Here Without You

Damn if she’s not panting. So am I.

‘Are you … are you wearing boxers, or briefs?’

I smile. ‘In the interest of fairness, let’s say no.’

‘Oh, fudge.’

I repress a laugh.

‘Um … what about …?’

I chuckle softly. ‘Dori, Dori – so responsible, even in the middle of our little fantasy. I’ll bring a whole strip of them. You’re protected. Now what?’

‘Reid … I want you.’ Her voice is pure frustration, and I love it.

My groan echoes her longing. ‘Baby, let me give your gifted little fingers a few suggestions to follow while I tell you the many, many ways I want you …’

BROOKE

Despite the fact that Reid had nothing useful to say, it helps to have someone to talk to about this. About him. Who better than his sperm donor?

I may have to stop referring to Reid like that, assuming he means to be a part of this, which isn’t a given. I can’t imagine him stepping up and admitting to anyone that he’s the father of this kid. Not really.

Earlier tonight, I learned my son’s name. River. Identical to the up-and-coming young actor who powerballed his way to a flatline on the sidewalk outside an LA club. A promising life cut short – by drugs, no less. Fabulous.

Bethany Shank brought an eight-by-ten print of the photo I’d been longing to get my hands on, rather than sending me a jpeg. I fully believe she just wanted to witness my reaction. That flagrant intrusion wasn’t a point in her favour with me. When she slid the photo across the glass tabletop in my kitchen, I stared, but couldn’t touch it. My first thought was No. This can’t be him. Hours later, that kneejerk reaction hasn’t changed, even though I know it’s wrong.

Staring at his likeness again now, alone, I don’t have to worry about my visible reaction. I can study every detail of him. He squats just inside a cyclone fence marred by patchy streaks of rust. There’s a stick in his hand, held like a tool, not a weapon – used, I think, to dig or draw in the dirt. In the background there are a couple of other children, a few pieces of ancient playground equipment, and a mousy middle-aged woman talking on a cell phone.

Compared to my stepbrother, who’s a few months older, this child looks slight. Undersized. His clothes are mismatched and his face is dirty, as are his small hands. His hair is shorn so close to his scalp that I can barely make out the colour – though given his DNA, it must be blond. Light brows endorse that guesstimate. His nearly bare head makes him look even more vulnerable than his size.

When I was young, I hid behind my hair. Tilting my chin forward, I watched the world slide by between the pale strands, pretending indifference to the resentful body language of my increasingly miserable parents and their half-heartedly cryptic conversations, so easily decoded. I anticipated their end before they saw it, and made plans to go with my father when they finally split.

But I was missing a few crucial pieces of the puzzle, and stupidly, so was my mother. Neither of us predicted that other woman – the soon-to-be third wife. The son she would give my father, beginning his third tiny empire, negating the second. Negating me.

Now, from the static image in my hand, River stares straight into my eyes as though he knows a high-powered zoom lens is trained on him. As though he knows I am on the other side of it. His eyes aren’t the ice blue I share with my father. They’re Reid’s deep blue. Dark, like the sky at dusk in that split second after the sun disappears for the day. His mouth, too, is Reid’s. His button nose is mine.

What an unfair trick God decided to play on me. This dirty, scrawny, ill-clothed child is mine, and the vision I’ve carried of the life I gave him – when I’ve thought of him at all – was a lie. I thought he’d be cared for. Wanted. Loved.

Sitting across from Bethany Shank four hours ago, I refused to cry no matter how my eyes stung. ‘I want to see him.’ I heard the words I said aloud, followed by her intake of breath. She was no more shocked at me than I was at myself.

‘Well, let’s not make emotional dec–’

‘I. Want. To. See. Him,’ I said, my sub-zero gaze freezing her in place. ‘Find out what we need to do to make that happen.’

She cleared her throat and smiled blandly. ‘Arranging meetings is not a function of my investigative services, Ms Cameron.’

A good decade older than me, Ms Shank is yet another woman who wrongly imagined me to be a vaporous young Hollywood plaything. I tend to allow the world to think I’m spoiled and gullible. Not only is it mildly amusing most of the time, it makes for satisfying expressions of shock on the opposite side of the table during contract negotiations. Behind closed conference-room doors, I am my father’s daughter. My agent and manager know this. A handful of studio execs know this too.

I cocked an eyebrow. ‘I suggest you make it part of your services, Ms Shank.’

She drew herself up in the chair, her mouth falling open slightly.

Leaning forward, I fixed her with a concentrated stare. ‘You’re an investigator. I’m asking you to investigate. Are you concerned about further compensation? Do you require an advance of some sort? I was assured you were the best in the business. I would hate to have to report otherwise to potential clientele.’

Her face took on the mottled appearance of someone newly disabused of unjustified superiority. Ten minutes later, she left my apartment after assuring me that she would be in touch tomorrow with more information.

Once she took off, I fell on to the sofa and dredged up memories I’d never intended to exhume.

I went to live with my stepmother in Texas for the six months it took to get from the blue stick to the birth. My parents were irate and disbelieving when I refused to get an abortion, as though I was staging a rebellion for the sake of extra attention.

‘What do you want, Brooke?’ My mother threw her shoes across the room – yet I was the one being accused of throwing tantrums. ‘Whatever you’re trying to prove, it’ll backfire. This will ruin your life. Ruin it.’ A beat of silence followed, the dots connected with little effort.

I didn’t say Like I ruined yours? Too easy. I’d long since learned not to offer up my vulnerabilities like a senseless sacrifice.

‘I don’t want to keep it,’ I sneered. ‘I’m not stupid.’

Her eyes narrowed. She was as proficient at reading the antipathy threaded through our words as I was. ‘Where are you planning to live as a single, pregnant teenager? Because you’re not living here in my house.’

She’d intended to deliver a jarring dose of reality, and I felt it, along with the sting of threatened consequences. I was more scared than I let on, but that was nothing new.

Lifting my chin, I said, ‘I’m staying with Kathryn.’

I hadn’t talked to Kathryn yet, hadn’t thought my mother would go this far.

Nothing drained the colour from my mother’s face faster than a reminder of my relationship with my stepmother, the woman my father ditched when my mother got herself pregnant with me. She’d begged him to leave his wife and two daughters, and he had.

He fulfilled his visitation duties to Kelley and Kylie – but elsewhere. His other daughters never came to our house, so my father’s previous family skated on my peripheral awareness for the first few years of my life, not quite real. I was too young to comprehend that my mother was a home-wrecking twat until kindergarten.

Kelley, then eleven or twelve, won a statewide writing award, and Kathryn insisted that her father – my father – attend the ceremony to show how proud he was of her. My parents fought bitterly over this atypical plea from his ex. Moving from room to room, my mother proclaimed her rights as his current wife while his guilt – heavy and sticky as only overdue remorse can be – compelled him to dismiss her demands.

In the end, all three of us attended a programme that had nothing to do with my mother or me. Mom took me to her salon that morning and we had our hair and nails done, as though we were attending a gala event. At the mall, she chose coordinating outfits for the two of us, giggling into the dressing-room mirror that we’d look like sisters instead of mother and daughter.

My father and his ex-wife sat next to each other, more congenial than my parents were with each other. We sat in a tense row, a phoney testament to post-divorce cooperation: me, Mom, Dad, Kathryn and Kylie, who leaned up to give me dirty looks until her mother leaned down and said something that made her face go scarlet.

The final straw, I think, was my father’s exuberance when Kelley’s name was called and she crossed the stage. Sticking his fingers in the sides of his mouth, he whistled as he did on the soccer field when I hijacked the ball from an opponent or kicked a goal. I hadn’t known he could feel that way about anyone but me.

‘Kenneth,’ Mom hissed, yanking his arm down.

They began to argue, first in softly spat words and heated scowls, and then louder until my father gripped her by the elbow and steered her into the aisle and out of the auditorium. Kylie’s wide eyes told me that she wasn’t used to witnessing the sorts of outbursts that were commonplace to me. Kathryn worried her lip, glancing back towards the exit three times as the programme came to a close and my parents had not returned.

Kelley appeared at the end of the row with a wooden plaque in her hands, her name and accomplishment carved into the brass plate affixed to the front. ‘Look, Mama, they spelled my name right! Where’s Daddy? Can we get milkshakes now?’

Kathryn glanced at me, the two empty seats between us, and the aisle where neither of my parents was visible. ‘I’m not sure where your father is … but we can’t leave Brooke here alone …’

Kelley and Kylie stared at me and I stared back. Their clear blue eyes were the same colour as mine. The same as my father’s eyes. Our father’s eyes. For the first time, I realized I had sisters. Kylie glared, out of her mother’s sight.

I had sisters, and they hated me.

‘Let’s just bring her!’ Kelley said, shrugging.

Thus began my odd relationship with my father’s former family.

Eleven years later, it was Kathryn I begged for help. It was Kathryn who took me in, hired an attorney to oversee the adoption, and helped me leaf through scrapbooks made by prospective adoptive parents – all white teeth, spotless homes and financial portfolios, and promises of a future full of love for some lucky infant.

I chose wrong, didn’t I? I couldn’t have chosen more wrong.

Refusing to read up on post-pregnancy, I didn’t know what to expect after he was born. Kathryn tried to warn me about the possible physical and psychological side effects, but I ignored her warnings, insisting that my personal trainer and I would deal with the physical issues, and as for the so-called mental distress – I wouldn’t miss a baby I didn’t want, because that would be crazy.

After I signed the forms the next day, my attorney and the social worker left with the baby. I lay in the birth-centre bed, my hands kneading my sore, once-flat stomach like bread dough, feigning indifference to what that new emptiness signified. I hadn’t wanted to see or hold him, but I’d grown accustomed to him moving around inside me. Only a week before, I’d seen the shape of a foot pressing out just under my ribcage, plain as day. Fascinated and horrified, I’d poked at it with my finger and it had pressed back.