Faking Perfect (24 page)

It didn’t make any sense, but I knew without question he’d loved me back then. It was like I carried it in my bones, or in a tiny corner of my heart. And I’d loved him back. Our connection was evident in the one picture of us that I owned, blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. We’d been close. The same kind of closeness he shared with Willow and Jonah, the kind that made them want to run to him for scraped knees and closet monsters and deflating alligators. The kind that made me want to crawl to him and sit at his feet as a baby or walk with him beneath the trees and hunt for bugs. Despite everything I’d heard all my life, despite the inexorable hold his addiction had had on him, he’d once been my dad.

What had changed? Why had he decided letting me go was easier than getting well for me? Being with him and his happy, much-loved children allowed me to see exactly what I’d missed out on—a loving, involved parent who put his children first, a priority. Clearly, I’d never been a priority to him. Instead of choosing me, he’d withdrawn into his addiction, shattered the bond between us, started all over again with a brand new family, and become the kind of father he’d never been strong enough to be for me.

I’d loved that tattoo not because it was a snake, but because it was a reliable, permanent part of him. A benchmark. And that image—along with the feelings it evoked—had stuck with me, long after he’d tried to rip it away.

“Lexi, are you coming in?”

I looked over at Jonah’s bright, freckled face and then beyond him to Willow, who was watching me with an insightfulness that was well beyond her years, as if she could read my innermost thoughts, the way Emily used to do. Obviously, the real me wasn’t concealed as well as I’d always thought.

“No, I think I’ll—” I stood up quickly, banging my shin on the table leg. Ignoring the pain, I started toward the doors. I couldn’t do this. Couldn’t let myself love him or get close to him again. Couldn’t let myself get attached to his family. It was too much of a risk. “I need to go to the store,” I said, not looking back. “I forgot to pack something.”

Luckily, Renee was nowhere to be seen as I passed through the kitchen to the basement stairs. In the guest room, I grabbed my backpack and carried it upstairs and through the front door. I didn’t care that I wasn’t entirely sure how to get downtown. I didn’t care that my skin would surely fry on the way there. All I cared about was getting away.

As it turned out, the main street was only a ten-minute walk from the house and easy to find.
I could leave
, I thought as I passed a vacant taxi parked alongside the curb in front of a convenience store. I pictured myself in the backseat of that taxi, following the same route I’d taken almost fourteen years ago with my mother. I wondered if she’d looked back as we left Alton, or felt a pang of regret during that two-hour drive to the airport, or questioned her decision as we stepped onto the plane that would take us to our new home. I wondered if she’d been like me, waffling between trying to make it work and giving up entirely. Knowing my mother, the choice to leave had probably been an easy one. She held grudges, she didn’t forgive, and when life got too hard, she bailed.

But I wasn’t like my mother, not anymore. So instead of finding the taxi driver and blowing what was left of my babysitting money on cab fare, I found a fast food joint and ordered the biggest, greasiest cheeseburger on the menu. Then, feeling fuller than I had in days, I went back to my father.

Chapter Twenty-two

O
n Sunday night, after the kids had gone to bed and I was watching TV alone, I received a text from Shelby.

Piper Olivia was born at 6:25 this evening. 6 pounds, 14 oz. Healthy & perfect. We’re both doing fine. Miss you. Call me when you get home.

Relieved and teary-eyed, I sent her my congratulations and promised to visit them when I got back. A few minutes later, she answered with a picture. Their very first family portrait. Shelby and Evan, both looking like they hadn’t slept in weeks, smiled into the camera as baby Piper lay in her mother’s arms, fast asleep. The three of them together seemed untouchable, like the only thing ahead of them was joy.

But that was the tricky thing with pictures—those images, those captured memories, were incomplete and fleeting.

I shut off the TV and headed for bed. But instead of going into the guest room, I continued down the hallway and stopped outside the door right next to it. My father’s music room.

He’d been shut up in there for the past hour, strumming his guitar and reliving his band days. I didn’t know much about guitar or bass or any instrument, really, but he sounded pretty good for an old guy. During a pause in riffs, I knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he said, and I peeked inside to find him sitting on a leather stool with a bright red guitar in his arms. He brightened when he saw me, then leaned over to turn off the amp at his feet. The room instantly became quiet. “I wasn’t keeping you awake, was I?”

I shook my head and stepped farther into his sanctuary. I hadn’t been in there since the day I arrived, and at the time I’d been too overwhelmed to give the room more than a cursory inspection. Now, I took the time to really look.

“Are all these yours?” I asked, taking in his collection of guitars. I’d never seen this many strings outside a music store. Two guitars hung on the wall behind him, and three more—two bass guitars and another six-string—rested in stands on the floor. “What else can you play?”

“I can handle a simple beat on the drums, but mostly I stick to guitar and bass. Can’t sing to save my life, either.”

Something else we had in common. Dogs howled whenever I tried to sing. I turned away from the guitars and approached the opposite wall. Every inch of it was covered in autographed pictures of bands I’d never heard of and a few old, wrinkled flyers promoting a band called Rust, which I
had
heard of. It was Eric’s old band, the one he’d played bass for in his twenties, when he was with my mother. He’d told me a bit about them over the phone a few weeks ago. They were together for eight years, during which they played in bars and small arenas in cities and towns all over this side of the country. “We even did a few shows in Seattle,” he’d told me proudly. I had no idea why this was a big deal, but I’d tried to act impressed.

“I was pretty skinny, huh?” Eric said as I leaned in to study one of the flyers, which showed Rust on stage in mid-song. My father wore baggy shorts, black combat boots, and no shirt, his hair hanging in his eyes as he pounded on the bass. And yes, he was practically emaciated. I glanced back at the present-time him, bright-eyed and healthy.

“Was that when . . . “ I let the sentence trail off. What was I supposed to say?
Was that when you were a hopeless junkie?

“Yeah,” he said, gently placing the guitar back on its stand. “That was the worst of it.”

I looked back at the picture and noticed the date of the concert being promoted. Three years after I was born. So unless the picture on the flyer was an old one, he’d had a little daughter at the time, not to mention a girlfriend. But instead of going back to them after the show, he’d probably spent the rest of the night searching for the perfect high, the kind that had let him forget all about who was waiting for him at home.

Or so I assumed. Eric spoke often about his memories of me as a baby and toddler, but we never ventured any deeper than that. In the past few days, I’d learned a lot about him, little things like he went jogging every morning at six a.m., was allergic to cats, and had a weakness for mint chocolate chip ice cream. I knew some more significant things, too. He’d relapsed twice before finally getting clean, and he’d gotten my name, Lexi Claire, tattooed across his rib cage the week after I was born. I knew a lot of things, good and bad, but after dozens of emails, almost as many phone calls, and four full days together—we still hadn’t discussed his side of the story. Even though my need to hear it was the reason I’d contacted him in the first place.

It would mean a lot to me if you’d give me the opportunity to explain my side someday
, he’d said during that very first phone call.
Not today, but someday
.

It was after ten and Renee and the kids were all upstairs. For the first time all week, it was just me and my father, alone with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Tonight, right now, was his opportunity.
Someday
had arrived.

Moving away from the wall, I grabbed one of the folding chairs in the corner, set it up a couple feet in front of Eric, and sat down in it, facing him. “Tell me how bad it was.”

Myriad emotions crossed his face—fear, shame, resignation—and he said, “What do you want to know, exactly?”

“You told me things had gotten really bad the year before Mom and I moved,” I reminded him. “I want to know your definition of
bad
. Mom said . . . well, she told me a few things about you.”

His back stiffened as if he was bracing for a hit. “Like what?”

“She said you spent all our money on drugs and that you drove drunk with me in the backseat. Did you?”

“I did a lot of things,” he muttered. Then he sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Look, Lexi. These past few days have been more than I could have ever hoped for. Having you here, getting to know you and seeing how incredible you turned out. Watching you with Willow and Jonah.” He looked at me, eyes pleading. “I don’t want to ruin it by resurrecting the past.”

It was if he’d slapped me. I’d worked up the nerve to email him, then talk to him, then
see
him, and he wasn’t even brave enough to tell me the truth? “But it’s
my
past too,” I said, that constant, familiar resentment emerging. “It’s why I contacted you. Why I came here. I deserve to know, Eric. You said you wanted to explain your side.”

“Yeah? Well, my side is totally fu—” He stopped when he realized he’d raised his voice and was about to swear in front of me. A habit from having young children around.

“Fucked up,” I finished for him. “I know. You think my side isn’t?” My voice shook as I continued. “I don’t know what my mother was like when you knew her, but growing up with her wasn’t exactly a picnic. My friend Nolan’s parents practically raised me because she was always either too drunk or too busy with one of her asshole boyfriends to bother. She didn’t even go to my
graduation
. Know why? Because she thinks it’s my fault her boyfriend couldn’t keep his damn hands to himself.”

Eric’s face turned pale under his tan. “I didn’t know. . . . I mean, every time I called she seemed fine. I was—”

“What?” I cut in. My heart was racing. “What do you mean, every time you called? You never called. After we left, you forgot I even existed.”

“No,” he said firmly. “No, I never forgot, not for one second. Jesus,” he muttered to himself. “You really don’t know.”

“Know what?”

He leaned forward on the stool, elbows on his knees and eyes back on me. “After I got out of rehab, I used to call your mother several times a year. Most of the time she hung up on me or avoided my calls, but I kept trying. Eventually, she changed the number and made it private so I couldn’t call anymore. You can ask Renee if you don’t believe me,” he said when I shook my head, unconvinced. “Every single year I sent you birthday and Christmas cards. I sent pictures. I never stopped trying to contact you, even after Stacey told me you hated me and pretended I was dead. The last thing she said to me before she took you away was that she’d make sure you grew up hating me as much as she did. That’s why I was so shocked when I saw your email. All these years, she let me believe you wanted nothing to do with me.”

The room was spinning, the colorful array of guitars bleeding together and then separating again, shifting sharply into focus. If my mother had been standing in front of me right then, I would have bludgeoned her with one. “How could she have kept that from me?” I asked, and then I thought,
Of course she kept it from me
. She kept everything from me . . . her love, my past, the truth, right down to the fact that my own father was alive, sober, and ready to be my father again.

“She wanted to protect you.”

Teresa had said the same thing, but I wasn’t buying it. Not anymore. “My mother has never protected me from anything. She hates me. I probably would have been better off with you.”

“No,” Eric said, leaning back. “You wouldn’t have been better off with me. Not back then.”

“We were close. I know we were. I have this memory of us, walking in the woods together . . . “ I blinked back tears and looked away, toward the paper-covered wall. “That was real, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was real. There was a path in the woods behind my parents’ house. We used to walk there all the time, just the two of us. You loved it.”

I thought again about how safe and happy I’d felt with him there, under a canopy of trees. It wasn’t just the walk I’d loved—it was him. “I see how you are with your kids,” I said, tearing up again. I let them come. “You’re a good dad. You’ve always been a good dad for them. Why couldn’t you do the same for me? I mean, was it my fault? What the hell is wrong with me?”

I felt his hand close over mine and then he squeezed it, willing me to look at him. When I did, his face was drawn with pain. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Lexi, and I’m sorry I made you feel that way,” he said, his voice breaking. “You know how long it took me to learn to be a good dad? There’s ten years between you and Willow. That’s how long it took. I wasn’t a good dad to you, Lexi. Not even close. Good dads don’t smoke crack in front of their three-year-olds. Good dads don’t leave syringes lying around the house for their babies to find. I did that. I drove drunk with you and exposed you to other addicts and bought eight balls instead of diapers. I put you in danger every single day, even when I knew CPS could intervene at any time and remove you from the house. And I’ll never forgive myself for that. Never.” He grasped my hand again, his warm palm enveloping my fingers just like I remembered. “Your mother
did
protect you, Lexi. She took you away so you could be safe and I didn’t try to fight it. You deserved better than me, so I let you go. I was a horrible excuse for a father, but I loved you so much it hurt. I always have.”