The Beresfords Read online

  The Beresfords

  Christina Dudley

  BellaVita Press

  Bellevue, Washington

  The Beresfords

  Published by BellaVita Press

  Bellevue, Washington 98004

  www.bellavitapress.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Christina Dudley. All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design: Kathy Campbell, www.gorhamprinting.com

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  Print ISBN 978-0-9830721-2-6

  For my mother

  Chapter 1

  “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

  “…Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14)

  I was fourteen when Satan devoured my cousin.

  He disguised himself as a nineteen-year-old college co-ed named Caroline Grant. And he made the devouring process so pleasant that it took Jonathan a long, long time to feel the teeth behind the smile.

  I exaggerate, of course. A little. But I saw things then in the stark shades of adolescence, right and wrong, black and white. Jonathan was the Hero of my unfolding life, and if Caroline Grant was the one to topple him from his pedestal, she must therefore be the Villain.

  To be fair, I guess if I weren’t so Jonathan-focused, I would have to admit Caroline Grant was no worse than her brother Eric, and that, between the two Grants, Satan succeeded in taking down all my cousins and very nearly me. Did that make her brother Beelzebub?

  It was not Jonathan, but Tom who opened the door to it all. Tom was the oldest of the four cousins I grew up with. Jonathan was a year behind him, and then came the girls Rachel and Julie. I was younger even than Julie, so when I came to live with the Beresfords years before, I did not disrupt the family hierarchy. If anything, my age reinforced my low position. Made me even more invisible.

  But I was saying: it was Tom who brought the Grants into our lives on a June afternoon that looked like any other. Rachel and Julie and I were out back in the pool, along with Rachel’s boyfriend Greg. Julie floated in the lounge chair, Ray-Bans on, radio turned up just enough to make Rachel and Greg think they had some privacy. Those two were nestled in the corner at the four-foot end, cooing at each other, Rachel trying discreetly to tug her one-piece lower because she wasn’t allowed to wear a two-piece. “It’s a tough decision,” Greg was saying, “but my parents want me to go to college. They say education’ll last me forever, no matter what happens. I dunno. The coach was cool. He said he liked my game sense. He said I’m the most natural he’s seen in a long time. If I can just keep my g.p.a. up, it’s a done deal.”

  Julie let out a snort, her opinions on Greg’s intellectual prowess being public knowledge when he wasn’t around. Rachel ignored her. “That’s amazing, Greg. Not every guy gets to choose between a minor-league contract and a top university. And it’s not like you won’t get even better in college. The scouts will keep their eye on you.” Greg Perkins was her trophy boyfriend, the biggest catch at the high school since Tom graduated. Star athlete, flashy car, money, looks. Julie said Greg was the kind of guy who spent the rest of his life remembering how great high school was, but Rachel said she was just jealous.

  Had I been a different sort of person, Julie might have enlisted me in ridiculing her sister’s boyfriend, but despite being nearest in age, she and I had never been close, and when I picture myself then I can hardly blame her. There I was, skinny as a string bean, flat as a washboard, pale as an albino, quiet as a shadow. Julie on the other hand, two years my senior, had come into her Beresford beauty. Like her brothers and sister, she was now tall, athletic, confident.

  I was picking leaves and sticks and Band-Aids out of the pool filter, calculating how much longer Jonathan would be, driving home from Westmont. If he’d packed up and gotten on the road by ten—ten-thirty, even—it’d be another couple hours. Three hours, max. Where would he be right now? Past Coalinga? When the last piece of detritus was extracted, I slid the cover back on and looked up. And saw a strange girl by the steps.

  She was small but curvy in her fuchsia bikini, with dramatic dark eyes and hair that stood out against her olive skin. At a time when every teenage girl was getting spiral perms for maximum volume, enviable natural curls crowned her head. I thought of my own lank locks, lanker still for being wet, and gathered my too-long legs to my chest to hide my ungainliness. She was watching the sisters’ interaction, the hint of a smile curving her mouth. Just as her gaze wandered to me, the sliding glass door opened. “Hey, Caroline, that’s where you got to,” called Tom. “Found her, Eric.”

  Out came my boisterous oldest cousin, a six-pack in each hand and a bag of Cheetos crushed under one arm. Behind him was a shorter guy, trim and dark, carrying a bucket of ice.

  Thus here, in the space of a minute, were two red flags:

  (1) The bikini. We were a churchgoing, conservative family, at least as regarded outer appearances. Which meant, as I mentioned, that one-piece swimsuits were the rule. I could tell by Rachel’s and Julie’s expressions that the Beresford side of them thought this “Caroline” might as well strut around naked, while the girl side of them was consumed with envy.

  (2) The beer.

  a. Tom was only twenty and thus under the legal age for drinking in California.

  b. If Tom was only twenty, then we, his younger family members, were absolutely positively under the legal drinking age, as was the guest in our home Greg.

  c. Tom had picked his first college in Colorado specifically for that state’s drinking age of eighteen and how long he imagined it could hold out against the National Minimum Age Drinking Act.

  d. Tom was later removed from said first college by Uncle Paul because he’d been doing too much partying.

  e. Uncle Paul was now in China, bringing a new manufacturing facility on line, and therefore not home to keep an eye on Tom.

  “Everyone, this is Eric Grant and his sister Caroline,” announced Tom, nestling the beer in the ice Eric set down. “Grants, meet my little sisters Rachel”—pointing—“and Julie, my cousin Frannie, and Rachel’s squeeze Jake.”

  “Greg.”

  “Greg, I meant.”

  Eric waved and Caroline said, “Thank you for letting us invade your pool party.”

  “The more the merrier,” said Julie. She lowered her sunglasses a fraction and looked over them like Tom Cruise in the Risky Business poster. “Are you guys in college, too?”

  “Too?” echoed Tom. “I wasn’t aware you were in college, Julie.”

  She glared at him. “I meant in college with Tom here.”

  “We are,” answered Eric smoothly. He sat on the lip of the pool and swung his legs in. “I met your brother in Music Appreciation class where we learned the fine points of opera and the finer points of the Easy A.” Leaning over, he spun the radio volume up on Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and sang along, jerking his chin to the beat.

  “Eric is hopeless,” said Caroline, dropping gracefully down beside him. “My mother despairs of his tin ear.”

  “I’ll have the last laugh, though. I’ll be employable, while you’ll be lucky if you get your own subway tunnel to perform in.” Eric raised his eyebrows at the girls in mock horror. “Caroline is a Music major—vocals and harp, if you can believe it. I told her she should at least pick an instrument that orchestras need more than one of.”

  “Oh, I have my career plan fully mapped out.�
��

  “Let me guess, Care—you’re going to steal a page from Mom’s book and build a comfortable life off alimony checks.”

  “If I can ever find the right man to divorce.” She gave Tom a sidewise glance, but he was popping open his first beer. “At least that plan would show initiative,” Caroline laughed. “I think your ambition is to be a kept man.”

  We’d never heard conversation like this before, and you could see us all draw nearer, like neighboring stars being sucked into a black hole. Even Rachel abandoned her boyfriend in the corner to float over.

  “I think the harp is gorgeous,” Rachel volunteered. “I would love to hear you play. I sing myself—Julie and I both do,” she amended, when she heard another of Julie’s snorts. The sisters were frequent soloists in the senior youth choir at church and the high school’s glee club.

  “Don’t you hate how older brothers always cut you down?” said Julie, right next to Caroline. “Tom is forever giving us a hard time.” While this was absolutely true of Tom, I thought it not true at all of Jonathan, her other older brother.

  Caroline gave Tom another playful look, but this time he was tossing Cheetos up and catching them in his mouth. “I can’t say if that’s how older brothers behave, but it’s certainly true of my younger brother.”

  “Younger by seven minutes!” objected Eric.

  “All the same. Younger is younger. Grant me my seven minutes of superior wisdom.”

  Eric shook his head, throwing Rachel and Julie a rueful look that both begged their sympathy and made them laugh. “We younger ones have to stick together. Only you two can imagine what my life has been like. But for me it’s been worse because I always had Caroline in my grade—usually in my class! I couldn’t even go off to college without her there.”

  “You keep him out of trouble, I hope,” said Rachel to Caroline.

  “No, no—that’s beyond my seven minutes of experience and wisdom! Eric does exactly whatever he pleases, like taking up with your brother here.”

  “What do you mean?” protested Tom. “Grant was the one copying off of my notes.”

  “For all the good it did me,” Eric said. “They’d be like, ‘Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro exemplifies…’ And I’d say, ‘Exemplifies what?’ And Tom would say, ‘Man, I don’t know—that’s where I fell asleep.’”

  “You were the one throwing the parties,” said Tom. “It’s not my fault I fell asleep in class. At least I got my ass there, man.”

  “Your ass, Beresford, but you left your brain back at the dorm.”

  The raillery continued, and if anyone noticed that a fourteen-year-old just out of the seventh grade (long story) was sitting there hearing all these inappropriate things, it didn’t slow them down any. Tom and Eric talked more keggers and highs and hangovers, pranks (streaking naked across campus) and missed classes and near-misses; Caroline pretended to chide them, but it was clear she witnessed plenty of these adventures live and in person. When the beer was finally gone and Tom and the Grants took themselves off somewhere, the curtain closed on the show and Rachel and Julie put their heads together for a detailed analysis.

  “She’s so cute and funny,” Rachel said. “And small like a little doll.”

  “I hope Tom doesn’t date her and then break up with her because it’d be fun to have her around,” Julie agreed.

  “Even if he did, she doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who would go all dopey over Tom. Not like that one who kept coming around his senior year, remember? Crying and saying she might kill herself?”

  “She said that?” I asked, forgetting myself.

  Rachel and Julie had forgotten me, too. Julie scowled and went on like I hadn’t spoken: “Oh my gosh. Chantelle. Yeah—she was such an idiot. Caroline probably wouldn’t do that. You can tell she has healthy self-esteem. But did you think she was serious about all the girls liking her brother? I mean, I didn’t think he was that cute or anything.”

  “Oh, no,” said Rachel quickly. “He was too short—barely taller than me.”

  “And he didn’t play any sports but some tennis,” Greg added in a mulish voice. Like a spectator at an Eric Grant tennis match, he had done nothing but look on for the past couple hours. The rapid back-and-forth of the conversation left him struggling a beat behind, throwing his two cents’ in after the others moved on. After a few unsuccessful tugs on Rachel’s arm to tear her away, he gave up and spent the time punching a beach ball straight up in the air, counting how many consecutive hits he could get before it touched down.

  “He had nice eyes,” Julie said, in her best, let’s-be-fair tone. “Eric Grant.”

  “I guess,” said Rachel. “But I still don’t think he’s cute.”

  “Smart, though. And pretty funny.”

  “Yeah. But not cute.”

  “Not that it matters,” persisted Julie. “It’s his sister Caroline who I really like.”

  “Uh-huh. Me too.”

  “Let’s invite her to come swimming again.”

  “Definitely.”

  “I suppose that means we have to invite Eric, since they’re twins and all, but it seems weird to invite a college boy over.”

  Rachel tossed her head. “For you, maybe, since you’re only going to be a junior. But I’ve graduated now. It’s not so weird for me.”

  “You’re graduated, but you haven’t gone to college yet,” said Julie irritably. “But, still—you totally could invite Eric Grant all you wanted, and he wouldn’t think it was weird, you know, because you already have a boyfriend.”

  Rachel’s mouth clapped shut. She didn’t answer.

  They left it at that and fell into thoughtful silence, Rachel only rousing herself when Greg had to leave for baseball practice.

  And so Satan got his toehold.

  By the time Jonathan pulled up I had relocated from the backyard to the front lawn. I was showered and wearing Rachel’s turquoise hand-me-down Izod shirt and Julia’s old Jordache jeans, cut off modestly mid-thigh. My flyaway white-blonde hair was braided into submission, but as time passed without him appearing, I unbraided it to drag anxious fingers through its length. More time passed; I braided it again.

  Across the street and two doors down I saw my aunt Terri emerge, and, much as I hated to take my eyes off the road, I darted behind the oak tree closest to the front porch and waited until she disappeared into our house. Most likely she was looking for me, intent on giving me some chore, and when she didn’t find me she was sure to give my aunt Marie an earful about it. But Aunt Marie could bear it better than I at this point.

  If only he would come!

  Finally, finally, I saw his battered Civic hatchback take the corner. Uncle Paul had given each of his sons a lump of money upon graduating high school. Tom bought a flashy new Mazda RX-7 and blew through the rest going on a road trip with friends, but Jonathan got the cheapest used car he could find and put the balance in the bank. “Seminary can be expensive, Frannie,” he explained. “Dad and Mom are paying for college, but I can’t expect them to cover graduate school. Especially when I want to study something that will never lead to any money.” I was the only one who knew Jonathan wanted to be a pastor. That he had felt “called” since he was my age and went on the youth retreat.

  With one glance toward the front door and living room window—no Aunt Terri, thank God—I ran out to meet him.

  “Frannie!” He waved one tanned arm out the rolled-down window. “How’s my favorite cousin?”

  Fine—more than fine—now that he was home. I took a good, long look at him. I hadn’t seen him since Christmastime, because everyone at Westmont spent Spring Break on mission trips to Mexico. He seemed older now, more filled-out. The little highlights in his wavy brown hair and his tan made his eyes look bluer. Maybe he studied for finals outside in the Southern California sunshine.

  Despite the happiness flooding me, it bothered me to be called cousin. Why not just Frannie? And when he sprang out of the car and swooped me up in a big hug, I felt my p
ulse race and my stomach go all wobbly.

  Was this what Rachel felt when she was with Greg? I doubted it. Was this what she and Julie felt, having met that Grant person? But I didn’t want to think about the Grants now, not with my best friend here. Not just best friend—Jonathan, the best person I knew in the whole world.

  I had that one little moment with him at his homecoming, before Rachel and Julie and Aunt Terri came out to welcome him and he went in amid the hubbub to greet his stepmother. And then there were twenty-four hours before he met Caroline Grant.

  Hungry Caroline Grant, disguised as an angel of light.

  Chapter 2

  My Beresford cousins weren’t really my cousins. Not by blood, anyhow. When I first found this out, it was a blow. It also meant my aunt Terri wasn’t a blood relation either, but that didn’t come close to making up for it.

  “My brother’s family took you in out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Aunt Terri. This phrase would be the refrain of my childhood and adolescence. The goodness of their hearts. The Beresfords took me in out of the Goodness of Their Hearts.

  My aunt Marie was blood. Unlike my mother, who ran away from home when she was sixteen with Rob Carmen (who was no good, and whose name she could never say without a curse and a spit), Aunt Marie was the good girl who stayed home and went to Christian college and got married before she graduated to Paul Beresford. Wealthy Paul Beresford, wild child son of the college president. He was fifteen years older and already had four kids from his previous marriage. Some women would have been daunted by an antagonistic ex-wife and all those children—Julie was only an infant!—but Aunt Marie’s temperament didn’t allow her to get worked up about anything. That, and Paul Beresford always had enough money for full-time help, housekeepers and nannies, sitters and tutors and drivers. My future cousins realized soon enough that their new stepmother had zero ambition to parent them. She was fond of them, certainly, but not enough to bother with their upbringing. That was left to her husband’s older sister, their aunt Terri.