t believe what’s available online. How much his house was worth, what he owed in taxes . . . Even Dr. Sprague was surprised how much we discovered. He was kind of upset, really. But—that got me to thinking. I’d always been curious about the Marcuses.”

  “So you found them online?” I couldn’t help feeling impressed. “How did you even know their name?”

  “Well, I was sneaky. I looked at Mom’s birth certificate.” Bran had the grace to look ashamed. “But it was totally innocent. I just wanted to know . . . things. I knew Mom grew up in Ohio, and I thought it was interesting that her parents moved to New York right after she left. Like, ‘Good riddance, we don’t care, don’t come looking for us,’ you know?”

  Bran still sounded awfully mad at Mr. and Mrs. Marcus, especially considering they were loaning us a house for the summer.

  “And then I found out that they had the house down here,” he said. “I started looking up stuff about Gulfstone. And that’s when I found out about the single-mothers program at the university. So, yeah, we sort of did move down here because of Mr. and Mrs. Marcus. But I hadn’t met them yet.”

  I tried to remember how Bran had acted last fall. One week in October I’d stayed home from school with the flu, and he’d come home every afternoon and play Monopoly with me. Had he been thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Marcus then? Three days before Thanksgiving, Wendy had developed a big crush on Bran, and she kept bugging me to invite her over so she could talk to him. But Bran had barely noticed her, just saying hi and bye in his usual polite tone. Had he been distracted, wondering if he should tell Mom about Gulfstone?

  I didn’t think I’d been thinking about anything at all last fall.

  I focused on putting the rest of the puzzle pieces together.

  “So when we got to Florida,” I said, “you came over here and introduced yourself—”

  I was thinking Bran must have had a lot of courage. But Bran was shaking his head.

  “No. I didn’t tell them who I was. Not, uh, right away, I mean. I just showed up and offered to cut their grass, really cheap. I gave a fake name. And then I just watched them, trying to understand . . . to understand how they could have been so awful to Mom.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I suddenly saw how it must have worked. Wonderful, reliable, conscientious Bran had won the Marcuses over. He’d melted their cold hearts. Maybe they’d said, “Young man, you’re a real credit to your parents, whoever they are.” And then Bran had said, “Well, actually, now t
hat you mention it. . .” And they hadn’t been mad. They’d been—I thought of a word that Mrs. Stuldy used—they’d been repentant. They’d probably begged Bran’s forgiveness, asked how they could make up for the past eighteen years. Probably Bran and the Marcuses had worked out the whole house-sitting scheme together. It’d been their elaborate apology.

  It all made sense, and suddenly I really wanted Mom to forgive the Marcuses, like they’d forgiven her. I wanted everybody to stop being angry. Mom would say she’d been wrong to elope with Dad; the Marcuses would say they’d been wrong to throw out her diary and tell her she couldn’t be a doctor. And then . . . then Mom and Bran and I would be part of the Christmas dinners and Easter egg hunts and birthday celebrations. I wanted that. I wanted grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I wanted everyone to be happy.

  “Bran,” I said slowly. “I think . . . I think you should tell Mom the truth. Maybe she wouldn’t be as upset as you think. It’d be good for her to know that her parents don’t hate her anymore.”

  I remembered how she’d looked telling me about her parents destroying her diary, destroying her dreams. I could tell the memories still hurt, even after all these years. I didn’t want Mom hurting like that anymore.

  “No,” Bran said, shaking his head. “You don’t know the Marcuses like I do. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But—”

  Bran pushed past me.

  “Look, you solved the big mystery,” he said harshly. “Now just forget all about it, okay?”

  As if I could.

  Bewildered, I followed him down the hallway. The way he was acting, I could tell he was about to rush into his bedroom and slam the door in my face. I’d solved the mystery, but he was still trying to hide. He still wouldn’t look me straight in the eye. Why?

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  Bran whirled around.

  “This isn’t your problem,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about anything. So don’t.”

  And then he did walk into his bedroom and shut the door in my face, but he shut it gently, almost regretfully.

  I stood there staring at the grain of the wood door. The door keeping me from Bran. The door belonging to the grandparents I’d never known, might never get to know.

  “I could tell Mom myself,” I whispered.

  I started pounding on Bran’s door.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “What if I told Mom? What if I wrote to the Marcuses, said I know who they are now? Said they could talk to me, not just you?”

  Bran opened the door.

  “No, no, don’t do that,” he begged.

  “Why not?” I challenged. I was somebody else suddenly—not wimpy Britt Lassiter who did whatever her brother told her, but an investigative reporter, a prosecuting attorney, a person who’d do anything to get to the truth.

  “It’s complicated,” Bran said.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “You have to tell me everything. Or else I’m telling Mom.” I crossed my arms for emphasis. I’d summoned up the two most powerful words a younger sister could use: I’m telling. I’d almost never had the chance to use them with Bran before. But they worked.

  “Okay!” Bran said. He gulped. “You can’t tell Mom or contact the Marcuses because . . .” His face contorted; his gaze flickered away.

  “Because?” I prompted.

  He looked back at me and his eyes locked on mine. I knew that whatever he was about to tell me, it was going to be the truth.

  “I never told the Marcuses my real name,” he said in a strangled voice. “And I lied about them hiring me to house-sit. They don’t even know we’re here.”

  If I’d been dumbfounded before, I was far beyond that now. I reeled back against the wall. I probably would have fallen down if it hadn’t been there to hold me up.

  “They don’t know we’re here?” I repeated, trying to make the words make sense. All my rosy little dreams about Christmas dinners and Easter egg hunts seemed to cave in on me. My legs buckled and I slid down to the floor.

  So I’d been wrong about something else. Even the wall couldn’t hold me up.

  Bran crouched down beside me. He was acting like a caring brother again.

  “See why I didn’t want to tell you?” he said. “I knew you’d be . . . upset. But there’s nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control. Now.”

  I thought about Bran frantically moving boxes, hiding trinkets, worrying about air-conditioning and timed lights.

  “They don’t know we’re here . . . ,” I said again weakly. “But—they’re paying you.”

  “Just for mowing,” Bran admitted. “That’s all they hired me for.”

  “But—you’re making extra money. Aren’t you? You told Mom—”

  “Mr. Marcus is paying me a higher rate over the summer. Since it’s so hot. I just told Mom that extra money was for house-sitting.”

  Bran was so calm admitting he’d lied. I couldn’t understand.

  “But I heard Mr. Marcus tell you to be careful with the key. Not to lose it,” I said. I didn’t care now if Bran knew that I’d been eavesdropping.

  “The key to the shed,” Bran said. “That’s all he gave me.” I blinked up at Bran stupidly.

  “Then where’d you get the keys to the house?” I asked. “Mom’s key and mine and yours . . .”

  “The Marcuses always kept a spare key under a rock in the backyard,” he said. “I took it and made copies.”

  It sounded like something a criminal would do. It was something a criminal would do.

  The walls of the hallway seemed to be closing in on me.

  “Bran, this is . . . wrong,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “Shouldn’t we?” he said. He stared down at me, his eyes blazing in the dim hallway. ‘And should Mr. and Mrs. Marcus have been so nasty to Mom that it made her want to run off with a jerk like Dad? Should they have refused to help out when Dad left and she lost her job and you and I were hungry? Should they be able to live it up in two houses—two!—while we were going into debt just to pay for a lousy place like Sunset Terrace?”

  I hadn’t known about some of those “shoulds.” I ached all over for Mom. But I mumbled, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Neither did three or four.

  “Don’t you see how unfair it all was?” Bran asked. “Look.” He grabbed something from my hand. Amazingly, I’d still been clutching Mom’s high school transcript. He held it up before my eyes. “Did you look at Mom’s grades? Straight As. Freshman and sophomore year. And then she dropped out. Brilliant Becky Marcus, future MD, turned into a pregnant teenager with a drunk husband. Did you know I was three years old before she managed to get her GED? And then she kept trying, kept scraping together money for college classes, kept studying while her car broke down and her boss hit her in the face and you and I got strep throat and ear infections and made her miss work and miss class. . . . Don’t you know how hard Mom’s worked all these years? How hard she’s tried? Don’t you see how this is her only chance?”

  He was so fervent his voice cracked. That seemed to break the spell his words had over me.

  “She could have waited another year or two to get into the single-mothers program,” I muttered.

  “They’re not sure how much longer they’re going to have funding for it,” Bran said. “This may be the last year they accept new students.”

  I hadn’t known that. Nobody had told me.

  “The day Mom found that out, I came over here to mow,” Bran said, and he dropped his voice low, like he was telling more secrets. “I was so mad I could barely look at Mr. Marcus. He told me about them going back North, and he asked if I could mow for them over the summer and I just said, ‘Let me think about it.’ And then when I was mowing, I happened to knock over the rock where they kept the spare key, and I saw the key lying there in the dirt, and it was like everything was meant to be, you know? I figured it all out right then, the instant I saw the key. They had a house th
ey didn’t need, and we couldn’t afford our rent and—and they owed Mom. They owed her for all those awful years she had, for everything that went wrong in her life that was their fault. They owe her a lot more than a single summer of no rent. But this is enough. This will do.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Weren’t you scared of getting caught?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t then,” Bran said. He sat down on the floor opposite me, settling into a comfortable pose. “I was so sure this was the right thing to do, I wasn’t scared of anything. But since then . . . I’ve had a few close calls. Remember that day you and I came over here, when I thought the Marcuses had left already? I checked to make sure their car was gone, but then Mr. Marcus came out the door. . . . I was scared to death you’d say something about moving into the house, or that he’d recognize you.”

  “Why would he recognize me? He’d never seen me before in his life,” I said, and I ached a little more. It was one thing to have a grandfather I’d never met. It was another thing to have stood right in front of my own, true grandfather and not known it.

  “Silly, you look just like Mom,” Bran said.

  “I do?” This made me think about myself a little differently. Mom was blond and beautiful. I was blond and easily overlooked.

  “Of course,” Bran said. “In a strange way, that made me madder than ever, that Mr. Marcus didn’t recognize you.”

  “You didn’t really give him a chance to see me, you sent me away so fast,” I said.

  But I was thinking—what if Mr. Marcus had figured out who I was? What if he’d looked at me and realized how much he missed Mom? What if he’d started crying and hugged me and hugged Bran and begged us to bring Mom to him? What if Bran had given Mr. Marcus a chance?

  Bran was shrugging off the whole encounter.

  “And then I came back that same afternoon to hide all the things I thought would give away my secret. All the family pictures lying around all over the house, everything with the Marcuses’ name on it. . . I did it in bright daylight, as kind of a test. If anyone was watching the house, if anyone was going to notice what happened here, I wanted to know then, before we moved in,” he said.