Two months ago this would have astonished me. ree weeks ago, right after they finally got together, I was happy for them, if somewhat uncomfortable. Now it made me very, very angry.
“Tell us about the party,” Dad suggested. “Was your first night back with Adam everything you dreamed about?” He kissed the top of Frances’s head.
I did not even try the long, deep, calming breath this time. I already was developing a headache from grinding my teeth together. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I spied Frances’s nanny basket next to an armchair in the corner. I plopped down in the chair to explore it.
e nanny basket was a bottomless tote bag overflowing with Frances’s never-ending art supplies and random objects to teach and pacify small children. I tossed out a tennis ball, a long string tied in a circle for playing cat’s cradle, and a copy of Anna Karenina.
“Didn’t you always tell me to give away toys I hadn’t played with in a year?” I asked Frances. “ Anna Karenina has been living in your nanny basket for at least ten years, and it’s never come in handy.”
“I beg your pardon,” Frances said. “Alvin Harbarger plays with that. He looks up the difficult words in the dictionary and writes out the definitions.”
“Frances. Way to ensure a carefree childhood. Alvin is, like, four.”
“He is five.” She sounded more irate with me than she normally would have been just for messing with her nanny basket—almost as if I were barging in on her perfect date night.
OH REALLY?
Finally finding what I’d been searching for, I pulled out a sheet of red construction paper and a pair of child-safe scissors and started cutting. “Actually, Adam and I wanted some time alone, since we have been deprived of this so long. We skipped the party and saw a movie.”
“Adam sat through a whole movie?” Dad asked. “What movie did you see?”
“e Scarlet Letter.” e handles of the tiny scissors dug into my fingers, but I kept cutting. Big pieces of the red paper fell away. “I read the book in ninth grade. Did you?”
“I read it sometime,” Dad acknowledged. “I didn’t know there was a remake of the movie out.” Frances elbowed him gently. “She’s not serious, Trevor. She’s trying to tell you something.” Dad stared at me, slowly puzzling it out. “e Scarlet Letter . What happens in e Scarlet Letter ? What is she trying to tell—Oh my God!” He jumped up from the couch, dumping Frances onto the floor.
“NO, NOT THAT!” Frances and I shouted at the same time.
I tossed the scissors back into the nanny basket, fished out a roll of tape, and waggled my red paper letter at him with a wobbly sound. “It’s an I, not an A. And it’s not for me. It’s for you.” Stepping over the nanny basket and Frances, I taped the letter to his shirt. “I will make you lots of different color I’s to coordinate with all your suits and ties. Wear them in shame.”
He looked down at his chest in confusion. “What does I stand for?”
I opened my mouth to form the I word.
And something happened to me. I had never been so angry in my life. At Adam for what he’d done, at Sean and Rachel for being in the way, at Dad for putting us in this position in the first place. At myself for telling Adam I couldn’t forgive him.
I was so angry that for a second, I actually became Adam. I felt the unfairness of it all, the burden of it, living with it for weeks—or in his case, years. I understood how he could become so angry at his parents that he had to talk back to them and sabotage his relationship with me, even though he did care.
Because for that second, I was about to get grounded for the rest of the summer, maybe for the rest of the year. I was going to call my father an idiot.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Frances still on the floor, shaking her head.
Dad looked back up at me, blond brows down, growing suspicious. “What does I stand for?” he asked again.
I put my hand in the center of the I on his chest. Did he know he had ruined my summer by banning Adam and that changing his mind now didn’t help? Did he know he’d ruined my relationship with Adam forever? Did he know he’d ruined my life? My mouth still formed the shape of an I.
I opened my mouth a little wider. “Irony,” I forced out.
I took one more long, deep, calming breath, and I sighed.
And then I headed upstairs to my room.
When I reached the steps, I heard Dad say from behind me, “What’s eating her? I told her she could date Adam again.”
“And now they’ve had a fight,” Frances said. “It’s ironic.”
“I’ll go talk to her,” Dad said.
“No,” I whispered to the steps.
“No!” said Frances. “I’ll go.”
I was near the top of the staircase by then. I could have run into my room and slammed the door. I had that impulse.
But I didn’t do it. I walked into my room, sat on my bed, and waited for Frances to come up the stairs. She hadn’t even poked her head through the doorway before I started to cry.
“Oh, Lori,” she cooed sympathetically, which just made me cry harder. She sat beside me on the bed and held out her arms to me, and I totally lost it.
I never dared shed a tear around the boys growing up, even when I got hurt playing with them. I wanted to be like them, and they didn’t cry. Even if I had cried, I wouldn’t have sought solace from Frances. She was not my mother.
Or was she? I cried into her lap as if she were, and I learned what people meant by a “good cry.” As I cried, I thought about everything Adam had done to me and everything I had done to him. Offenses leveled at both of us by Sean, the Vaders, my dad, and even Frances herself in refusing to take my side. One cry led to another until I truly was all cried out. When I’d said that to Tammy a few weeks ago, I had no idea what I was talking about. I sat up, feeling empty, with a headache but no desire to cry.
“Tell me what happened,” Frances said.
I sniffed. “Adam hurt me as badly as he possibly could, and then…”
Behind her big ugly glasses, Frances’s brows went down. “And then what?”
“And then I told him I would never forgive him!” Whoops. I was still wrong about being all cried out. I found some more tears and cried them into my hands.
Frances waited until I was done. Again. “So you’re not crying over what Adam did. You’re crying because you told him you couldn’t forgive him?”
“I guess!” I wailed.
“Does that mean you can forgive him?”
“I might, if he would never do that to me again.”
Frances put her hand on my knee. “I think he’s going to do it again.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“All the years I’ve known you, you and Adam have been consistent. You seem alike in many ways. No wonder you’ve always gotten along so well. But you arrive at that similar place from opposite directions, which is why you argue. You want the best for everyone, Lori. You want everything to work out. You fix things. You have no malice.”
“Adam doesn’t fix things,” I said ruefully. “He has a lot of malice.”
“Adam feels much more deeply than you or I can understand,” Frances said. “He will find your buttons and push them. He will hurt you. I think it’s a defense mechanism he developed growing up behind Cameron and Sean.”
I felt guilty talking about him this way, though I knew it was true. “He’s not always mean like that,” I said.
Frances nodded. “He can also be the sweetest, most thoughtful young man I’ve ever met. His highs are very high, and his lows are very low. For an even-keeled person like you, it’s fine to be friends with someone like that. It’s harder to be in love. Then you’re on the receiving end of the lows as well as the highs.” I laughed. “Nobody’s ever accused me of being even-keeled.”
“In comparison with Adam,” Frances clarified.
“The Titanic while sinking was even-keeled in comparison with Adam.”