Her red pencil flew over the margin as she scribbled a note.
Mom, I feel like
your dating a multiple personality. Is this Laura’s boyfriend from the club?The
other guy Ryan?
Is this one story?
You need some transitions I’m not following.
The more she gave voice to her frustrations, the more absent
answers pricked beneath her skin. Jay tried to help with his story about
Olivia, but she rubbed her head to nail down what he told her. It all floated
in a sleepy, adrenaline charged haze. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to keep
going. With the trip or the manuscript? Her subconscious prodded. Casting the errant
thought aside she jotted another note in the margin.
Mystery creates urgency for the reader.
Lack of clarity creates frustration.
I need more clarification on who and what is happening.
Your roommate is mean to her boyfriend, and what does that
mean?
Who are you kissing? Is this dad or someone else?
Are we with you and Mike? How does this scene fit in with
you trying to find love?
For a girl with a broken heart, you seem to be interacting
with a lot of guys. Who are they?
The manuscript, shoved back in her
bag taunted her for the rest of the afternoon. A part of her realized it was
like a mosquito bite, taking her focus away from a festering infection. She
used it to avoid Charles, she needed the problems of somebody Else to stay sane..
The solution to her turbulent lack
of understanding could be fixed with a single phone call. but that would be a
can of worms she didn’t feel steady enough to open. Instead, she took her time
finding flannel pajama pants and a white t-shirt in her suitcase,. She paced, cleaned the tiny bathroom, washed
the towels and silk robe and tidied the house. However, working her thoughts into an avalanche of
awaiting arguments and hurt feelings made her head ache worse. This would be a painful conversation for both
of them, of that she was certain
Alex finally collapsed on the edge of Jay’s bed
laying her head on the crisp linen pillow case, and pulled her feet from the
floor onto the quilt. She stared up
at the ceiling, listening to the ringing
at the other end of the phone.
“Hello?”
Alex took a deep breath. “Hi mom,”
she said, “It’s me.”
“Are you alright, honey? You sound
upset.”
Alex gritted her teeth and held
back her desire to spill the whole awful tale of her trip
Her own jumble of expectations and
disappointments over the last few days threatened to wash over her in a
drenching flood. Nothing made sense. Not the manuscript, or this trip, or her
feelings about…anything.
Taking a shuddered breath, Alex cleared her
mind. “I’m lost, Mom. I need some help.”
The sharp intake of Tricia’s breath came over
the phone. “Oh, baby. Where are you? Are you lost in New York City? Don’t
panic, just call the police.”
Alex laughed. “No, mom. Not lost, like I
can’t find my way home. Lost…confused…with your story.”
Tricia’s relieved giggles bubbled through
the connection. Their brief sense of camaraderie linking them together. “Don’t
scare me like that, Lexi. I was picturing you, alone on the streets of
Manhattan. I know New York City is safer than when I lived there25 years ago,
but you scared me half to death.”
Alex felt the tenuous smile she
held slip away as her mind recalled her own fear when she realized she was abandoned
in New York’s International Airport.”I think only Central Park is safer, Mom. I
haven’t been there yet, but Jay told me its cleaner and better patrolled.”
“Well,” Tricia said, lengthening the word., “If you’re not in any
physical danger, then is it Charles? Is everything all right with him?”
Alex rolled her eyes and ignored her
mother’s less than subtle probing. “Physically, I’m fine. As far as your
manuscript is concerned though, I need some help.”
Tricia made a hesitant sound, as if she
wanted to avoid committing to the change in subject.
For a brief second Alex imagined
her mother purposefully arranging the manuscript to be confusing. She tightened
her grip on the phone and ignored the instinct. “I just need some clarification
on a few things. First, why did you start off with Mike? Are any of these guys
in your journal entries him?”
“Mike? Mike was out of my life. Well, at
least as much as possible. I was trying to give you a reference for background
and where I was. None of the journal entries are about Mike except
the ones that talk about him.”
Alex picked up a careful tone in her
mother’s voice. She remembered a day when she was six years old, watching the
woman pluck every shred of olive off a pizza for her little girl. Now, it sounded like she used
that same determined concentration in her response. “Okay, not Mike? Who else
is there? Some of these guys I can totally picture being dad. Some of them
though, I can’t tell. You don’t have any names and I can’t decide if you are
dating someone, more than one, or just sneaking around behind your roommates
back with her boyfriend.”
Alex pressed her hand to her mouth
as the words escaped. She didn’t plan on accusing her mom of cheating. The
painful silence that met the statement now stuck like a hot knife in her mind. “I just mean that it sounds like when your
roommate is around, you and her boyfriend are…friendly. When she isn’t though,
are you kissing him? Is that how you and Dad ended up together?”
This time Alex heard a gasp. she winced
at the sound, knowing she’d said too much.
I can’t care, she
thought.
“Mom, before you freak out I’m just
saying, if you and dad were cheating on your roommate—no matter how much she
wanted to date other guys—you will need to cut that part out. Nobody wants
their leading man to be a sneak or a liar.”
“Lexi,” Tricia scolded over the line. “You know
your Dad far too well to be accusing him of cheating on his girlfriend.”
Alex gulped back the surge of emotions
building for the last 24 hours. The stab of her mother’s words pushed
her tears beyond her fragile grasp.
. “Honey, Your father is not that kind of a man and I…” Tricia
took a defeated breath over the line. “I would tell you that I would never do
that either, but it wouldn’t be true.”.
A broken sob escaped Alex as she
whispered, “So you were making out with her boyfriend all that time?”"
“No, I wasn’t
making out with Laura’s boyfriend behind her back. She sighed again, “At
least…not that time.”
“Not that time? What is that supposed to
mean?”
An elongated pause reverberated once
more and Alex glared at the dark blue curtains against the lighter shades..
“ I
was a sophomore in college before I kissed anyone at all,””Tricia said. . “I
had a friend, sort of a pen pal who I dated just once. We ended up making out
and I never saw him again.”
“What are you talking about? Did this guy have a girlfriend?”
“No, but he, or I guess waiting so long, effected who I
kissed after that.”
“you’re serious? You were like 19 or 20 before you kissed
anyone?”
“I was 19 and kissing
Danny just convinced me I should have started sooner.”
“How come you didn’t keep going out with this
Danny, or at least making out with him?”
“He moved overseas, and I didn’t
want to. I wanted to kiss everyone I could.”
“Super trashy Mom.”
Trisha heaved a sigh, “I know, but
the real problem was I started making out with a lot of different guys I wasn’t
even remotely interested in falling in
love with. I was lonely and reeling from the loss of my father and I wanted
someone, anyone, to want me. I was
selfish and blind in my pursuit of affection and I made one of the worst
mistakes of my life. I had one of these empty relationships with my best friend’s
boyfriend behind her back.”
Alex choked, trying to sputter something
which would sound supportive. “You were …young, and…desperate…and”-Flopping
onto her back, Alex gave up-“trying to steal your best friend’s boyfriend,
because you were lonely? Come on, Mom. That’s a stretch."
“I didn’t want her boyfriend,” Tricia
said. “I just wanted someone and he was
willing…”
“That was your criteria? You just needed someone who was willing?
Why didn’t you just go stand on the corner and hold up a sign?”
“Alexandra!” Tricia’s voice took on
an edge, “Do you want me to finish the story or not?”
Alex bit off the remark burning her
tongue. She hated it when her mother reprimanded her using her full name.
“Okay, Mom,.”just don’t call me
Alexandra.
“The point is I was too caught up
in my own pain to see what I was doing to my friend. The mistake I made caused
me to lose the trust of my best friend. It was never about the boyfriend, I
wasn’t even attracted to him. It was all about me, I was an idiot. When he
couldn’t live with his own guilt anymore, he told her and I…Well, I hated
myself.”
“Since the two of you were such good
friends, the smart thing to do would be to laugh at him for being fat, bald,
and alone after she dumped him.”
Tricia released a hollow chuckle. “No,
honey, She married him. She loved him and he loved her. I was the one who
deserved to be fat, bald, and alone. she didn’t even hate me, though I deserved
that and so much more."
Alex gave a terse laugh as Tricia
continued, “Unfortunately they were not the only relationships I was careless
with. I behaved extraordinarily bad with a number of classless people until…”
A sob broke from Tricia’s throat and Alex
swallowed hard.
. “Until the night I got myself into a
compromising situation with a guy who was much crueler than I had been, and I
ended up…attacked.”
“You were raped Mom, Its been a long
time. You can call it what it was.” Alex knew the night she was referring to.
She remembered clearly one of Tricia’s earlier journals where she’d written of
the night on campus when she was twenty. Alex’s mind fought to keep her
thoughts away from the remembered details of that night.
. Her chest burned and the more she resisted the picture
forming in her mind, the clearer it became.
One of her mother’s friends, unwilling to stick with making out, pinned Tricia against a swatch of lawn outside The library. panic of that long ago night
pulsed through Alex’s veins as she could almost see the guy using his body
weight to imprison and force himself on her. A security guard walking the campus
interrupted before the guy could follow through with his promise to show her
how real men get what they want. However, it
was too late. Her world was shattered,
her soul broken from the sheer terror infesting her heart. Alex closed her eyes
against the flashing images the written words left in her mind. She didn’t
fully comprehend terror like that; Her own horrors were filed into easier categories. She could only imagine her mother’s feelings. she didn’t want to force
Tricia to dwell on it for too long. The exact words from the journal entry came to mind. “I became caged by a
paralyzing emptiness that worsened with the touch of each of his fingers against
my skin. I was prey; my weakness gave
him power with each of my struggles.
Back then, there was no such thing
as sexual assault in the eyes of the law; there was raped or not raped. So I stumbled
home, with no proof of anything except poor judgment and a heart full of self-condemnation.”
Alex shuddered, the ache in her chest a specter of her
mother’s pain.
Tricia continued, “After the attack, I never
put myself in any man’s arms for any reason until I fell in love with Mike.
I had a few relationships, but none of them were physical. I let
Mike break my heart, an experience nearly as traumatizing as the other guy
breaking my body. So I never felt safe enough to share those things with anyone
again.”
Alex pictured her Mom wiping her
cheeks. She bit her bottom lip, along with the desire to flee from this phone
call. The only thing that’ll make
this worse is if you hang up on her. Her thoughts scolded.
“Part of the reason it took me so long to
find your dad, was that I had careful rules about other people’s boyfriends and
your dad always had some girl he was dating. Our paths didn’t even cross until
we ended up …”
The break in conversation sheared Alex’s
last few nerves. “Until what Mom? You’ve never told me how you met Dad?”
“Lexi, I’m sorry. I know that little girl that once believed
I had all the answers is long gone, but there are some things about your
mother’s own stupidity no child should ever have to know. I shouldn’t have
asked you to live so intimately in my past. I just knew that I could count on
you to be critical with my writing. I guess I wasn’t prepared for you to
actually see my life in the same way.”
“What? What does that have to do with
Dad?”
“Please Lexi. I made
a lot of mistakes, and I live with the regret of them to this day. There are
powerful lessons in them; lessons I can teach to other girls so they don’t have
to go through the same thing, but I need your help with this.”
Alex
rolled her eyes at her mother’s dramatics and her own growing confusion.
“Okay, Mom,” she surrendered. “but I
need names for your characters. I can’t keep track. The guy with the old car,
the guy who wanted to be best friends with benefits, the guy with the
grapefruit juice, Laura’s boyfriend.” Alex ticked them off one by one on her
fingers.
“Your love life was a soap opera.,”
“No, honey,” Tricia assured. “There were
just two guysYour Dad, and the other one.
Alex took a shuddered breath and then
sighed. “I still need names,” she said, “or people are going to think you’re
hiding something, or dating Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde.”
Tricia laughed easily now and Alex could
here her contain her own tears.
“Okay honey, I’ll fix that when you bring
it back.”
“Wait mom!! Tell me their names.”"
the silence of the dead connection was
the only response. Did she just hang
up on me?
