She put her hand gently on my leg. "Have you heard about your father?"
I wanted to close my eyes and disappear. The last thing I needed right now was to get into a discussion about my mother and father. But I knew that even if I did close my eyes, when I opened them again she would still be there. And the question mark would still be spray-painted across her face.
"Yes, I did. He left a message on my machine." I cringed slightly, waiting for the outburst, the flood of tears and aggression, and of course, the guilt that would never be spoken.
But it didn't come. Not this time.
Instead, my mother simply squeezed my hand in hers and said, "How are you handling it? Are you okay?"
I gave her an odd look. This was highly unusual. I had grown accustomed to packing my purse with extra Kleenex every time I knew I was going to see my mom, because it almost always ended in a discussion about my dad, which almost always ended in tears gushing down her face and me attempting to console her.
I blinked in disbelief. "Yes, I'm okay. I just don't think about it."
My mom frowned. "I'm not sure that's the healthiest way to deal with this, Jenny."
"Mom, I'm fine. Really. You don't need to worry about me."
She sighed and removed her hand from my leg. "But I do worry about you, honey. I really do. This dating thing is starting to concern me."
I crinkled my forehead. "What 'dating' thing?"
My mom fidgeted with her napkin and lowered her voice. She leaned forward. "Well, you know, you're getting older now, and I just worry that maybe the fact that you're still single has something to do with—"
"Oh, not you too!" I groaned.
"What do you mean, me too?"
"Never mind," I said quickly. "Look, Mom, I honestly don't want to talk about this. And I can assure you: The only reason I'm not in a relationship is because I don't have time for one. My work keeps me very busy. Love can come later."
It was something my mom was used to hearing because my love life was a topic she was known to bring up... often. Although the fact that she had just now paired up my father's love life with my lack of one was somewhat unnerving.
The obvious disappointment on her face was hard to miss. "Well, you know, women don't have the luxury that men do of putting love on the back burner. We have biological clocks to adhere to. And the longer you wait, the more likely that front burner is going to run out of gas."
I put my hand up. "Mom, I refuse to have the same conversation with you every time. When the right man comes along, that's when it will happen. And until then I'm not going to date just for the sake of my biological clock."
There was so much more I wanted to tell her. About Sophie and Eric, and Andrew Thompson's flight attendant fantasy, and Raymond Jacobs's wedding ring, and the real reason my date the other night was a complete disaster.
But I couldn't.
My mom wouldn't be able to know that side of my frustration, because she didn't know anything about that side of my life. A side I had kept secret from everyone for more than two years.
My family knew nothing of Ashlyn, what she represented, or what she hoped to accomplish. But the ironic part was... she was born out of a family affair.
10
The Origin of the Species (Part 2)
WHEN I was twelve years old, my dad became a stranger to me.
It only took one night, one moment, one look in the wrong direction for my feelings about him to change completely.
At that age I couldn't fully understand what I had seen or what exactly it meant. And at that very moment of seeing my father with my twenty-year-old babysitter, I didn't exactly make any conscious decision to feel differently about him. But when I finally drifted off to sleep several hours later, and woke up in the morning with the image still as fresh in my memory as if I were watching it happen all over again, something changed in me.
My dad and I drove to pick up my mother from the airport, and I didn't speak to him the entire way. Not because I was choosing to be angry; that kind of premeditated emotion was far too complex for me to understand, let alone produce. It was because I had no idea what to say to him. I feared that anything that came out of my mouth, anything at all, would end with an involuntary recounting of the truth, followed by tears, many, many tears.
"Is something wrong?" my dad asked as we veered off toward the Arrivals area of LAX airport.
I shook my head, staring intently out the window at the passing cars and world travelers.
To this day I can still see the airport signs above, meticulously sorting out those who were coming from those who were going. I distinctly remember sitting in that front seat, focusing all of my attention on the other side of that window, and utterly dreading the arrival of my mother and all that would come with it. All of the choices I didn't know how to make. All of the responsibilities I didn't know if I could handle. I desperately wished I could escape. Flee to the land of glorious "Departures." Fly away to Hong Kong, or Tahiti, or some other far-off place and never come back.
"You're awfully quiet," my dad remarked at my silence.
I simply shrugged.
He pulled the car up to the curb, and his eyes quickly scanned the passenger pickup area for a familiar face. "We're a little early," he said, checking his watch.
I continued to stare out the window, afraid to acknowledge his existence.
"You know," my dad began after a moment of silence. "Sometimes there are things we want to tell somebody but it's difficult to do so."
I didn't respond. I could feel tears stinging the back sides of my eyelids. I quickly blinked them away.
So my dad kept talking. "And then sometimes there are things we want to tell people but probably shouldn't."
I suddenly spun around to face him, my face filled with questions that would never be answered. Did he know? Had he seen me? As I replayed that dreadful night over and over again in my head I could have sworn I had escaped up the stairway unseen. I had made sure of it. But is it possible he could have heard me?
"What do you mean?" I asked, trying to hide the curiosity in my voice and cling to a more casual, aloof tone.
My dad seemed to be thinking carefully about his next words, weighing all the options like a mental thesaurus search. "What I mean is, sometimes there are things that are better left unsaid."
"Why?" I shot back, almost defensively.
He reached out to gently touch my face, but I instinctively flinched. My dad tried to play it off with a lighthearted chuckle as he removed his hand and rested it on the gearshift. "Different reasons," he said with a half shrug, as if he didn't really care one way or the other if I was listening. "Mostly if you know that the truth will hurt someone."
I reached up and gently tugged at my bottom lip, trying to digest everything he was telling me, but at the same time trying to figure out if there was a hidden motive behind it. And to be honest, it was far too much for my twelve-year-old brain to compute.
Then my dad turned his entire body toward me and looked me directly in the eye. "Especially if it's someone you love," he added in a critical tone.
I quickly looked away, wanting desperately to read his mind, dissect his thoughts, search through his memories like a card catalog index. But there was no time. I looked up to see my mother exiting the terminal and hurrying over to the car. Without another word I immediately unbuckled my seat belt and climbed into the backseat.
My dad faced forward again, as if nothing had happened. As if we had merely been discussing last night's episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. and now that conversation was over.
But that conversation was far from over in my head. In fact, it was repeating incessantly. Trying to locate clues, key words, anything that stuck out as unusual. But unfortunately, nothing did. And I couldn't help but think that it all just seemed like a random piece of fatherly advice arriving at a very inopportune time.
The backdoor of our minivan slid open and my mother's round and cheerful face leaned in and kissed
me on the cheek. Then she opened the front door and settled into the passenger seat, reaching back and resting her hand affectionately on my knee.
"So? How was everything while I was gone?" she asked brightly. Blissfully. Innocently. Completely unsuspecting. And it was like a knife in my chest.
I smiled back. "Fine."
At that moment, the confusion faded away. Everything that had just come out of my father's mouth suddenly made perfect sense to me. Why would I purposely hurt someone I loved? Or more important, someone who loved me... unconditionally?
The answer was: I wouldn't.
That's when I made the choice. That I would never utter a word of this to anyone. Not to my mom, not to my dad, not to Julia... not even to Sophie, my best friend. And in fact, the more I never spoke of it, the easier it was to effectively convince myself that it hadn't actually happened. And the more I convinced myself, the easier it was to never truly deal with it. Never have to process it. Never have to give it that second thought my mind was begging to give it. This way I could go on with my life. Talk about boys with Sophie, complain about not having a phone in my room, feel delightfully naughty in putting on lipstick and eye shadow when I knew my mom would disapprove.
But what I didn't realize as I made that conscious decision to lock the secret away in a vault that had no combination was that my life wouldn't go on like that. It wouldn't be as naively simple as I had hoped.
Sure, I could talk about boys and makeup and phones in my room. But I would never feel the words that were coming out of my mouth. I would never relish in the innocence of being a child-turned-teenager. And when I would grow up and turn fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen, I would date boys, I would kiss boys, I would even share my body with them. But I would never love them. I would never be vulnerable to them. At least not the way I wanted to love them and be vulnerable to them. Not the way Sophie did.
And thus began my life of make-believe.
When my mom got home from Chicago after visiting my grandparents, I was able to use her as a shield. As long as she was around I would never have to be alone in a room with my father. I would never have to sit in silence with him while fighting the temptation to ask the burning question that wouldn't leave me alone. Why?
Why would you kiss another woman when you have Mom? Why would you wait until she was out of town to do it? Why don't you love her the way you're supposed to?
All these questions would eventually boil down to one essential, unsolvable puzzle: Why do people cheat?
THE DIVORCE came when I was twenty-five. My mom discovered that my dad had been cheating on her for several months with a woman from his office.
Exactly how she found out, I don't know. I never asked. It was a detail I wasn't sure I could handle. Funny, you would think that after the burden I'd been carrying around for all those years, one tiny little additional piece of information would be an easy enough thing for me to digest. But it was exactly the other way around. If I had to internalize one more element of my parents' failing relationship, I would certainly lose it. That whole camel back–breaking straw phenomenon.
But whatever the reason, however the method, she found out about this one. And she left him.
To say I was relieved would be like saying, "I'm thirsty" in the middle of a desert. It's an understatement beyond all understatements. And it doesn't even begin to do justice to my true feelings.
"Jennifer," my mom had said tearfully after sitting me down in the tiny, one-bedroom apartment I was renting at the time. "I need to talk to you about something."
I took a seat next to her and gave her my full attention. "Yeah, Mom?" It was rare for her to come over to my apartment by herself, let alone with the introduction of "I need to talk to you about something." So I was immediately concerned.
"Your father and I have decided that our marriage just isn't working the way that it used to, and we think it's best if we split up and get a divorce."
The reaction was easy to fake. The tears were genuine. But according to my mom, they were the painful, heartbreaking tears of a child who had just lost the only family she's ever known. But in all actuality, they were tears of joy, relief, and most of all, liberation from the dysfunctional household that had imprisoned me for far too long.
I felt like someone had opened a door that I had been leaning and pressing and pushing against for years. A door that had kept me trapped inside a dark room full of secrets, and I was afraid of the dark. But it was all over now. Everything would be fine. I could come clean. I could tell her what I'd been keeping locked up all this time. Because it would no longer matter. She had seen the light and she was moving on. The past would be in the past and I could finally release the demons that had been haunting me throughout most of my life.
"Why?" I asked, my tone filled with curiosity but my head filled with expectation. Because I already knew the answer.
She sniffled slightly and reached out to touch my face. I saw the struggle in her eyes. Her fight to stay strong for a daughter who couldn't possibly understand the complications of an adulterous marriage. "Honestly, honey. Your dad was not faithful to me." She swallowed hard and attempted to regain her courage and composure. "And when I confronted him about it, he admitted that he hadn't been faithful for a while."
I swallowed hard before managing to ask, "How long a while?" Even though I was pretty sure I already knew. But I needed to know what she knew. I needed to know just how much honesty he had given her.
"More than ten years," she said softly, bowing her head.
More tears fell. My mom reached out and held me close to her. She stroked my hair like I was a child. And, ironically, I felt just like one. It was exactly the kind of comfort I needed... thirteen years too late.
I knew this was it. This was the time to say it. All it would take was a simple "I know" and my whole world would change. My life could start over. I could even attempt to find some of the childhood that I had lost to sleepless nights and merciless anxiety. I opened my mouth to speak the words that promised to heal me.
But instead I heard my mother say, "I just wish I would've known earlier."
"What?" I asked, panic filling my eyes. I couldn't even begin to fathom the logic behind her statement. At age twelve the only thing that had made sense was protecting her from the truth. What you don't know can't hurt you. "Some things are better left unsaid," as my dad had so poignantly put it. And that rationale had followed me into my adult life. I'd never even allowed myself to reassess it.
She smiled tenderly at me and took my hand in hers. "You know, so I could have moved on with my life. So I wouldn't have wasted all those years, being married to a man who wasn't loyal."
And those were the magic words.
Not only because they made perfect sense, but because they were the exact opposite of the words that had led me so far down this stray path. And the fact that they made perfect sense was the reason I had to shut the door again. I couldn't let my mom know that I had been responsible for her lost happiness. My immature, naive choices had taken years off her life... literally.
And the whole time I thought I was protecting her, I was actually protecting him. The very person I had grown to loathe and look down upon had actually benefited from my silence.
11
A Heart Flush
I RECOGNIZED Parker from his picture right away. As I scanned the tables at the Bellagio Poker Room I assumed the other early-thirty-something guys scattered around the room were friends of his, judging by the way they were all dressed: ready to hit the clubs once poker was deemed no longer entertaining.
I gave my name to the poker room manager standing at the front podium, along with one of the several hundred-dollar bills I had stuffed into my small white leather Versace clutch.
"Table number 13, please," I said quietly, motioning ever so slightly toward the table where my subject was seated.
He nodded his understanding and discretion as he slyly relieved me of my large bill.
I f
ollowed him through the poker room and was offered a seat directly across from Parker. I felt his eyes watching me as I approached the table and lowered my body into the seat. The low-cut top coupled with my cleavage-maximizing bra was clearly a good choice. I could tell right away that it was working.
A Breast Man.
After hearing Mr. Ireland's depiction of him I'd had a sneaking suspicion he would be. I suppose that's what you get from two years of experience in this game – sneaking suspicions.
I made specific eye contact with him, leaving no doubt in his mind that my first impression of this perfect stranger was a good one.
A delicate smile inched its way across my lips.
He reciprocated quickly before being drawn back into the game as the cards were dealt.
I played my hands carefully. Folding most of them immediately. Waiting for good cards to come my way, just as Ethan, my poker tutor, had instructed me during my lessons. I used the waiting period in between hands to advance my other game, the one that consisted of purposeful, across-the-table flirting: glances, smirks, visual appreciations of his poker skills and resulting winnings.
Tonight I was a player. And not just at poker.
Because this was, in fact, his bachelor party. If Parker was going to cheat tonight, it was clearly going to be with a one-night stand...a fling. Someone who knows how to have fun and knows it will mean nothing in the morning. A girl who doesn't necessarily do this with everyone she meets, but when she meets someone intriguing enough, there's no telling what she might do with him, or to him.
So that's exactly the girl I was.
Twenty minutes after sitting down I was dealt an ace, queen of hearts and I decided to slow play it. Meaning I didn't raise the bet right away. I simply called all bets before me and pretended I had a mediocre hand and was patiently waiting for a card to fall that might improve it. The slow play was a strategy that Ethan thought he had taught me during our lessons. But in all actuality I had been using it regularly for the past two years.