Family Reunion Read online

  Also by Caroline B. Cooney

  The Janie Books

  The Face on the Milk Carton

  Whatever Happened to Janie?

  The Voice on the Radio

  What Janie Found

  The Time Travel Quartet

  Both Sides of Time

  Out of Time

  Prisoner of Time

  For All Time

  Other Books

  Hit the Road

  Code Orange

  The Girl Who Invented Romance

  Family Reunion

  Goddess of Yesterday

  The Ransom of Mercy Carter

  Tune In Anytime

  Burning Up

  What Child Is This?

  Driver's Ed

  Twenty Pageants Later

  Among Friends

  It began when we found out that our new summer house had an old bomb shelter in the backyard, and my brother, Angus, decided to sell time-shares in it. Angus is twelve and a terrific salesman. He used to sell my Girl Scout cookies for me, and not once did a customer ask why a boy with a crew cut was in the Girl Scouts. He has red hair and freckles, and I think there is something about red hair and freckles that makes strangers relax their defenses and buy, buy, buy.

  Soon after we examined our bomb shelter, Angus divided the year into fifty-two weeks and went off to sell ten shares per week of year-round, lifetime, come-as-you-are survival shelter use.

  It was that “come-as-you-are” line that people liked. You could tell it soothed them to know that when the bomb fell, they wouldn't have to dress up to take advantage of their time-share.

  “But Angus,” I said. “What if the bomb falls in July and somebody bought a lifetime first-week-in-March use?”

  Angus drew a long, slow, sad finger across his throat. “Poor planning,” he told me. “People have to think ahead. Know their global politics.” He turned to his latest potential buyer, an innocent Vermont child with an untouched allowance. “Or better yet,” Angus said joyfully, “buy a share in each week of the year! That way you'll never have to worry.”

  Before Daddy found out and stopped him, Angus had sold seventy-two shares. He had even worked out the division of each shareholder's right to the cans of Campbell's soup still in the bomb shelter. I personally would be worried about chicken noodle soup from 1958.

  Daddy went berserk. “We bought this summer house because you were going to enjoy fresh air! Swim in the lake! Fish for trout! Climb every mountain! People said that children need a backyard for a normal, stable upbringing, and so I said, Okay, June through August they'll have a backyard. I'll make these kids stable if it kills me. So what happens? You come up here from New York City, demoralize all these nice Vermont kids, rip off their allowances, and sell them…”

  Daddy paused.

  He was praying that Angus would admit he hadn't really sold time-shares to a bomb shelter; he had really gotten all that money from a paper route.

  “Dad, it's a new idea,” said Angus proudly. “A fresh concept. I bet nobody else in Vermont is doing it.”

  Daddy got a grip on himself and asked what Angus had been charging.

  “Ten dollars a share, Dad. It's a bargain. Everybody saw that right off.”

  My father is a large man, well over six feet, with shoulders like a yardstick. Whenever he has to deal with Angus, he takes very deep breaths, so his chest rises, and his jacket lifts and his shirt buttons reach a state of high tension. I think of him as a rocket about to launch. I worry about the explosion.

  “Angus,” said my father, “we have hardly arrived in this town. So far I know the guy who installed the extra phone line, the mailman and the waitress at the coffee shop.”

  “Gee, Dad, that's a shame. I've met everybody. I've been going door-to-door for days.”

  Daddy's chest sank back to resting position. He looked up at the ceiling, which in our summer house is quite close to his head. He frequently communes with its cracks. Then he stared at his sweet-faced son and said he had just remembered pressing business back in New York City. He'd be gone for weeks. Possibly all summer. It was up to Angus and me and Annette (our stepmother) to go door-to-door, return all the money and apologize for anybody in our wholesome little family even thinking of selling bomb shares.

  Angus had, however, earned seven hundred and twenty dollars. The thought of giving it back was not a happy one. He put on the expression of a puppy at the pound, entreating us to give him love and affection. Earnestly he explained that this sort of thing looked really great on a college application.

  Daddy said this kind of thing would make any reasonable college admissions office bar the door.

  Angus said he thought he would write Grandma about it, because Grandma was always proud of him, even if nobody else was.

  Daddy said if Angus went and told Grandma, Daddy would kill him. Daddy's chest began expanding alarmingly. Angus backed up a bit.

  I backed up completely and said I would go check the mail.

  Mail is the best thing about having a summer house in Vermont. The big black box pokes up out of tall white daisies and high grass on the other side of a narrow country road, and when the little red flag is down, you know your mail has come.

  Vermont is entirely treed. You'd think they had a genuine fear of open spaces and views. Trees curve in over roads and houses and towns, wave upon wave, as if local zoning laws require you to live in a green aquarium. Only the lake, being filled with water, is barren of trees.

  I walked through the filtered sun and pulled down the little curved door of the black mailbox. I wasn't actually expecting any mail, because everybody we know uses e-mail or the phone. But there was a letter from Aunt Maggie.

  Aunt Maggie is Daddy's older sister. She lives out in the Midwest, where she and her family lead A Perfect Life. We call them the Perfects, because it's rather like their real last name, which is Preffyn. In the old days, when we were sort of perfect ourselves, we used to visit them, but we don't anymore. Daddy says he doesn't have the energy.

  Aunt Maggie married Uncle Todd, and she is lovely, and he is handsome, and she is chairman of the school board, and he is a pharmacist. They have a backyard, of course, have always had a backyard, and therefore their children, Brett and Carolyn, are also Perfect. Brett is sixteen and Carolyn is fourteen, and they never were awkward or fat, never had braces, never had pimples, never got anything below a B+. In gym they are always team captains. In photographs, they are always smiling and attractive. That is just the kind of family they are.

  When they used to visit us in New York City, we would walk down the sidewalk and point to perfectly innocent people waiting for the bus and whisper, “Careful. Drug deal.” Carolyn and Brett always fell for that and told their mother, and Aunt Maggie would say that if we just had a backyard to play in, we would be stable, like her kids.

  Stable is a big word in Aunt Maggie's life. She has stability, Carolyn and Brett have tremendous stability, but we have none. We are unstable, unbalanced and at risk.

  Aunt Maggie loves that one. At risk. As if my brother and sister and I are poised at the edge of a cliff, teetering dangerously, nobody within reach to pull us away from a smushed-to-slush death.

  When we were younger, you see, our mother fell in love with a dashing, romantic, handsome French newspaper reporter who at that time was covering the United Nations for a Paris paper. Mother left Daddy and went to live with Jean-Paul, and a few years later, they went on to Paris.

  We stayed with Daddy. This was partly because we wanted to stay with Daddy and partly because Mother wasn't sure we would fit in with her new lifestyle. Although we could agree that Angus wouldn't fit easily into anybody's lifestyle, my sister, Joanna, and I did not like hearing that we wouldn't either.

&nb
sp; Joanna, who is the oldest, is spending her entire summer with Mother and Jean-Paul. She is the first of us to visit France. Joanna left the very afternoon that school ended—June 17—and won't be back until school starts again— September 8.

  Daddy likes us to write to Mother, but I have a bad attitude toward this activity. A few weeks ago, I sat down at the computer and e-mailed Joanna (I don't correspond with my mother by any method) that Angus was enjoying his new leg.

  Mother telephoned, which we don't do all that much because of the time difference and because Angus and I are apt to be rude. She demanded to know what had happened to Angus's old leg. Angus said it had gotten all crushed and thrown in the dump, but he had gotten a new one cheap, and Mother wasn't to worry about her share of the bill.

  Mother telephoned Daddy at work for details. (It is hard to say which of them hates these phone calls more.) Of course, Daddy didn't know Angus had any fake legs, let alone cheap ones, so it was just the sort of conversation that had made Mother abandon Daddy in the first place. Mother called back to Vermont and demanded to speak to Annette about the leg, but Annette is afraid of Mother and whispered to Angus to say she wasn't home, and Angus of course said, “Annette says to tell you she's not home.”

  By then I don't think Mother really cared about Angus's leg. I think she called Daddy in New York again just to be difficult. This time Daddy remembered that Angus likes to use an old hollow detachable mannequin's leg as a briefcase or tote bag, down which he stuffs any papers he might need to carry around, such as the contracts for time-shares, although Daddy didn't know about those yet. Daddy gave Mother a sane, reasonable explanation for the leg story, but Mother did not think anybody in the picture was being either sane or reasonable.

  But that was in the past.

  Nobody cared about Angus's leg anymore. I just wanted to take the pressure off the bomb-share deals, so I ran into the house to read Aunt Maggie's letter out loud.

  My father had sunk into the only chair in the summer house large enough to support him. Summer house furniture turned out to be flimsy, but Annette doesn't mind, as this means she gets to redecorate and replace all of it.

  The house in Vermont has no curtains on any downstairs window. By day, the sun moves slowly from one pane of glass to the next. Hot little squares of sun first lie on the living room floor, then slide to the table, drift into the next room and become late-afternoon slants across the kitchen counters.

  The heat of the day was already vanishing, and Daddy, exhausted from either his long drive or his children, was closing his eyes. The afghan on the back of the easy chair was pale blue with pink flowered trim. It sank down when Daddy did, and it lay around his shoulders like a baby blanket on a grizzly bear.

  “You want to hear a letter from Aunt Maggie?” I said, but I didn't give anybody a chance to say no. “ 'Dear Brother Charlie,' ” I read.

  Daddy said that made him sound like an inmate at an institution. We did not tell him that he also looked like one, what with the baby blanket scootched around his cheeks.

  “ 'It is hard to believe, but Todd and I are approaching our twentieth wedding anniversary!!!!!!!!' ” I read out loud. “Eight exclamation points,” I told my listeners.

  Enough to make anybody gag, but especially Daddy, who did not reach his first anniversary with Wife Number One, hit a twelfth with Wife Number Two (our mother) and is barely within reach of a second with Wife Number Three (Annette).

  “Don't worry, Dad,” Angus consoled him. “All those exclamation points mean that Aunt Maggie is as surprised as anybody that her marriage lasted all those years.”

  “ 'And of course we want to have a big and wonderful family celebration of this unique event.' ”

  “Notice she's rubbing in how unique it is,” said Daddy.

  I kept reading. “ 'So we've planned a family reunion gala for August!' ”

  My aunt Maggie is known for her enthusiasm, which tends to tire out everybody but Aunt Maggie. Now even her handwriting was bigger and more excited. I made a note to get a library book on handwriting analysis because I was sure there were depths to plumb in Aunt Maggie's.

  “ 'We're even getting in touch with all our old friends from high school, Charlie!!!!!!!! We'll want everybody to come!! Joanna must fly back from Paris, and this will be our chance to get to know dear Annette at last, and how wonderful it will be for Shelley and Angus to be back in Barrington again!!!!' ”

  “Where they have all those backyards,” said Angus.

  Annette looked as if she would rather postpone meeting the Perfects for another generation or so. In her situation I would feel the same, since Annette does not measure up to anybody, especially Wife Number Two (Mother) and Aunt Maggie.

  “What else is in the letter?” asked Angus. “It's awfully thick.”

  “The invitation the other several hundred people are getting,” I said. “Miscellaneous driving directions and flying information, and the latest family photographs.”

  Annette began fussing with the Queen Anne's lace. Angus read that you can dye the flowers, so he has bunches of them sitting in glasses of water mixed with entire containers of food coloring. Nothing has happened with yellow or green, but red and blue have promise. The flower heads are now a sick pastel instead of white. Annette shifted Queen Anne's lace glasses all over the table.

  “Can I telephone Joanna and tell her all about the family reunion?” I begged. “Please, please?”

  Daddy looked wary. His usual excuse against phoning Europe is the expense—therefore we should e-mail—but actually he's afraid Mother will be home and he'll have to talk to her, or worse, that Jean-Paul will answer and they'll have to have a civilized conversation. The crummy thing about divorce and remarriage is how you're required to be civilized about it and not scream ugly things, especially when several years have gone by and, if you have any stability at all, you have gotten over it.

  “I'll tell Joanna you're not here,” I said kindly.

  Daddy was weak from dealing with Angus, and he agreed. I ran upstairs to use my own phone in the privacy of my bedroom. Vacation bedrooms are different from real bedrooms. In the New York apartment, my half of the room is lined with shelves and cabinets. Each shelf has a front and back layer of books, CDs, games I used to play, dolls I used to collect, papers I wrote last year. My drawers are stuffed with sweaters and sweatshirts, and socks pop out when I tug open the sock drawer. My view is limited to Joanna's side of the room, which is even more cluttered because she's had more years to clutter in. There is no visible wallpaper because we've been taping up posters for years without ever taking down the first ones, so formerly adored stars have only their feet showing beneath the hair of the currently adored star, who is partially obscured by the perfume advertisement Jo cut from a magazine and the cartoon I ripped from the Sunday comics.

  In Vermont my room is bare. It has a gleaming wooden floor, white walls and nothing of me except my clothing, which is hidden in the closet and bureau. The view through two narrow windows, curtained with white, flower-sprigged muslin, is treetops. The leaves are not quiet. They shift as if they are straining to see more. In a high wind the leaves run in place, like basketball players hoping to get off the bench and into the game.

  I sat cross-legged on the bed and dialed France.

  I have this fear that Joanna will fit perfectly into Mother and Jean-Paul's lifestyle and will stay there forever and not come home in September. Every time I talk to her, she bubbles away about weekend visits to kings' castles, and dinners at ten P.M. and strolls in Paris, where she nibbles on a real croissant instead of the shabby make-believe ones we eat in New York. I am losing my sister. Joanna and I don't share a bedroom anymore, and she hasn't seen the bomb shelter or lived in the summer house, and she didn't help Angus divide up the Campbell's soup rights, and she probably thinks life is better abroad.

  So actually, Aunt Maggie's Perfection was good timing. Joanna would have to come home nice and early, and we would all get very stable from a
ll those Barrington backyards.

  But when I read Aunt Maggie's letter to her, Joanna said, “August?” in a distracted voice. “Impossible, Shelley. Out of the question. Simply cannot. Jean-Paul and Mother and I will be spending the month traveling in the French mountains, with excursions into Switzerland and northern Italy. It's all arranged.”

  Outside, a chorus of insects rasped, as if planning an assault on the window screens. “You'd rather go to some dumb alp than have a watermelon-seed-spitting contest with Brett and Carolyn?” I said.

  Joanna laughed. “Three years ago I thought it was crucial to win that contest. I was thirteen and immature. Now— well—admit it, Shell. You're just jealous of me.”

  I could not imagine being jealous of a person who had to spend week after week in the company of Mother and Jean-Paul and did not even get a break while he went off to work, but had to photograph an alp together.

  “Daddy will make you come,” I said, knowing he would not.

  “He can't. It's Mother's time.”

  In divorce you cannot trespass on the other parent's time. It's a rule. Of course you do, all the time, but you do it quietly and sneakily. I sneakily let a quiver into my voice. “Jo, you have to come. Please. I need you. Angus needs you. We need to present a united front.”

  I am good at making people feel guilty. Once, my mother said she needed the Atlantic Ocean between us because of all the guilt I lay on her if she's any closer.

  “Nonsense. You guys will be fine. Just leave Annette at home. She'll embarrass you if you bring her to Barrington.”

  I could not think of a way to leave my stepmother at home. “Lock her in a closet with enough water to last her a week?” I asked.

  Joanna felt the plan deserved serious thought. She believes that Daddy's standards have fallen over the years. “Mother is incredibly more intelligent, beautiful, interesting and bilingual than Annette,” she said.

  “Annette is hardly even one-lingual,” I admitted. “Especially after Angus works her over.” I told Joanna about the bomb shares.

  Joanna laughed. She has a wonderful laugh, loud and boisterous and room-filling. It hurt to listen to the laugh and know that it was really hundreds of miles away. Which would I rather have? I thought. A room to myself, with privacy and quiet and bare walls? Or Joanna doing her homework while she's online, borrowing my earrings while she's braiding my hair, sprawling all over my bed to eat her barbecue-flavored potato chips or Rice Krispies Treats or Oreo cookies? (She's never dumb enough to get crumbs on her own bed.)