Not Quickly Broken Read online

  Tanner was in charge of throwing me a bachelor party, but David was helping him so I was pretty certain that it wasn’t going to be anything too risqué. I couldn’t imagine who was even going to be there besides the three of us and Chase. I figured we’d probably wind up playing video games in Tanner’s basement or – with any luck – maybe go catfishing on Cross Lake.

  “I’ll try not to be too hung-over tomorrow,” I promised sarcastically. She smiled back.

  “Can we talk for a minute?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, suddenly worried by the seriousness in her voice. “What’s up?”

  She glanced around, looking for a place where we could be alone for a moment, but coming up empty. Finally she opened the back door of her car and slid in, tugging on my hand to pull me in behind her.

  “What’s up?” I asked again. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just want to talk with you about something.”

  I looked at her expectantly. “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

  “Of course not,” she said, smiling at me and grabbing me by the tie. She pulled me toward her, gently kissing me on the lips.

  “What then?” I asked, breathing a small sigh of relief.

  She looked away, letting go of my tie, but keeping her hand on my chest. I brought my hand to her face and made her look back at me.

  “Tell me,” I encouraged.

  “I can’t wait for tomorrow,” she finally began quietly.

  “Me, too.”

  “And I’ve been thinking about tomorrow night,” she told me.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “I might have thought about it once or twice, too.”

  “I’m glad we waited,” she went on, still looking at me. “I mean, I . . . I know it hasn’t been easy, but . . .”

  She stopped.

  “But what?” I asked when she didn’t go on.

  “But I think it’s going to be really special because we did,” she finally finished.

  I nodded at her.

  “But . . .”

  “But what?” I asked again.

  “But I got to thinking about it and . . .”

  She stopped again.

  “And what?” I coaxed.

  “And I realized that if you’d ever slept with someone else . . .”

  “I haven’t,” I assured her.

  “I know,” she agreed, “But I was thinking that if you had . . . well, it would really bother me.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “I know,” she said slowly. “But I have.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “And,” she finally went on, “I want to know how much it bothers you.”

  “It doesn’t,” I promised.

  “Jordan,” she said, sternly. “We said we weren’t going to keep secrets from each other. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that it doesn’t bother you?”

  Actually, it did bother me . . . it bothered me a lot. But what good was going to come out of telling her that? It wasn’t as if she could change the past . . .

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me again, her warm lips lingered on mine and she touched the side of my face with one hand.

  “I love you so much,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “I want to tell you something.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. Our faces were still touching and she still had her hand on my face.

  “What happened with them was nothing,” she whispered urgently. “Nothing.”

  I was surprised to feel tears spring into my eyes.

  “It didn’t mean anything,” she said, still whispering. “I didn’t love them. It was nothing.”

  I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against hers.

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever, ever loved,” she went on. “And that’s everything.”

  I nodded.

  “I just wanted to make sure you knew that,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I finally managed. She kissed me again.

  “Will you tell me something?” she asked after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Are you nervous?”

  I hesitated at first, but then nodded.

  I expected her to tell me not to be . . . that there was nothing to be nervous about, but instead she surprised me by giving me a shy smile and saying, “Me too.”

  “You are?” I asked, surprised.

  “Of course I am!” she replied emphatically. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you – this is completely different!”

  I smiled back at her.

  “But even though I’m nervous,” she said with that same bashful look on her face, “you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s going to be fantastic.”

  I smiled at her again and kissed her lips one more time.

  She was right.

  ~ ~ ~

  I WAS SURPRISED at how different things were on the campus of a major, secular university than they had been at Baylor. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t naïve. I knew that plenty of my classmates in Texas had been breaking the rules and everything, but at least there had been rules. At State the policy seemed to be “anything goes” and honestly I never felt completely comfortable the entire time I was there.

  Charlotte and I got an apartment off campus though, and that helped a lot. I also searched for a men’s Bible study that I could join. (Back in Texas it had been pretty easy to find a Bible study, but at State it took me a while.) Eventually I finally settled into one, however, and pretty soon Charlotte and I found a church to attend. By fall I was thoroughly happy with my life.

  I loved being married to Charlotte. I loved everything about it. I loved coming home from a late afternoon class and finding her trying (and often ruining) a new recipe in the kitchen. I loved curling up on the couch with her in the evenings and quizzing her for an upcoming exam. I loved how we would go for runs together on the cross country track and how she’d let me catch her just so I could kiss her neck while she pretended to fight me off, squealing that I was gross and sweaty. I loved going to the doughnut shop with her in the morning and meeting her at the cafeteria for lunch between classes. And I loved falling asleep with her in my arms every night and waking up in the morning still wrapped up with her. It would have been impossible to have been any happier.

  Several of my freshmen classes didn’t transfer so I had to retake them. The plus side of this was that I’d already had a lot of the material and they were easy for me, but the down side was that – even though I was taking classes each summer – I was barely going to be able to graduate in four years.

  Charlotte, on the other hand, was flying through her classes. Because of all of the AP and college level classes she’d taken in high school, Charlotte had started college as a second semester sophomore. She took summer classes too, and by the time I started my junior year, she had only one more semester to go.

  Charlotte had started out as a structural engineering major at State (just like David had done), but after she’d gotten familiar with the curriculum she had switched to architectural engineering. Then – after many heartfelt conversations with David and assurances from him that he was not going to be disappointed in her if she didn’t follow in his footsteps – she’d switched for a final time to architecture. Once she did that I knew she’d found her passion . . . that it was what she really wanted to do. Her plan was to start graduate school at State as soon as she graduated at the end of the winter semester.

  Early that fall, however, she came home one afternoon and sat down next to me on the couch. She was holding an envelope.

  “What’s up?” I asked her, shifting my computer to give her a kiss.

  “I, um . . .” she tapped the envelope against her leg. “I, um applied for graduate school.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, confused. State had accepted her a l
ong time ago.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “I applied to UIC” she finally said quietly.

  The School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago was pretty prestigious – especially their graduate program.

  “You applied to UIC?”

  She nodded.

  “And you got in?”

  She nodded again.

  I stared at her for a moment.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “When are you planning on doing this?”

  “I can start next semester.”

  “Next semester?” I exclaimed. “How’s that gonna work?”

  “You could transfer . . .”

  “Transfer? Again?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Why can’t you just go to graduate school here?” I asked.

  “I can,” she agreed quietly.

  I looked at her. Graduate school at State wasn’t the same thing as UIC.

  I sighed.

  “Why do you have to start next semester?” I asked. “Can’t you wait until I’m done?”

  “It’s going to take you another year and a half until you’re done!”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but it’s going to take me two and a half if I transfer again!”

  “I didn’t say I was going to go . . .” she said softly.

  “But it’s what you want to do,” I stated. She didn’t answer me, but I could tell by the look on her face that she did.

  I sighed again.

  “Congratulations,” I finally said.

  She couldn’t help but grin at me.

  “I still don’t understand what I’m supposed to do,” I said.

  “Transfer,” she suggested again.

  “I just got caught up from the last time I transferred!” I reminded her.

  “It won’t be that bad,” she said.

  “Yes it will!” I protested. “If I transfer they’re going to make me take sixty hours with them before I can graduate. This whole year’s gonna be a waste.”

  “But if you start in January you’ll only be fifteen hours behind.”

  “I can’t start in January!” I exclaimed. “I have a scholarship to play ball in the spring.”

  “Can’t you get out of it?”

  “I don’t want to get out of it, Charlotte! I haven’t gotten to play ball in almost two years.”

  “Maybe you can get on the team at UIC.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m already signed here. I’ll have to sit out for another year if I transfer again. Either I play for State this spring or I don’t play at all.”

  “So you don’t think I should go?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said. “You can go, but . . .”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “We’re just gonna have to live apart for a semester.”

  “Is that okay?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  No. No that was not okay at all.

  I sighed for a final time.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “One semester apart and then I’ll transfer up there and be with you.”

  “I love you!” she exclaimed, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tight. “Thank you so much!”

  I hugged her back and the envelope she was gripping poked me in the back.

  Go Flames.

  ~ ~ ~

  I STARTED APPLYING to different schools in Chicago and got in to a private university that wasn’t too far away from UIC and had a decent undergraduate program for communication disorders. If everything went well, I might be able to go to graduate school at Rush University (which had one of the top speech pathology programs in the country) and I started getting pretty excited about that (which was good, because something needed to make up for the fact that Charlotte and I were going to be apart for a whole semester . . . that I was going to have to transfer again and lose a bunch of credits again . . . and that I was getting ready to play what would only be my second, and yet last, season of college baseball).

  Over Thanksgiving break, we drove to Chicago and found an apartment that wasn’t too far from either school and then we returned to State, finished out our exams, and Charlotte graduated. Finally we went back to Cavendish to visit our families for the Christmas holidays and to spend our last few days together before Charlotte moved to Chicago without me.

  David and Laci (who had moved back to Mexico about a year earlier) were back home visiting their families too. Since we had seen them last, they had adopted three more kids: Amber, Meredith, and a newborn little girl – a red-headed baby, named Grace.

  We were staying with Charlotte’s mom and she invited everybody over for dinner while we were there. Lily ran across the living room when she saw me and took a flying leap into my arms.

  “Jordy!” she cried.

  She had gotten cochlear implants a few years earlier and could hear now, so I didn’t worry about her being able to read my lips when I have her a tight hug and said, “Hey, Lilybug! How’s my beautiful little girl doing?”

  “Good,” she said, and I flipped her over my shoulder and carried her into the kitchen.

  Baby Grace was a hot commodity – everybody wanted to hold her. When it was Charlotte’s turn, she took the baby and held her close to her body, gently rocking her back and forth. Charlotte glanced at me with a look on her face that was hard to define . . . a mixture of something between joy and awe and bliss.

  I watched Charlotte softly swaying with that little newborn back and forth in her arms and I wondered if she was thinking about her own little baby that she’d had to give away. I remembered how angry I’d been to see her walking the halls of our high school with her belly growing and how alone she’d been throughout the whole thing. I thought about how the fear of Huntington’s disease might keep Charlotte from ever going through that experience again the right way . . .

  For the past two years I had thought a lot about Chase and about the fact that there was a fifty percent chance that I might have Huntington’s too. The more I thought about it, however, the more I was able to convince myself that I wasn’t in danger of getting Huntington’s myself.

  I actually had a theory . . .

  My theory, basically, was that Chase wasn’t really my brother – well, not my full brother, anyway. I know you might think that this sounds a lot like denial, but I had more than one reason for thinking that this was true.

  For one thing, Chase didn’t look anything like me or Tanner. Like I said before, Tanner and I looked pretty much alike, except that Tanner has blue eyes (mine are green) and his straight hair was a little bit lighter brown than mine and he kept it a lot shorter. Tanner was also nine years older and had about twenty pounds on me, but – other than that – we pretty much looked alike. (I also didn’t swagger everywhere I went, but that’s a completely different story.)

  Chase, on the other hand, looked nothing like me or Tanner. Chase had blond, wavy hair and dark brown eyes. He was tall like Tanner and I were, but he was also lanky – a word that had never been used to describe either one of us. Tanner and I could each palm a basketball, while Chase’s delicate fingers were more suited to plucking the chords on a guitar. Chase burned after a few minutes in the sun, but every summer, Tanner and I turned golden brown. The list went on and on.

  Another reason I managed to convince myself that Chase wasn’t my full brother was because Mom and Dad had always had a rocky relationship. Lots of fights . . . threats of divorce . . . an actual separation at one time . . . pretty much general unhappiness throughout their entire marriage as far as I could tell. It wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that Mom – at some point – had had an affair. (Of course it was likely that Dad might have had an affair too, but I wasn’t thinking about that right now.)

  Mom didn’t have Huntington’s . . . she’d been tested and we knew that. This meant that Chase had contracted it from his dad. And I started to wonder . . . what if Chase’s dad wasn’t my dad?

  I loved Chase
and I felt bad for him and I worried for him, but the more I thought about it, the less I worried for myself.

  And sitting there in Mrs. White’s living room, watching Charlotte hold that little baby with a look of absolute bliss on her face, I made a decision that I’d been toying with ever since I’d come up with my little theory.

  I decided that I was going to get tested.

  ~ ~ ~

  I DIDN’T TELL Charlotte that I’d decided to get tested because it was going to take a while to get it done and I didn’t want her worrying during that time. I wanted her to be able to concentrate on her studies (and I also figured that it would be fun to surprise her once I got the good news back).

  The first thing I found out when I looked into getting the test done was that most doctors wouldn’t do it unless I agreed to all sorts of neurological testing and counseling and all that. (I guess they were worried that I was going to off myself or something if I found out I actually had it, but counseling was about the last thing I was interested in participating in.)

  I wound up using an online service instead. They sent me a kit, I sent them a sample, and then they sent me the results.

  The results were not what I was expecting.

  ~ ~ ~

  I STILL DIDN’T tell Charlotte . . . I still didn’t want her worrying. There was, after all, the possibility that I didn’t really have Huntington’s.

  All of the literature said that one of the problems with using one of these do-it-yourself services was that there was a high risk of false results from possible contamination. (Of course the chance that it had randomly been contaminated with something that would show I had Huntington’s seemed pretty far-fetched. But it was possible . . .)

  Another downside of using one of these services was that the people who take these tests (like me), often misinterpret the results.