Chapter Eleven (Straight Talk)
"I thought I was supposed to come meet you?"
She grabbed her purse off the floor in front of my seat and shoved it on the seats behind us. "Thought I’d save you another half hour walk," she joked, motioning me to buckle up. "It’s good to see you."
"It's good to see you too." My seatbelt clicked into place. "What errands are we running before dinner?"
"It’s not really an adventure," she confessed. "I hope you aren’t too disappointed, but I thought we might drive up to Port Townsend for dinner and stop in to see Calen."
"Ca- your husband?"
We pulled off Hemlock and onto the highway. The radio was playing a soft classical aria, and she turned the volume down a bit before she spoke again.
She looked amused at my confusion. "He works in Port Townsend as a biochemist."
"Right. So he doesn’t live here then?"
"He does part time. It’s just easier for him to have a place up there than to commute every day."
"Yeah, that would be a long drive. For some reason, I thought you and he had-"
"Divorced?"
"Or separated. So much for rushing to conclusions."
"I let you draw those conclusions on purpose. I let everyone draw those conclusions. I should be sorry." Her face got noticeably more serious. "Of all people, I should trust you with the truth, and I do. I just didn‘t think that we‘d become friends so quickly." She smiled and peered through the windshield at the tiny raindrops pelting the glass. "I’m-faking-a-divorce-with-my-husband isn‘t really a first lunch type conversation."
"I get it. Totally understand." I grumbled as I rolled up my window. "I just hate not knowing anything about this place." I scooted awkwardly in my seat. "I mean, I didn't even know Dad grew up here! It's lame he never told me anything."
Celine laughed into the steering wheel. "My darling, you have no idea."
"Well, we have a long drive ahead of us. Spill it," I said. "I want to know everything, explain it all."
"Everything will have to wait for another day. Your father gets that task, and I don't envy him," she said, sighing. "But I'll tell you what I can."
"Deal," I said, adjusting my position to look at her.
"Where do I begin?" she murmured to herself. "I came to live with Sullivan, Becca, and Meg when I was seven years old. My mother had been friends with Becca since childhood. We had lived in Seattle, but when my parents were killed in an accident, the house was auctioned off and I was sent to them because I had nowhere else to go."
I cleared my throat to break the silence that had filled the car. "That’s awful," I finally said.
"It was, but I was such a little kid that I can barely remember them at all. What I do remember," she said with a smile, "is moving into this wonderful, magical house. Meg was five years old, and so I all of a sudden had this little sister – more like a permanent play mate. We ran wild through the woods, played in the barn, rode horses, played on the beach. We were home schooled until high school. We took the bus to Chimacum High School near Port Townsend for the first time that September – it was very exciting."
"That’s quite a mouthful," I laughed.
"Quite a mouthful, and quite a trip. Almost an hour to and from school with all the stops."
"That’s horrifying," I said. "School must have been torture!"
"School was quite the shock, I’ll agree with you there. But the rides to and from on the bus were so much fun – the highlight of the day in fact."
"You’re kidding."
"No not at all. That’s where Meg and I met your father in fact."
"Dad went to high school here?"
"You really don’t know anything about this place," she said disapprovingly. "Your father lived up here from the time he was born until the time he married Reena," she said. "The three of us were close. He spent a lot of time at the Inn with us. Sullivan and Becca treated him like a son."
"Finally some straight answers! So what happened to make him leave?" I asked.
She shrugged. "He had different plans than what everyone expected. He had dreams. He wanted to be a pilot, and decided to go to aviation school. He met Reena at the school, she followed him on a job to California and that’s where they started a life. That’s where your brother was born."
"I knew that one. Eli was born in San Diego and I was born after they moved back here."
"I see."
"Were Calen and Dad friends too?"
"Actually, Calen and Ricky didn’t know each other until after I was married. Ricky left and Cal moved into what is now our house – we were all 18. You should have seen the house then!" she said, glancing at me. "It was a mess. The Chadwick family hadn’t lived there for years and years."
"Why wasn’t anyone there?" I wondered.
"That, my dear, opens an entirely new issue altogether."
"If it has anything to do with you, and your family, it’s not a new issue," I pouted. "You said you would tell!"
She waved me off. "Alright, alright. Many years ago, the Chadwicks and the Whitfields were very close families. William Whitfield and Byron Chadwick were the heirs to the respective families, and were also playmates – had been since they were born. The Whitfields owned and operated the Inn – still do of course, and the Chadwick family lived on and managed the estate," she glanced over again to see that I was following. "As they grew, Byron joined his father as a groundskeeper while Will and his father ran the Inn. Together, the boys ran the town. They were hotshots to say the least," she said with a wink. "When they were 18 or so, Byron proposed to his sweetheart. Her name was Ava Tremaine and she and Byron had been in love since they were kids. Will eventually married Ava’s best friend, Caroline Garner. It was an ideal situation for everyone except Caroline. She didn’t love Will, but he was a good opportunity for her and she would have been a fool not to do it. The two couples were very close and eventually inherited the Inn and continued the work relationship between families. A few years later, when Ava was expecting their first child, Byron built her a home – the one our family still lives in today. Ava had a very difficult childbirth and was unable to conceive after her son was born, but the Whitfields had a son just Owen’s age and two younger daughters and the whole clan acted like one giant family. Years later, Owen and Will Jr. were the ones running wild like their fathers had. The two girls, Addison and Marcheline were eight years old when it happened, four years younger than the boys."
"When what happened?" I asked, complete engrossed in the story.
"There was a fire in the barn out behind the house. The girls died that night."
Goosebumps ran up my arms. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. I shook the interruption out of my head and listened for her to continue.
"We were told that Byron got to the barn just in time to see Owen running inside to try and rescue the girls. If he had been a split second slower, Owen would have been lost too. Still to Byron, it was like he had just lost two of his own children.
"And that is what caused the families to fall out with each other?"
She nodded. "The story goes, that William was so angry and out of his mind that he claimed Byron was guilty of negligent homicide. He said Byron had left a lantern lit and that had caused the fire."
"But it was just an accident right?"
"In reality, no one knows how the fire started. But it really doesn't matter. What matters is that William betrayed Byron and his family in the greatest way he ever could. I don’t understand it, and I don’t know how it could have happened. After such a great loss, I don’t know what would make a man push away the only other people that he loved, but it happened. Maybe he was jealous of Byron’s family. I don’t know. But, from then on out, Will did everything he could to ruin their lives."
"What happened?"
"He claimed Byron had 'unusual' capabilities. He said that Byron could see things before they happened, that he could know when someone was lying or cheating or even as they got older, what they could get away with and what they couldn‘t. He propagated these exaggerations, telling them to whoever would listen. He ran them out of town. That was in the 19th century."
"So what? He knew magic or something?" I asked, disbelieving. "What kind of crap is that? It’s not even original. Why would anyone believe it?"
"You have to understand, at that time, the worst thing you could do was claim someone as having abilities that made them spiritually abnormal. They were so afraid of anything different than Christianity, and saying Byron had some sort of weird ability was the same thing as denouncing his religious faith."
"Like witch trials in Salem?"
"Exactly like the Witch Trials. He and his family were ostracized completely from society. No one would ever treat them the same again. They either had to live like that, or move somewhere that would allow them to start fresh. Not only that, but if he stayed, there was the possibility of a murder trial."
"And Calen was the first to come back?"
"Well by this time, those stories had become purely folklore – something we laughed off, or told kids to keep them off the old property. It didn't work," she said with bitterness in her voice. "Kids ransacked that place. But even Sullivan and Becca seemed relaxed and open talking about the legend, as it had become."
"Did they change after Calen came back?"
"You bet they did," she laughed loudly. "It was like night and day. The hate bubbled up just as though it were William and Caroline standing in front of me instead of the people I had come to call my parents."
"I bet they weren’t pleased when you brought him home for dinner!"
"That, my dear, definitely did not happen," she said, chuckling again.
"How did the two of you meet? You said he was 18, out of high school?"
"It was spring, so I had almost graduated from high school and was working at Scully’s as a waitress. He came in and had dinner the first night he came to town. We ended up talking until closing," she smiled as she remembered. "I had no idea who he was, I just knew him as Cal. We ran into each other everywhere after that – bookstores, Quinn’s, just out and about – everywhere. I wasn’t really interested in a relationship, but there was something different about him. Eventually I gave in and agreed to a couple of dates," she said, laughing softly. "We had fallen head over heels for each other by the time Sullivan and Becca ever even realized there was anything serious happening. When they found out who he was, Sullivan told me he would be caught dead before anyone under his roof married a Chadwick." She turned off the main highway and onto another side street.
"Did Calen know the story before he met you?" I asked.
"The poor guy had no idea. He even tried to talk to Sullivan. He wanted to marry me the right way. Sullivan told him to get lost, that the best thing he could do was leave."
"What happened then?" I was completely turned sideways in the seat, my leg had fallen asleep all the way to my thigh. I didn’t care.
"He left. He had been restoring the house and he just left everything as if he would have been coming right back. I showed up to the house one day as normal, and he was just gone. I knew instantly the only thing that would have driven him away so unexpectedly."
"But you went after him?" I smiled.
"I did. We had a trip planned for that next weekend, and I went to the place we were supposed to go together, hoping he would have done the same." She smiled out the windshield, the crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes forming as her cheeks rose.
How she could smile was beyond me. "What a wimp! He would just give you up, just like that? What ever happened to kids defying their parents?"
She smiled at my reaction. "I thought of it like that at first too, but I realized he never gave up on me – he gave up everything for my own good. Or what he thought was best for me. He gave up everything – the house, his livelihood – so that I could hate him for leaving me, could move on, start over and be normal. It was a test. If we both ended up there, that was honest and true."
"That could possibly be the cutest thing I've ever heard," I said, sinking back into my seat. I rolled the window down a little. "I wish that would happen to me."
She laughed, the light sound not matching the creases in her eyes. "What? A bunch of old people trying to repress you?"
"No. The love part," I cooed sarcastically.
"Well not so fast. So, in order to really set it all in stone," she began with a double fist pump, "we got married at the nearest courthouse right then and there. I think I must have been pregnant with Casey that afternoon," she laughed. "But when we went back home, I knew I had alienated my way out of another family."
I snorted. "Did you care? If they couldn’t see that you were happy, then what difference does it make?"
"Meg saw it. I think she did anyway." Both hands came off the wheel to do the bunny-eared quotation marks in the air. "Sisterly bond," she said with a smirk. "Sullivan and Becca though, they hate him, as if defining the word, and are in a strange limbo of love and hate for our children. On the one hand, they are the only 'grandchildren' they have ever known. Still, their lack of understanding or attempt to understand was what chased us away, nothing else. I’ll never be able to forgive them for treating Calen or my children in such a way."
"I don’t blame you. Wouldn’t you trust someone you had raised practically all their life enough to let them love who they wanted? I mean, you didn’t pick him out of a lineup because it would piss off your parents," I said. "Even still, if they thought it wasn’t a good choice or wasn’t safe for you, wouldn’t they want to stay as close as possible to make sure you were okay?"
"I can’t explain how they tick, Lana. All I know is that we had our kids, our house, and each other, but Cal couldn’t be himself. He felt like he ruined the life I had, and any chance we had to really be happy together. When the boys got big enough to fend for themselves a little, Cal decided to take a job up north. That way, he thinks, we can be a part of society a little easier than if he were still here with me."
"That is ridiculous! Now you don’t have anyone! Can’t Calen come home now that it would just be you two?"
"I have all my family, all the family in the world. I’m happy my kids have gone off to make lives for themselves."
"This is the craziest thing I‘ve ever heard," I said, shaking my head as we turned onto a side street right after the "Welcome to Port Townsend" sign.
We followed the road up a ways and pulled into an apartment complex.
"We’re here!" exclaimed Celine as she put the car in park. "You ready, now that you’ve been briefed?"
"No turning back now," I said, fumbling with my seatbelt.
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