The Girl in the Mirror(18)
I’ve been so distracted by Summer’s pretty story, so caught up in the dream, so busy imagining Adam’s hardness rising up from the foredeck like a Samson post, only now do I hear what she’s saying. And she looks so sorry, so nice-is-dumbly sorry for ruining my life, that I make it easy for her. I say what she can’t bring herself to tell me. “Congratulations. You’re pregnant.”
5
The Pageant
When we found out about the will, I thought that Summer’s and my rivalry would be intense. We were competing for a hundred million dollars. No one else was in the running. Even if there hadn’t been some secret concerning Ben, he was four years younger. We would have four years to marry and reproduce before he reached eighteen.
Ben came out in his early teens, and no one was surprised. I realized the adults had known for a long time. Ben didn’t prance around in sparkly hot pants or try to kiss the other boys at school, but somehow, the adults all knew. Ridge Carmichael had fathered seven children, but he hadn’t produced a heterosexual son.
The Carmichael name was going to die out. It must have driven my father crazy.
I guess Dad thought we would all be adults when he passed away, so he never imagined his daughters would be racing to be teen brides. He didn’t want us to make the mistake he had made, which had led to him divorcing Margaret—the mistake of leaving the business of having children until too late. We girls wouldn’t have the option of trying again with a younger wife.
The day after Dad’s funeral I snuck into my mother’s bedroom and nabbed a copy of the will. Locked in the bathroom, I hurriedly photographed each page with my phone to read later in private. The rules were laid out in plain English. My father was progressive in his own way, an equal-opportunity testator. The grandchild didn’t have to be a boy. But it had to be given the Carmichael name, and it had to be first.
Technically, the money stayed in trust until this precious grandchild came of age, but the parents of the heir were the trustees and had wide powers to use the money however they liked. They could spend it on themselves or their other children, but they couldn’t share it with the rest of us. My father had no interest in compensating losers. It was winner takes all.
Summer and I might have put off marriage until our thirties if it weren’t for Francine and our four half-sisters. They were little girls when Dad died, but they were Francine’s only hope.
Within days of Dad’s funeral, Annabeth and Francine were communicating through lawyers. Plush envelopes were delivered to the beach house by signature courier. Annabeth would scuttle off to read them in her bedroom and emerge red-faced and silent. She would have long conversations on the phone—I was never sure with whom, despite a campaign of eavesdropping—weeping over Francine’s lack of compassion and her own need for “time to grieve.” She had been married to Dad for the longest.
None of it made any difference. Boxes sprouted in our living room while our Christmas tree still stood, brown as brushwood, in a forlorn corner. My mother’s tears gave way to anger. Books were banged into boxes; pots and pans were crashed into crates. But she was careful with the crystal and the glassware. She didn’t break anything.
Annabeth seemed to be packing that whole summer, making sure that “the homewrecker,” as she began to call Francine, wouldn’t get her hands on any of our jewelry or china. That was when I figured out who Virginia’s father was.
“The child has to be conceived and born in wedlock,” Annabeth moaned into the phone one day, as she knelt over a box half packed with champagne flutes. “No, it can’t be legitimized retrospectively. There must be at least nine months between the wedding and the birth or medical evidence proving the baby was premature. Yet Virginia’s not excluded. Now if that isn’t hypocrisy, I don’t know what is. Vicky, too. Vicky was born only six months after their wedding.”
Her listener must have said something soothing, because my mother’s tone changed. “Yes, yes, I know, plenty of time,” she mumbled. “She’s six. No, of course I wouldn’t want the child punished for Ridge’s sins, but honestly, Virginia, what a name to give a bastard! Might as well have named the child Adultery!”
A similar conversation took place the next day, and the next. The hot weather wore on, Ben and Summer squabbled and whined, and Annabeth began to look for any excuse to get us out of her hair. She sent us to the beach every morning with strict instructions not to come back for two hours, but we seldom managed half so long. We would forget to bring water or run out of food; one time we forgot sunscreen, and fair-skinned Ben was so badly burned that he couldn’t go back outside for a week.
Annabeth was so desperate to be alone that she forced me to gate-crash Summer’s annual end-of-holiday sleepover at her best friend’s house. With her soft, bovine eyes and brunette ringlets, Letitia Buckingham was exactly the sort of sweet fool Summer doted on. She and Summer had been friends since kindergarten, but I couldn’t stand her.
Not content with running the PTA, Letitia’s mother had set up the Wakefield Beach Committee, an organization that specialized in ruining Wakefield Beach with unbeachy events, crowding it with unbeachy people in unbeachy clothes. So far that summer, she had staged a fashion parade and a talent show. Mr. Buckingham had laid down boardwalks over the sand so his wife could strut around in the high heels that seemed glued to her feet. I kept as far away from these events as possible, swimming at the far end of the beach where nobody would spot me.