The Unwelcomed Child (24 page)

“How did this happen to your mother? Do you know any of the details?”

“Why is that important?” Mason asked.

“There are rapes, and there are rapes.”

“Huh?”

“Actually, my mother told me something like that. She was drugged,” I said. “She called it the famous rape drug. She was at a party when she was at college.”

“See?” Claudine told him. “That goes on everywhere. If you’re at a party, especially a party with many people you don’t know, you don’t let go of what you’re drinking, and you don’t take any drugs from anyone you don’t know well.”

“Don’t take drugs at all,” Mason said.

“Yes, Mr. Perfect,” Claudine said, and sang, “‘And he’s oh, so good. And he’s oh, so fine’ . . .”

“Stop it, idiot.”

She laughed and sat on the blanket. “Suddenly, I’m feeling a little sick,” she said. “I never imagined anything like this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. We’re glad you told us the truth,” Mason said. “Right, Claudine?”

“Yes, yes. I have to cool off.” She got up to go into the lake.

We watched her dive in and start swimming.

Mason took my hand again. “What you told us doesn’t make any difference to me,” he said. “I mean about how I think of you.” He leaned forward and kissed me. “Go on, work on your painting. I’ll just sit here and watch you. I love watching you work.”

He returned to sit on the blanket. I looked at Claudine. She was swimming laps hard, swimming like someone who had to beat the anger out of her body. I wished I knew how to swim as well. I’d probably be right beside her, I thought.

I returned to my picture, but it was harder to concentrate on it. Every once in a while, I looked at Mason to see if the expression on his face had changed while he stared at me. Had he told me the truth? Did he still see me the way he had before I had revealed my mother’s story and mine? He looked thoughtful but not disgusted. I smiled at him, and he smiled back.

Gradually, I felt myself get back into my picture. I thought of myself as an artist with magic powers. I would paint scenes in which I wanted to be, and as soon as the picture was completed, I could do just that: disappear into the canvas and enjoy the setting, the warm breeze, the sunlight, and feel I had truly escaped, even for a short time. Maybe I could even paint someone else in the picture with me, someone like Mason, and for as long as the picture lasted, we would be together, perfect, never visited by any disease, never in any danger, and never unhappy.

When Claudine came out of the water, she looked relieved. She took off her bathing cap and stood beside me to look at my picture.

“That’s getting really good. You have a talent, Elle,” she said. “Someone born with evil inside her couldn’t do something as beautiful as that, especially without any formal instruction.”

“Thank you,” I said. That did make me feel better.

She kissed me on the cheek and then went to the blanket to get her towel. Mason got it for her quickly and handed it to her, seizing her hand at the same time to draw her closer to him.

“That was a nice thing to say,” he told her, and he kissed her on the lips.

She shook her hair and playfully pushed him back onto the blanket. He yelled and tackled her, gently lowering her to the blanket before putting a handful of sand on her stomach. She screamed and threw some of it back at him. Then he turned away and came over to me.

“You want to have another swimming lesson?”

“I . . .”

“I have a bathing suit for you,” Claudine said, surprising me. She dipped into her bag and brought out another bikini. “Mason will turn his back while you put it on, won’t you, Mason?”

“Sure, but I’m not saying how many times.”

“Very funny. Elle?” She held it up. “Go for it. One of these days, you might be able to swim out here all by yourself.”

I looked at Mason. He put his hands over his eyes. I didn’t want to refuse her offer and his, not now. I put down my paintbrush, walked over to Claudine, and began to change into the suit. It was going to be my first ever bathing suit. Every new day held out the promise of something new, something for the first time, I thought.

“Looks great on you,” Claudine said. “Maybe even better than it did on me. But can’t you take off that tree log of a cross?”

I looked at it. Did I dare? I nodded, and she helped unfasten it.

“Ten pounds off your chest,” she said, bouncing it in her hand. She set it down. “Okay, Mason, you can turn around now.”

“Wow,” Mason said. “She’s right. That bathing suit does look better on you.”

“Shut up,” Claudine said. “I can say those things, but you can’t.” She turned back to me. “Most of the girls you meet in school will tell you wonderful things about themselves, and when they give you compliments, you had better be a little skeptical. Doubly so about boys. Right, Mason?”

“Yes, yes. Can we go swimming now?” He reached for my hand, and I joined him.

We walked into the lake slowly. Another flock of ducks, this flock braver, landed a few hundred yards from us. When Mason and I were nearly up to our necks, he told me to lie forward again, and again he held me up while I kicked and dog-paddled. He told me to move my arms farther out and showed me how to cup my hands. We were at it for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I realized I was swimming completely on my own. He was still beside me, but he hadn’t been holding me up.

Claudine yelled, “Congratulations!” from shore, and Mason clapped.

When I stopped, he told me to tread water and put his arms around me. We were like that for a while, before he kissed me again, and we moved closer to shore so we could stand and talk.

“What was your mother like when you finally met her? I mean, did you like her?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “She seemed like she cared about me but then almost as quickly made it clear to me that she couldn’t look after me. There was a big blow-up at dinner between her and my grandmother, and she and her new husband just left.”

“So she’s not someone you’d like to go live with if you could?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I think she’s having fun, but . . .”

“But what?”

“I don’t think she’s really that happy. She looked like she was still trying to find herself. With my problems, I don’t think I’d be so welcomed. What I mean is, my grandmother is probably right about her.”

“Wow.” He bounced in the water and looked at me. “Things will get better for you when you go to college and get out on your own. I’m sure.”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said.

“Another secret. Uh-oh.”

“No,” I said, smiling. “Nothing to do with my mother.”

“What?”

“I always wanted to go to school, be with people my age, but now that’s it going to happen . . .”

“You’re afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be. Between Claudine and me, you’ll be just fine.”

He kissed me again. I looked at Claudine. She was staring at us, but she didn’t look very happy. She looked angry again.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “I have to dry off and think about getting home.”

“Right.”

We waded in, and Claudine tossed her towel to me.

“My hair,” I said. “My grandmother saw it was wet last time.”

“We’ll stop at the house before Mason rows you back, and you’ll use my hair dryer if it’s not dry enough when we leave.”

“Thank you.”

“Come sit next to me,” she ordered, suddenly looking older. “Mason, you sit on the other side of her here. Go on.”

“What’s this?”

“Truth lessons,” she said.

“Huh?” He sat.

“Mason, since the seventh grade, have you ever looked at a girl with interest and just wanted to be friends with her like you might be with another boy?”

“What? C’mon, Claudine.”

“Answer truthfully, Mason,” she said. “You saw their little boobs, and you thought about their bodies naked, and those were the girls you really tried to get close to, right? Even back then. Well?”

I looked from her to him.

“You told me stuff, Mason, stuff I didn’t forget.”

“You’re making it sound too black-and-white,” he complained.

“For now, we have to do that for Elle, Mason.”

“She’s right,” he admitted. “The girls I was most interested in were the prettiest and the sexiest, and I wasn’t looking just to do homework with them.”

“Were you different from any other boy who reached your level of maturity, Mason?” she asked. Now she was the one sounding like a lawyer.

“No.”

“So first thing, Elle, as I have tried to tell you, is be suspicious. No boy just wants to borrow your pen or get the answer to number five on your math homework.”

“That’s not always bad, Claudine. You’re making it sound bad.”

“It’s not always bad when the boy you would like to be interested in you is the one. Just anticipate more than he will be, especially how you look,” she added.

“And why don’t you tell her how you get the boys you’re interested in to be interested in you, Claudine.”

“I will. First things first, Mason. Always beware of the boy who wants to give you something alcoholic to drink at a party or something else to, quote, make you feel good. Just tell him you already feel good.”

“Oh, like you do that,” Mason said.

“She has to be more careful, Mason. You know what we should do?”

“I can’t imagine,” he said.

“We should give her something, some X one afternoon, so she can see what it’s like.”

“C’mon, no.”

“It’s how I learned what to stay away from and what was all right,” she told me. “Mason, do you want to tell her about the first girl you had sex with and why you weren’t happy about it afterward?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Not fair. We’re supposed to be honest with her.”

He looked at me. “She’s making it sound like I’m having sex constantly. It’s not true.”

“More than most in your class. You told me.”

“Shut up.”

“Boys like to brag about what they’ve done with you, Elle, and even if they haven’t really done it, they’ll say they have if you give them the opportunity. Whether you like it or not, you’re very vulnerable, especially when other girls and other boys don’t know much about you. Whoever makes up the first story will be believed. Isn’t that right, Mason Spenser? Didn’t you get even with Pamela Thornton that way?”

“She deserved it.”

“Still, dirty pool,” Claudine said. “And you’ve shown her a little about pool.”

“The girl was making stuff up about me,” he told me. “I just got even and got her to shut up, that’s all.”

“Wasn’t that what happened with the other girl?” I asked. “The one who . . .”

“No, it wasn’t that bad. This was just silly stuff,” he said quickly.

I shook my head. “Going to school really sounds like walking through a minefield,” I said. My grandfather liked to use that expression when he talked about doing something particularly difficult.

They both looked at me and then laughed.

“Exactly,” Claudine said. “That’s exactly what it is. Especially for someone who doesn’t know anything about where to step and where not to.”

“Great, you’re frightening her again.”

“Just trying to do what I said, speed up her real education.”

“Yeah, well, why don’t we get into some of your truths, Claudine? What happened when you went out with Seth Gates last May?”

“We’re not ready for that story yet,” she said.

“Oh, sure.”

“I think I had better be getting on the way home,” I said, seeing the time on Mason’s watch and sensing that they might get into an argument.

Claudine felt my hair. “You might need my dryer. Let’s see how it is after we pack up. You know what? Keep the bathing suit on. It’s nearly dry. Put your clothes on over it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Later, you can look at yourself in the mirror and see why Mason is having heart failure.”

“Will you shut—”

She laughed.

I smiled, but then I thought, how would I ever tell them that I wasn’t permitted to look at myself in a full-length mirror? The only one was upstairs in my grandmother’s closet.

“Please help me put my cross back on,” I asked her.

Mason grabbed it first. “I’ll do it.”

“Talk about having to bear a cross,” Claudine muttered.

She was right, of course. Someday I had to take it off and wear something more like what other people wore. Now that I thought about it and about some of what they had said, I felt a new emotion. It wasn’t fear, either.

It was anger, anger that I had to live the way I was living, that I had to be so careful, and that I had to learn the things that girls much younger than me already knew. It wasn’t fair. I wanted it to end.

Maybe I was feeling more like my mother.

By the time we reached their dock, I thought my hair was dry enough. I was cutting the time close anyway and couldn’t afford to take the chance of staying longer. There was always the possibility that my grandparents had come home earlier than they had anticipated, and my grandmother had begun wondering why I had stayed out in the forest or near the lake so long, despite what my grandfather had told her about artists losing their sense of time. She could even have told him to go out looking for me by now. He could walk through the forest calling my name, panic, or go to the lake and see me with the twins. That was always a fear.