The Beresfords Read online

  Aunt Terri and Uncle Roger (whom few ever heard speak) had no children of their own. When her brother’s first marriage fell apart, Aunt Terri seized her opportunity to fill the gap. She oversaw the children’s schooling, liaised between the warring exes to set up the visitation schedule, drove Tom and Jonathan to baseball practice and the girls to ballet. For a time she even tried to light a fire under Aunt Marie—get her to do PTA or start a neighborhood book club or serve on the Women’s Ministries Committee at church. But there, an unstoppable force met an immovable object, and the immovable object won. So Aunt Terri joined the PTA herself; Aunt Terri moved two doors down and started the book club; Aunt Terri headed the church committee.

  And Aunt Terri decided something must be done about me.

  For the first several years Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie were married, she didn’t know I existed. She knew Aunt Marie had an estranged sister who was in and out of trouble, but that was it until one Christmas. The presents were unwrapped, paper and ribbons and tissue and tinsel lay everywhere, Tom stole Jonathan’s new Nerf football and was beaning his sisters with it, Uncle Paul was poking the fire and grumbling about who shut the blasted damper when that just filled the room with smoke, and Aunt Marie was plopped on the sectional with a glass of wine, two tears running down her cheeks.

  “Good Lord, Marie, have you got a cold?” Terri demanded. “Didn’t you take those supplements I recommended? I haven’t been sick a day since I started them. I keep trying to get Roger to double up the dose because he has the weakest immune system a man can have without being actually dead. Always catching every least little bug—”

  “I took the supplements,” said Marie in her mild voice. “It’s my sister. Her neighbor tells me she’s in jail again, and the child went to a foster home.”

  “What—jail? Child? What on earth are you talking about, Marie?”

  “My sister went to jail again, and the child was placed in a foster home.”

  “I heard you the first time! I just don’t have the faintest idea what you mean. What child, Marie?”

  “Beverly’s daughter Francine. I think she calls her Frannie. She’s six, maybe.”

  “Your sister has a child? Your drug-addicted runaway sister who’s always getting arrested? You never mentioned—I—but who’s the father? And where is he in all this?”

  Marie shrugged. “I don’t know if Bev knows who he is. Or if the father would want the child if she did. Poor thing.”

  Terri was dumbfounded. She sank onto the couch beside her sister-in-law, not bothering to sweep aside the mountain of crumpled paper and garment boxes. “Does Paul know about this?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What does he plan to do?”

  “Do?”

  “Do. What does Paul plan to do about it?”

  “Nothing, I guess. There’s nothing we can do about Bev being in jail. She makes her own choices. It’s probably the safest place for her now.”

  “I don’t mean Bev. No one can help her till she decides to help herself. She’s in God’s hands. I mean the child. What will we do about the child?”

  Marie only stared at her until Terri gave up and transferred her attack to Paul. “Paul, what is this about you having a niece in foster care!”

  “Awful, isn’t it? Beverly’s made a hot mess of her life, and that poor kid is the casualty.”

  “If the mother is in and out of jail, it’s just a matter of time until the child is permanently taken from her! Do you think we need to step in? Imagine Tom and Jonathan and Rachel and Julie having a cousin—their only cousin—in foster care.”

  “They aren’t actually related, technically,” Paul pointed out. “More like stepcousins.”

  “That may be, but this stepcousin is all your children have. Paul—there are so many bad stories about foster care. Girls being—well—some of those homes are not ideal. This child is six! I think—yes—maybe God put us in her life for such a time as this! We need to do something, Paul.”

  “‘We’ need to do something?” repeated Paul.

  “Yes,” said his sister emphatically.

  “‘We’ meaning ‘me.’”

  This gave her pause. “Well—yes, you. Roger and I are no relation, after all. No court is going to give the child to us. And it would be odd for her to live two doors down from her real aunt’s family. Think how unpleasant it would be to live in a quiet old fuddy-duddy home like Roger’s and mine. Almost as bad as foster care! You have this enormous house and all her cousins to play with. Or almost cousins. Besides, I am devoted to your children. Beverly’s child would fall to my responsibility whether she lived in my house or yours. You could convert the play room into a bedroom for the three girls—how fun for them to be together. Like a slumber party every night.”

  Uncle Paul cleared his throat. Once. Twice.

  Aunt Terri went in for the kill. “She’s younger even than Rachel and Julie, Paul. Think what a positive influence they could have on her. You wouldn’t just be saving a life, you would be giving the world a gift—one fewer drug addict, one more functional citizen. Yes. The three girls could share the play room—it’s so enormous—or Frannie could just have Julie’s bedroom. It’s the smaller one.”

  As it turned out, however, Rachel and Julie had no intention of giving up either the play room or their separate bedrooms to share with an unknown “cousin,” so before I came Uncle Paul had to do some remodeling. A room was carved out from the loft in the garage, and if it was a little drafty in winter or a little noisy year-round from the automatic door going up and down, I didn’t notice, awestruck as I was by the size of the Beresfords’ home. A sprawling, hacienda-style ranch house, stuccoed tan with a red tile roof, it boasted five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, a playroom, den, sun porch, and four-car garage, all set on a half acre of bowling-green lawn studded with oaks and bay trees. The swimming pool and hot tub came later, when Tom hit high school, but it was already more than enough to overwhelm the average child, much less one like me who had only known a succession of studio apartments next door to strip malls. I, who had been awed by the grandeur of the foster home from which I was plucked, the sagging half of a duplex on a busy street. No, I had no objection to the size or furnishings of my garage bedroom. My mother and I could have fit in it twice over. What bothered me was the distance from everyone else. To get to the main house or the closest of the seven bathrooms, I had to go outside and down a wooden staircase to the side door, in daylight or darkness, clear skies or rain. I never voiced my misgivings, conscious as I was from the outset of the Goodness of the Beresfords’ Hearts, but when I was about seven and had been with them for some months, Jonathan found me in the laundry room one morning, stuffing my sheets in the washer, my shoulders shaking.

  “What are you doing, Frannie? Just leave them in the hamper, and Paola will do them later.”

  I dumped two heaping scoops of detergent into the machine, but when Jonathan leaned over to look in, he straightened quickly, and I knew he detected the sharp smell of pee. Shamed, I burst into tears and would have run away if he hadn’t been between me and the door.

  “Don’t cry, Frannie,” he said. “Every little kid wets the bed once in a while.”

  I only shook my head. I never wet the bed. Not once since I was three and Mom had gotten so angry she smashed her beer bottle against the bed rail and made me clean the whole mess up—the broken glass, the beer, the soiled sheets. “I don’t wet the bed,” I sobbed.

  “But then—well—” I knew Jonathan heard my sincerity but didn’t know what to do with the evidence before his eyes and nose.

  “I don’t wet the bed,” I said again. “But it was raining hard and there was thunder last night, and I was too—too s-scared to go out to the bathroom.”

  “O-o-ohh.” He understood instantly.

  To his credit, he promptly offered to exchange bedrooms with me, but when he suggested it to Aunt Terri, she wouldn’t hear of it. “Move all that furniture and redecorate? Forget it, Jona
than! Wasn’t it enough work for your father to create that room over the garage in the first place and for me to pick the finishes and decorate it? Just be grateful, Frannie. No boogey man’s going to get you out there. And for heaven’s sake, remember to go to the bathroom last thing before you go to bed. No more drinks for you after eight o’clock.”

  Even had she not given me the advice, I would have done it on my own. As it was, my sleep became restless. A night rarely passed when I wasn’t up at least once to pee, whether I needed to or not. I never wet the bed again, and the garage room continued mine for another couple years until Tom decided it would be a whole lot easier for him to sneak out nights if he didn’t have to crawl through his window and shinny along the edge of the porch roof, hoping it wouldn’t give any loud cracks.

  But I was grateful afterward for my brief exile in the garage because it gave me Jonathan, my first friend. An ally and a guide in a strange new world.

  When I first came to the Beresfords, they found me a constant source of wonder. “You’ve never had kiwifruit?” “Aunt Terri, she’s never had kiwis! Or pesto or sushi or salmon!” “You girls have been very fortunate to be exposed to such a variety of healthy, nutritious food—” “Dad, do you mean it, that Frannie’s never been to school?” “Not even kindergarten, and she’s already six-and-a-half.” “She’ll be so dumb.” “She’ll be so far behind!” “There’s so much she doesn’t know. Aunt Terri, Frannie didn’t know what the Trinity was—” And so on.

  My mother never bothered to send me to school, changing apartments whenever someone hassled her about it, so that, at the age of nearly seven, even Aunt Terri thought me too old for kindergarten and grumblingly recommended to Uncle Paul that they hire a private tutor for the first year. If all went according to plan, I could go to first grade the following fall, only a year behind my age group. I learned embarrassment of my age and ignorance quickly, but to my girl cousins my existence was mortifying. Julie hated the way I would perch on the porch steps when she and her friends came walking home from Mission Elementary. Taller than her, all angles and elbows, my wispy white hair straggling across my bony shoulders, I looked like the scarecrow child I was. She told her friends I was her stepmother’s niece and “staying with them for a while,” which was why I wasn’t enrolled at Mission. Rachel the fourth grader took a different tack: she called me her “short bus cousin” who needed special tutoring for “retardation.” Both girls feared I waited on the porch every afternoon because I wanted to play with them and their friends, but it wasn’t the case. I was waiting for Jonathan.

  It was not that my other cousins were unkind, but Rachel and Julie were so alike, so close in age and interests, that there was rarely room for a third. (And such a third!) I would do, when they needed someone to be the child in games of House or “it” when they played tag; otherwise they left me to my shyness and odd ways. Tom largely ignored me, a boy in junior high having little in common with a held-back kindergartener, except for the occasions when he couldn’t resist teasing me for my backwardness, my flyaway white hair, my adoration of Jonathan.

  From the time he discovered me washing my sheets and I felt his quick sympathy, Jonathan was the one—not the tutor, not my aunts or uncles—I turned to when I didn’t understand something. He was the one who would quiz me on my math facts, pronounce words I couldn’t figure out, circle ones I’d misspelled, tell me the names of clouds, of rocks, of birds and bugs. Despite his patience, school would never be my strong suit. I loved to read once I learned, but there my brilliance ended, if it could be called that. I really think I loved reading because I could hide there. In the world of books I was not the awkward, ignorant, poor daughter of a drug-addict, dependent for everything on the Beresfords. And without that motivation to escape myself, other subjects eluded me. I had no head for numbers, no intuition for science, no hand for penmanship, no instinct for spelling. If I remembered things, it was not for the facts themselves but because Jonathan taught them to me.

  As for my actual benefactor, my uncle Paul, I found him altogether unapproachable. Big, gruff, serious. When I look back on him, I think he must have dreaded that his children might go through a wild stage similar to his own. To forestall this, he maintained strict order, leaning too far in the direction of rules and the outward appearance of obedience and respect. We all toed the line, but Tom and the girls chafed particularly and gave vent to their feelings in Uncle Paul’s absence. And as Uncle Paul moved up the corporate ladder over the years, those absences grew more and more frequent.

  Between my two aunts I greatly preferred Marie. Certain expressions and mannerisms of hers reminded me of my lost mother, but in Marie they were softer and slower and never held danger for me. Aunt Marie rarely initiated conversations or showed me physical affection, but neither did she rebuff my attempts to speak to her or push me away if I came to lean against her. She loved me as much—or as little, depending on your perspective—as she did her stepchildren.

  I tried to keep my distance from Aunt Terri. Not from fear of rejection but because she was all too present. “Your special tutor is expensive, you know, Frannie, but your uncle pays for her because it is the right thing to do. The least you could do is work harder.” “Why don’t you want to take ballet or gymnastics with Rachel and Julie? Is it because you’d have to be in the beginner class, and they’re in the Advanced? You would catch up in time”—this, with a doubtful look at my scrawny limbs. And, “For heaven’s sake, stand up straight! The way to feel confidence is to act confident. If there’s anything I can’t bear, Frannie, it’s your tendency to skulk around. That, and the mumbling. Please e-nun-ci-ate. If you have something to communicate, it’s your responsibility to do it as clearly as possible. Your listeners shouldn’t have to make out what you’re trying to say.”

  I wanted to please Aunt Terri at first. Or at least to keep her off my case as much as humanly possible. But even when I gave up on pleasing her, I obeyed to show my gratitude to the Beresfords. I worked harder to learn; I attempted ballet, gymnastics and soccer until I was excused from them and allowed just to watch; I stood up straighter when my aunt looked at me and spoke to her in the ringing tones of a diction coach. I’m not sure it helped her hear me any better.

  I think only two people ever heard and understood me throughout my childhood, and one wasn’t even human. No matter if I mumbled, if I shrunk into myself—I could always count on Jonathan to make out what I was trying to say.

  Jonathan, and God.

  Chapter 3

  The Beresfords were churchgoers. As I mentioned, Uncle Paul’s father was the president of a Christian college when Aunt Marie was enrolled, and while Uncle Paul had been something of a black sheep growing up—wine, women and song all playing prominent parts—he was tame enough now. There were no family prayer times or Bible readings or that sort of thing, but more Sundays than not found us in church and every Christmas Uncle Paul put a big check in the offering basket. He would never say anything so embarrassing as “the Lord” or “a personal relationship with Jesus,” but when he said we children should grow up with “values,” he meant ones garnered in places where the professionals would use such language.

  So, along with my education, my posture and my elocution, Aunt Terri took my salvation upon herself. She regretted not being able to teach my Sunday school class, having already volunteered to lead Rachel and the other fourth graders, and had to make do giving me memory verses and quizzing me on the stories I found in the thick brown Children’s Bible. I was particularly fascinated by the picture of Solomon’s Judgment: the two women before him laying claim to the baby, Solomon’s arm upraised—“Let the baby be split in two and one half given to each”—a look of satisfaction on the false mother’s face and despair on the true’s.

  “Aunt Terri, do you think King Solomon would really have cut the baby in two?”

  She frowned at the illustration, three vertical lines forming between her eyebrows. “Of course not. That’s why they say he was wis
e.”

  “But what if both women acted sad? What would he have done then?”

  “Well, both women weren’t sad, Frannie. The woman who was lying would rather they both lose than for the true woman to win.”

  “But why would the woman who was telling the truth want her baby raised by a mean liar?”

  “She didn’t, Frannie. It was the lesser of two evils. ‘A living dog is better than a dead lion,’ as the Proverb goes.”

  “But—”

  “For heaven’s sake, you’ll understand when you’re older. Now what do you remember about Solomon building the Temple?”

  But the despairing woman haunted me. I thought of her twisted robes, her hands clasped to her chest. I brought the problem to my cousin. “Jonathan, why would the woman want her baby raised by a mean liar?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t she keep telling the king that it was her baby?”

  “Because the other woman would have kept telling Solomon that it was her baby. It was no use, Frannie. But she would rather know her baby stayed alive than see justice done.”

  “Even if her baby became a mean liar like the bad woman?”

  “Not everyone becomes like the people who raised them.” He paused. I knew he was thinking of my own mother. “I guess she trusted God.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She trusted that, even if she couldn’t watch over him anymore, God would. And that God loved him even more than she did.”

  Jonathan’s ideas about God were thoughtful, strangely personal. To him, the Almighty was more than a concept, more than just a distant country about which we memorized facts. As far as I knew, Rachel and Julie considered God as they would any other subject—they learned what they were taught and that was enough. God was Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died for our sins, and rose again three days later. End of story. And Tom—if Tom knew or subscribed to any or all of the above, he kept it to himself.