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.