Local Girl Swept Away

  “Dad keeps asking me if I know what a huge responsibility it is to be a father. I do know, or at least, I can imagine. I know I’m not ready for it, but I don’t have a choice. If I turned my back on them, I’d feel guilty forever.” His eyes latched onto mine. “I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I, Jackie?”

  The truth pounded away in my chest. “Oh, Finn. You can’t ask me.”

  He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.” He smacked the palm of his hand against the steering wheel. “It’s going to be weird between us now, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve been my friend for so long. More than a friend. Is that over?”

  I took a bite of my bagel so Finn couldn’t see my chin quiver. “I think it is. I think it probably is.”

  • • •

  At lunch I sat alone at a table in the back of the cafeteria. The story of Lorna’s reappearance was spreading through the high school like an oil spill—a jangle of excited voices rang through the room. Finn was surrounded by his basketball buddies who were bombarding him with questions. Charlotte and Lucas sat at a table with her Drama Club friends and everybody there was in a manic frenzy too. Lucas looked like he’d been hit in the head with a board, his eyes a little loose in their sockets. Had Char told him, or had he heard it from Finn?

  A few kids said things to me too, things like, “Pretty amazing about Lorna, huh?” in answer to which I just smiled and said, “I know.” I knew, all right. I knew more than I ever wanted to know. If only I could un-know it. If only I could go back in time to Friday and have it all turn out differently. If only Charlotte was still my new best friend, Finn was still an impossible dream, and Lorna . . . Lorna was still dead.

  Obviously, I was the queen of the jackasses for thinking I’d be off better if Lorna had stayed dead. I didn’t really want her dead, just gone. Why couldn’t she have stayed in Maine or Boston? Why did she have to come back here and ruin everything? Now I’d have to live without her even though she was right here. And it looked like I’d lost Finn and Charlotte and maybe even Lucas in the bargain. Maybe I’d even lost Elsie, now that she had that broken bird to care for right in her own house, not to mention a granddaughter on the way.

  I tried not to think about Cooper at all, though I couldn’t help wondering if I’d ever be able to trust my instincts about anyone again. Every time the scene between Cooper and Lorna replayed in my mind—and it was on an endless loop—I felt nauseated all over again. He was the one person Lorna loved, but he didn’t love anybody. Which, of course, included me. The only thing that made me feel a little less like an idiot was that he’d fooled Lorna too, and that wasn’t easy to do.

  Finally the school day was over. I passed Finn in the hallway and he gave me a quick, sad smile. No doubt that would be the new normal for us.

  Then, just as I was turning away from my locker, Lucas appeared beside me, a scowl on his face. “What the hell, Jackie? Why didn’t you tell me? You told Charlotte before you told me! I was there, Jackie! On the breakwater. I deserved to know!”

  I opened my mouth to defend myself, but I had no words left. He was right. Every decision I’d made lately had been a mistake. A groan started from somewhere so deep inside me that I felt it before I heard it, and then the tears gushed down my face, right there in the hall where every gossipy snoop could see.

  Lucas’s eyes went wide with panic. “Hey! Come on, Jackie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you . . .”

  I couldn’t seem to stop sobbing so he took me by the arm and pulled me into an empty classroom. I fell into a desk chair while Lucas dug through his pockets and came up with a handkerchief.

  “Here. It’s clean.”

  Still crying, I looked up at him and said, “You, you, have a han, a handkerchief?” For some reason it suddenly struck me as hilarious that Lucas, the backwoods hiker, should be carrying around such a thing as a clean, white, pressed handkerchief, and that was enough to turn my sobs into gulping giggles. Halfway between crying and laughing, my emotional upheaval quickly turned into a monumental case of the hiccups.

  “Simon always makes me carry one,” Lucas said. “I mean, he doesn’t check to make sure or anything, but he always put one in my pocket when I was a kid and I just got used to it.”

  “I love Simon,” I said, as I dried my face with the cloth.

  “Jackie, look, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, hiccupping. “I deserved it. I’m just having a bad day.”

  “A bad day? I thought you’d be ecstatic. Lorna’s back!”

  I nodded and a few more hiccups escaped. “Yeah, well, things are weird. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. She didn’t want me to. She wanted to do it herself. You heard she’s pregnant?”

  “Yeah. Finn told Charlotte the baby’s his. Which is a huge relief. I mean, I sure don’t want to be somebody’s daddy at eighteen!”

  “Even if the baby is Lorna’s?”

  Lucas looked surprised. “Are you kidding?”

  “You said she was your miracle.”

  “Yeah, she was my fantasy, but I could never deal with the reality of her. I mean, she made us all think she’d died! It was just an elaborate joke to her, like the bear running off with her father’s leg. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad she’s alive. Hell, I’m thrilled. But I don’t know what to think of her anymore. Bottom line, I’d much rather have a real girl like Charlotte than some daydream about Lorna.”

  It was the first hopeful thing I’d heard all day. “I’m glad you and Char are together, Lucas. She’s great, isn’t she?”

  “I think so.”

  “I miss her.”

  “Well, God, Jackie, why were you so mean to her? She thinks you abandoned her all over again, just like the first time Lorna showed up. She’s unbelievably mad at you.”

  “I know. I screwed up. When I found Lorna again, I just wanted everything to go back to the way it was before, with just the four of us. I wanted it all to be perfect again.”

  Lucas shook his head. “It was never perfect, Jackie. It was always the two of us following the two of them. And I was getting tired of that, weren’t you? Anyway, things change. There’s no going back.”

  I took a deep breath and folded the wet handkerchief into a droopy square. “Will you tell Charlotte I’m sorry? I know it’s not enough, but I just want her to know.”

  Lucas smiled and took the limp hanky from my hand. “I’ll show her your tears.”

  30.

  I managed to convince my mother I was sick enough to stay home from school the next two days. It wasn’t that hard. By then she’d heard the news of Lorna’s return and assumed that my “illness” had to do with that. She didn’t ask for details and I didn’t supply any, but it didn’t stop her from denouncing Lorna.

  “Of course it makes you sick. It makes me sick too, the way she fooled all of you like that. Fooled the whole town, really. I never trusted that girl—she’s just like her mother,” Mom said as she slapped a huge bowl of oatmeal on the table in front of me.

  “She’s not nearly as bad as her mother,” I said. “Carla’s the reason she ran away.” Or, one of the reasons, anyway.

  “Don’t stick up for her! She ran away because she was pregnant and she was ashamed of it!”

  Not quite true, but I didn’t feel like arguing about it. I’d asked for the oatmeal sitting in front of me, but now I didn’t think I could get it down.

  Mom took the chair across from me. “And to think that she’s going to ruin poor Finn’s life too. Saddling him with a baby when he’s not even out of high school yet. His parents must be out of their minds.”

  Sympathy for the Rosenbergs? This was definitive proof that people could change.

  “They’re dealing with it.” I dotted the cereal with raisins and sprinkled more brown sugar over the top.

  “I bet she planned the whole thing, pregnancy and all. I wouldn’t put it past her. I wouldn’t be surprised if that baby isn’t even Finn’s.”

  My spoon stood up
straight in the thick cereal. “Why do you suddenly hate Lorna so much?”

  “Why are you still defending her, is what I want to know? She lied to all of you! She was always a schemer, always trying to get the rest of you in trouble. Oh, she was a lot of fun, I could see that. She had that wild energy. I always figured as long as Finn and Lucas were along you wouldn’t get into too much trouble, but I never trusted that girl. I never did.”

  “Hindsight is 20/20, Mom.”

  “Well, I hope your eyesight is good enough now to see her for what she really is. So you don’t get taken in again.”

  “She’s not the devil. There are worse people.” Worse people? That was all I could come up with in defense of my best friend?

  “Well, none, I hope, that you get involved with!”

  Thank God she didn’t know how close I’d come to getting involved with someone much worse. The sugar and raisins couldn’t completely disguise the porridge I suspected Goldilocks would turn down, but I ate half a bowl anyway. My mother was watching.

  • • •

  On Thursday I went back to school. The excitement around Lorna’s return was somewhat back-burnered by then because of a traffic accident the night before involving several students. Updates on their conditions varied depending on the source, and rumors ran wild. It was only broken bones, not tragic enough to take my mind off my own problems, but I was glad that the student body was no longer focused primarily on Lorna.

  I kept to myself, which wasn’t hard. Charlotte still wasn’t speaking to me, and when Lucas was with her, which was always, he stuck to the most minimal of greetings. If I saw Finn in the hall or the cafeteria, I kept my eyes on the floor.

  I told myself it was time to start thinking about my own future. I’d been so preoccupied with Lorna since she came back, my photography had taken a backseat, but I needed to get a portfolio together soon if I was going to apply early decision to RISD. The third Thursday of the month was always the JSAC Trustees Meeting, which Cooper, as the new director, had to attend, so this afternoon seemed like a perfect time to use Elsie’s photo program without running into him. I couldn’t imagine what I’d say to Cooper when I saw him again. It was bound to happen sometime, but the longer I could put it off, the better.

  I wandered through the gallery before settling down at the desk. My pictures were already off the walls, stacked by the door waiting for me to take them home. Tomorrow morning Cooper would hang a new exhibit and my brief moment of modest fame would be forgotten. The opening had been less than a week ago, but it seemed as if an eternity had passed during these six days—the best and the worst of my life—and I wondered if my emotions would ever recover.

  The afternoon turned out to be rainy and windy, which kept most of the Fellows inside their studios, so I was alone in the office. I was relieved to feel my excitement return as I looked for the first time at the photos I’d taken at my opening. Some of them lent themselves to collage, but some were better as standalone shots. Once again, I was thankful to Elsie. Now I’d be able to show the college admissions committee that I could photograph people as well as landscapes.

  I cropped and printed a shot of Finn and Rudy bent head to head over the cheese platter, looking solemn but united, and another one of local painter Selena Foster backing Billy into a corner, her fingernail pointed right at his eyeball. Both photographs thrilled me. They were dynamic and moving and told stories. Of course my cloud pictures told stories too, but maybe it was time for me to look away from the sky for a while, to take a closer look at the people standing right next to me.

  There were also a number of very dark pictures that I took from inside the gallery looking out toward the parking lot. The resolution wasn’t good, but the outdoor lights threw shadows on people’s faces, which the program allowed me to manipulate in interesting ways. The more comfortable I became with the software, the more I appreciated it. I wasn’t so much manipulating the reality of the photographs as it was finding deeper truths that weren’t immediately obvious to either my eye or the camera’s.

  At first I didn’t think the dark pictures would be usable. The program could lighten and sharpen them, but, even cropped, I didn’t like the composition of most of them. I kept tinkering with the lighting just because it was fun to use the program, and all of a sudden I recognized one of the faces that had been highlighted by an outdoor lamp. It was Cooper, and he was leaning over a much smaller woman, her face in shadow. I went back to look at the other pictures in that series and I realized Cooper was in a lot of them, but I couldn’t make out the woman. It looked like she was wearing a lavender JSAC T-shirt. Was it one of the new Fellows?

  Had Cooper been hitting on somebody else right in the middle of my opening? Would I ever stop being astounded and appalled by his nerve? I brought up the clearest shot of him with the woman and zoomed in, adjusting the brightness and contrast as much as possible until I could clearly see his cocked head and luminous smile. And then, finally, the pixels arranged themselves so the face of the second person emerged too. For a minute, I couldn’t breathe. Cooper Thorne was leaning down to kiss Tess Rosenberg.

  It’s possible I sat there for ten minutes without moving, paralyzed by the extent to which I didn’t want this to be true. If I’d fallen under his spell at seventeen, why should it surprise me that Tess, at thirteen, had also been spellbound by his insidious charm? And Cooper, unbelievably, had taken full advantage of it. Finally, I roused myself, printed out the evidence, and stuck it in my backpack along with the other photos.

  Then I started to move fast. It was still raining steadily, but I hardly noticed as I ran down Commercial Street, dodging pedestrians. By the time I got to the Rosenbergs’ house, I was soaked.

  Lorna answered the door, barefooted. Her hair, clean now and shining once again, was caught in a high clip at the back of her head, and she was wearing a pale pink cardigan sweater I recognized as Elsie’s. We stared at each other a moment and then she took a step back and said, “Come in,” as if it were her right to issue the invitation.

  A puddle immediately formed at my feet as I stood in the marble-floored foyer. Even on such a cloudy day, the Rosenberg house with its white walls and windows on the bay was bright and cheerful.

  “Did you want to talk to Finn?” Lorna asked. “He went out to—”

  “No, I want to talk to Tess. Is she here?”

  “Tess? Yeah, I think she’s up in her room.”

  I kicked off my soaked shoes and shrugged out of my dripping raincoat, leaving them in a pile by the door.

  “Why do you want to talk to Tess?”

  I looked right into those bright eyes that thought they had everything figured out. “She’s next in line for Cooper. After you and me.”

  For a few seconds Lorna’s face didn’t move at all, not the tiniest muscle. Then slowly it began to fill with outrage. I’d shocked her for a change, but I wasn’t taking much pleasure in it.

  She tried to pull herself together. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

  “You know exactly what I mean. You can stop lying—I know everything. I know Finn is not Lucy’s father, and I know it was Cooper, not Carla, who wanted you to have an abortion.”

  Lorna grabbed my arm and looked around frantically. “Jackie, please! Rudy’s in his office down the hall.”

  “I didn’t come here to give away your secrets. Although maybe I should—I don’t know.”

  The hard outer layers of her face seemed to have been peeled back to reveal the unblemished girl who lived beneath. I remembered that child. When Finn and Lucas and I hid from her behind the trees, it was that girl who thought she’d been abandoned. I’d felt guilty then.

  Lorna took my hand and led me into a small alcove off the entryway where we couldn’t be heard. “I can’t believe Cooper told you. Have you . . . been with him?”

  “Sort of. It was just starting. I never slept with him. And now I have proof that he’s been coming on to Tess too.”

  She winced. “I
thought I was special to Cooper. He denied it but I didn’t want to believe him.”

  “He didn’t tell me. I went to his house last night and heard you talking. I was outside the window.”

  Her eyes blinked wide. “Eavesdropping?”

  “Kind of a minor crime, don’t you think? Considering.”

  “You heard everything?”

  “Enough. I know Cooper’s the father. He’s the one you love, isn’t he?”

  She looked down at her belly and pulled the pink cardigan tightly over her breasts. “He’s the only one. Ever. I didn’t even know what Finn was talking about when he used to say he loved me—I didn’t know what the word meant until Cooper. I wish I still didn’t know.” She looked so powerless I couldn’t bear it. I had the urge to shake her, to hug her, to remind her who she was. If Lorna could be defeated, what chance did I have?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I get it. I thought I loved him too.” But I was only playing with the idea, wasn’t I? I never felt for Cooper what I did for Finn.

  A corner of her lip turned up in an almost-smile. “Cooper’s the male version of me. Kinda crazy, a little bit mean, totally dangerous.”

  “Lorna, did you get pregnant on purpose?” By now I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. I wanted a way to hold on to him, to make sure he didn’t leave me. I should have known a baby would do just the opposite. I mean, look at my own father.”

  “And you ran away because he wanted you to get an abortion.”

  She nodded. “I kept thinking, what if Carla had had an abortion? If she’d listened to my dad, I wouldn’t even be here. I mean, she’s a crazy bitch, but at least she didn’t scrape me out of her uterus. I couldn’t do it. But I had to protect Cooper—I didn’t want him to lose his job because of me. That’s why I slept with Lucas—he was my backup. I knew people would assume it was Finn’s kid, but if for some reason that didn’t work out, if Finn didn’t believe it or something, well, Lucas was in love with me too, and I figured maybe he’d step up to the plate. He was my insurance. The more people it could have been, the less chance anyone would suspect Cooper. But then, the more I thought about it, I decided if Cooper wasn’t going to be Lucy’s father, I didn’t want anybody else—I’d just go away and do the whole thing by myself.”