“No, I’m good.” Ben leaned his elbows on the table, looking at me. “How are you?”
“Fine.” Such a stupid answer, but what was I supposed to say? Dale and John had both encouraged me to go to a therapy appointment—or to at least call Dr. Jarvis—but I hadn’t. I knew what Dr. Jarvis would ask. How does it make you feel? I was excited, nervous, anxious, confused, afraid, sad, and a little angry. The neurotic seven dwarves. But I wasn’t about to tell Ben that.
“How about you?” I asked. “How was your flight?”
“Fine.”
So we were both fine. Everything was fine. Awkward, but fine. Why could I manage to ask him a hundred questions on the phone but feel so strange and distant when we were face to face?
“Oh, I brought those pictures.” I grabbed my purse, unzipping the top and digging through. They were in a white envelope. I put it on the table, sliding it over to him. “Mom had a whole box, but I just brought a few. The sample pack.”
He smiled, picking up the envelope and taking out the pictures.
“I tried to pick ones of me at different ages,” I said, watching him study each picture and then put it down on the table when he moved on to the next.“If you really want, we can go through the whole box some time.”
“Sure.” He nodded, putting another picture down on the table. Me at age three—I knew, because there were three candles on the cake Mom was helping me cut. Then me as a newborn, almost completely bald. It was a black and white photo and I was propped up on a couch with pillows.
“That’s how I remember you.” Ben tapped that photograph, glancing up at me. “All these years I pictured you as a baby.”
“Sorry I grew up.”
“I’m not.” He smiled sadly. “I’m just sorry I missed it.”
“Me too.” I reached over and picked up the picture of me as a baby.
“Oh, wow, look at that.” Ben put a picture of me and my mom on the table. I was about fourteen or fifteen. My freshman year in high school, because I recognized the painting I was holding. It had won some sort of contest. “Carolyn never aged a bit, did she?”
“Not much,” I agreed, looking at the two of us, her arm around me. We were like twins, blond and blue-eyed, same nose, same smile.
“Aww, look at you.” Ben put another photo on the table. “Your first bike?”
“Yeah.” It was a white bike with a banana seat and pink streamers. I was riding toward the camera, head down, determined. I’d learned late—all the other kids on my block knew how to ride a bike before me. It wasn’t until my mother met Pete Holmes, future stepbeast, that she could even afford to buy me a bike.
“Is that your stepfather?” Ben tapped the photographed. “In the background?”
“That’s the stepbeast,” I agreed. My mother had been behind the camera. “Although I don’t think they were married yet. I was in second grade when that happened.”
“He really did all those horrible things to you?”
I leaned back in my chair, pulling up my t-shirt to expose my midriff. The doctors did the best they could, but when you have a six-inch piece of splintered door frame hammered into your side by a two-hundred and fifty pound man—let’s just say my days of wearing bikinis and half-shirts were over.
“Good God.” Ben cringed. I pulled my shirt back down. “And Carolyn’s dead? What did he do to her?”
Not half as much as he did to me.
I met his eyes and thought about telling him the rest. How the stepbeast had started coming into my room drunk in the middle of the night when I was fifteen. How I’d finally worked up the courage to tell my mother two years later after I’d already missed three periods, and how she’d turned away, not believing me. How I’d missed my last year of high school, hiding in my room, afraid of the stepbeast, and with good reason. Somehow I’d known it was going to happen. The inevitable beating. The baby girl who stopped kicking inside me when I was about six months pregnant. How the stepbeast kept me locked in until all the bruises had faded before letting my mother take me to the hospital. And how she lied. And I lied too.
But how could I tell him that?
“She killed herself.” I picked up the picture of me and my mother. Freshman in high school. Fourteen or fifteen. Had he started raping me yet, I wondered. “I guess she just couldn’t handle it.”
“Jesus. What a mess.” That about summed it up. “So you were left all on your own?”
“I had Dale.” I smiled, glancing over at him. He had headphones on, but he was watching us. “And John’s been like a father to me.”
“I’m glad.” He put all the pictures down on the table, leaning in and taking my hand. “If I couldn’t be there for you, I’m glad you had someone.”
“Well you’re here now.” I looked at him and noticed his eyes were blue, like mine. I looked so much like my mother it was hard to see if there was any of him in me. I looked down at our hands together, his swallowing mine. He had a healthy Florida tan. His watch was off-kilter and a white band of skin showed underneath.
“I know this is all new to you. Me too. And I haven’t asked you what you want, but…” His gaze dropped to the photos on the table. “I missed so much of you already. I really want to be a part of your life. But I’d understand if you don’t want that.”
Was he kidding? I’d spent my whole life believing he was dead—my mother told me he’d been in a car accident. She didn’t even have any pictures of him. The few times I asked, she’d been very vague about the details—just that they’d been young and in love. Then he died while I was still a baby and she had to raise me on her own. Until the stepbeast came along. I think my mother saw him as our savior. I saw him as the antichrist.
And I spent years wishing my father was alive, wishing he could come save me. Then I’d focused all that energy on Tyler Vincent, rock star, movie star—the perfect man, the perfect husband, the perfect father. He had a wife and three children he publicly adored and he lavished all sorts of gifts and attention on them—while I had the stepbeast and dreaded going to sleep at night. It took me a year in therapy after it all happened to realize I’d just been placing all my hopes on Tyler as a replacement father. My real father was dead, my stepfather was a beast, so Tyler Vincent would have to do.
Ironic, considering how it all turned out. The more I listened to Dale’s manager, Greg, talk about the music business, the more I realized how the lie of “image” was created. No one in the public knew the real truth about celebrities and that was the point. To the rest of the world, Tyler Vincent was still a rock star, a movie star, the perfect man, husband and father. But Dale knew better. And so did I. Tyler Vincent was a lying philanderer. Everything about him was a lie. I was beginning to believe that was just part of being famous. People liked hearing comforting lies instead of the truth. The truth was too dark and twisted and full of demons. No one wanted to hear the truth.
“I shouldn’t have asked, I’m sorry.” He sat back in his chair. “I know I have no right…”
“No.” I shook my head, trying to work my voice around the tears caught in my throat. “I’d like that. More than you could ever know. I’d really, really like that.”
“I’m so relieved.” He leaned forward, smiling, and took a deep breath. “Because I have good news. I just got a job here in New York. I’m moving up here next month.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“That’s the reason I’ve been traveling back and forth. Today was my last part of the interview process. It’s not official-official yet but the manager pretty much assured me I’ve got the job if I want it.”
“Oh my God.” I sat back, incredulous.
“Too much, too soon?” he asked.
“No.” I gave a little, strangled laugh. “No, I just can’t believe my luck. Every time something bad happens, it’s like the universe turns it around into something good.”
“What do you mean?”
I couldn’t even tell him all the things.
If I hadn’t missed my last year of high school, I never would have gone to Iselin Academy, where I met Dale Diamond. And even then, if my stepfather could hold down a job, I wouldn’t have been hungry the day Dale walked into class and heard my stomach growling. He wouldn’t have offered me Skittles and started up our conversation.
And if I hadn’t been head over heels crazy-obsessed with Tyler Vincent, Dale wouldn’t have offered to get me front row seats at his concert. (Of course, at the time, I had no idea Tyler Vincent was Dale’s real father—that didn’t come out until much later. And sometimes I still wondered if Dale had picked me because he saw the “I heart Tyler Vincent” scribbled on my notebook. Like he saw me as a challenge. I didn’t wonder about it before seeing Dr. Jarvis but I did now).
But Dale was my best thing, my most lucky thing of all.
Still, if the stepbeast hadn’t lost control that day, if he hadn’t beaten me and tried to kill me, I might never have moved in with John and Dale. Who knows, I might be dead. If Dale hadn’t been there, I most certainly would be.
And now, that stupid photographer who sold the pictures to the paper, the pictures that threatened Dale’s whole career, had brought my father—my real father—back into my life. My whole life was like being pushed off a cliff only to find I had a soft place to land after all.
“I’m just glad you found me.” I couldn’t stop the tears now. “Now you can walk me down the aisle and dance at my wedding. And you can be there when your first grandchild is born.”
“Okay now you’re scaring me a little.” He laughed, holding his hands up in surrender.
“Sorry.” I sniffed, using a napkin to wipe my face. “Don’t worry, if Dale’s manager has any say in it, we’ll never get married.”
“But you’re wearing a ring.” He nodded at my hand. “A nice one too.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had this one for a few weeks.” I looked at the huge diamond on my left hand. Then I showed him the ring on my right hand. “But I’ve had this one for two years and we’re still not married. I’ll believe it when the preacher says, ‘And now you may kiss the bride.’”
Ben glanced over at Dale. He had his combat boots on—ready for battle—propped up on a chair. He leaned back in it, arms crossed over his chest, headphones on, just watching us.
“He doesn’t like me much, does he?” Ben asked, jerking his head toward Dale.
“He just loves me. He’s very protective.” I smiled at Dale but he just raised an eyebrow at me and didn’t smile back. “He doesn’t want to see me hurt anymore.”
“That makes two of us,” Ben said, giving me a long look. “Are you gonna tell him that he’s going to have to be good and share his things or do I have to?”
