by Piper Lennox
Jeannie nods in an “of course” kind of way and sets it back in place, perfectly aligned with the others.
“I always thought if Tim and I had a son,” she says, facing the fireplace, “he would have looked just like Bourne, too.” Her smile is strained when she turns back to her seat, then fixes itself. “We tried, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us, I guess.”
“Is, um...” Saying “my sister” sounds way too weird. “...Caitlin-Anne your only child?”
Jeannie nods and checks her watch, turned to the inside of her wrist. “Tim should be here any minute,” she smiles, standing as a phone chimes somewhere in the distance. “Can I get you anything else while you wait?”
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
When she leaves, I set my mug down, exhale, and sink into the couch completely. Tension courses through my muscles, an electrical current as painful as it is energizing. All I want is to talk to Tim, get my information, and get out. I didn’t count on seeing any human sides to the Fairfields, today.
Finally, I hear movement back in the direction of the foyer. First an indistinct, booming sentence, then footsteps.
I stand, straighten my shoulders, and steel myself with a breath. The coffee churns in my stomach.
“Silas,” Tim smiles. There’s a cigar in his hand, unlit. He looks better than the last time I saw him, and infinitely better than the first. It annoys me, strangely enough, that his suffering is no longer visible.
“Hi. I just stopped by to, uh...to talk.” For whatever reason, I feel the need to fish the paper he gave me from my pocket, like the gate code is proof I belong here. “You said this timeframe was okay, so—”
“You don’t have to explain,” he chuckles. “Good to see you.” He walks to a small bar in the corner, opens a decanter, and pours a couple ounces in a glass, all one-handed. The other still holds the cigar, minding the books on the shelf beside him as though it’s lit.
“Brandy?” he asks, without looking at me.
“Sure,” I blurt, surprising myself. I’ve never had brandy. Then again, I’ve never had coffee in a mansion before, either. Accepting their drinks gives me something to occupy my hands, at least.
I thank him and sip. The liquor is smooth and tastes vaguely of peaches. He holds his up in a toast of some kind, so I do the same.
“I think I know why you’re here,” he says, growing serious. “Let’s go to my home office and talk.”
I say “sure” again and follow him numbly through the house. It’s a weird mash-up of old and new: antiques at every turn, topped with modern-looking clocks and minimalist-inspired coffee table books; crown molding and textured wallpaper, embedded with touch-panels to control the recessed lighting and room temperatures. A hallway is lined with every single one of Caitlin-Anne’s school photos, from kindergarten to senior year. Just like the hallway at Camille’s house, or the wall over the couch at my mom’s.
“Right through here.” Tim holds the door for me. His home office is richly colored, all maroons and browns, and the whole place smells like tobacco and leather. I sit in the chair in front of his desk; he sits behind it.
“So. I’m guessing you talked to your mother?”
“No.” I trace the rim of my glass with my thumb. “Figured I’d talk to you, first. Get your version of things.”
“It’s not ‘my version.’ It’s the truth. But sure—I’d be happy to tell you whatever you want to know.”
I swallow the toxic sludge of coffee and liquor climbing back up my throat. “Did you two really meet at a charity concert, when she was stage directing?”
“Yep. Year before you were born. She ran into me backstage—literally—with a tray full of hot chocolate for some kids at the dress rehearsal. She about had a heart attack when she realized who I was, thinking I would yell at her or something.” Faintly, he smiles. “Which was funny, because my first thought wasn’t about how mad I was. I wasn’t mad at all. I just kept thinking, ‘Damn. She is beautiful.’”
I laugh, a little out of breath; this wasn’t what I expected. “Wow. She didn’t tell me that part.”
Tim laughs, too. “Maybe she’s still embarrassed about it.”
The air feels charged. I wonder if he can hear my thoughts: She’s not still embarrassed. She just hates you.
“Okay,” I go on, clearing my throat, “did you really tell her you were going to leave Jeannie?”
The lines in his face deepen. “Yes. I did.”
“So...what changed?”
“A lot of things, really. At the time—and this doesn’t leave this room, please—we were both having extramarital affairs. Things weren’t good between us at all. We both thought divorce was inevitable, or at least I did. So when I got with your mother…. You have to understand, I didn’t think of it as cheating on Jeannie. In my mind, we were already over.”
“But you weren’t.”
Tim sits back, eyeing me intensely, but eventually nods. “That’s right,” he says. “We were still married. Starting a relationship with your mother was...still cheating.”
I nod. At least we’re on the same page with this much.
“My mom says.... I mean, from what she’s told me, and what I remember, you were around the first few years.”
“Yes. A lot. I was as involved with your life as I was Caitlin-Anne’s.”
This answer doesn’t make me feel better. If anything, it makes me feel bad for Caitlin-Anne: I didn’t get much time with Tim, if memory—or lack thereof—serves. She lived with the guy, and still didn’t get more than a few hours a week?
“But then you stopped,” I add quickly, “and...and the story I’ve always gotten was that you abandoned us. Just stopped all contact, didn’t send money anymore, and told my mom that if she tried to contact you, you’d make sure she lost her job.”
Tim laughs in his throat and sits back. “Becky wove you quite the web, all these years,” he says. “Not one word of that is true.”
I set my glass on the desk. “Then what is?”
“She gave me an ultimatum. Said I either had to leave Jeannie and Caitlin-Anne, or she’d make sure I never saw you again. I told her I just couldn’t do that—Jeannie and I were in counseling, trying to make things work again. We were doing well.”
“Were you still with my mom, by that point?”
“Technically speaking, yes.”
I scoff. His eyes narrow.
“I don’t believe in that kind of passive-aggressive behavior. If you have something you’d like to say, son, you go on and say it, point-blank.”
The way he says “son” burns the liquor in my veins like accelerant. “You sure committed to that marriage counseling. Kept my mom on the backburner, then told her you were trying to fix your relationship with someone else.”
“I’ve already said it was wrong. It was a long time ago. I’ve learned from my mistakes.”
“So that’s it—it was a long time ago, and you learned, so everyone else just has to get over it.”
“I didn’t say that. I would just like it if you could put your anger aside for a minute, to try and see why I did what I did. Right or wrong, I did it for a reason. In between the time I met your mother and the separation could become official, I realized...I didn’t want to lose Jeannie.” He pauses, glancing at his desk top and rearranging the ink blotter. “I still loved her. It just took almost losing her to figure that out.”
“Okay.” I hold up my palms and sit back. “Let’s say it’s true, that she really did give you that ultimatum. Why didn’t you fight for me?”
He looks up, confused. “What?”
“Fight for me,” I repeat. “Why didn’t you assemble your mega-team of lawyers to get custody, or visitation? Why didn’t you at least try and see me? Why didn’t you answer just one of the fucking letters I sent, or the phone calls I made?”
Tim stays silent for a long time. His eyes dart away from mine, like he’s uncomfortable, and it’s only then that I realize there are tears
in my eyes. Of course he can’t stand to see them.
“Your mother cut all contact. She didn’t want me to visit, didn’t want me to call—she didn’t even want my money, she said. And the few times I tried, early on, she threatened to tell Jeannie. So I—I stopped.”
“Nice try. Jeannie already knew about the affair.”
“Yes, but she didn’t—”
His mouth shuts. The chair creaks when he pivots just off-center, staring at a painting on the wall instead.
Suddenly, in a moment when I’m honestly not sure if I’ll be sick on this expensive carpeting or not, it clicks.
“Jeannie didn’t know the affair had been a real relationship,” I finish for him. “She didn’t know you had a kid. And if she found out, you knew she’d leave you.”
“Silas, I’m not saying it was right. I’m just trying to—to make you understand my reasoning, at that time.”
His phrasing just pisses me off more, but the core idea does sort of make sense. Maybe he’s not trying to beg off. He just wants to give me answers, as best he can. That is why I’m here, after all. I might not like them, but I knew I wouldn’t.
“Besides,” he goes on, right after I relax and nod, “the business was expanding. This was just before the Crickette acquisition, and Solomon Foods, and—”
“Acquisitions?”
“Yes,” he says simply, like this is some test I should have studied for. “Fairfield Industries is the parent company of some—”
I interrupt again. “I know. I actually work at Everyoung, in the R&D department.”
My goal in saying this was to shut him up and get him back on topic, but he grins. “No kidding! You should have said something sooner.”
Why this matters, I have no idea. It’s not like Tim or anyone with Fairfield Industries works with Everyoung directly, other than to make sure they’re pulling their weight in the profits margin. I shake my head and breeze past it. “What did acquisitions have to do with anything? And why didn’t you just tell Jeannie, anyway, since you both already suspected the other of cheating? You could have ripped off the Band-Aid. You could have….”
This time, I feel the tears immediately and blink them back before he can see.
“It just.... It sounds like you didn’t want to see me,” I say, hating how quiet my voice becomes. “Like you didn’t care.”
“Of course I cared.” Tim leans onto the desk and stares until I look back. “Silas, it tore me up every single day, knowing you were growing up without me. I used to drive past your school when it let out, just so I could watch you get on the bus. Do you remember that spelling bee you won, when you got all the way to the state level? I recorded it—still have the tape, too, right on that bookshelf.”
Whatever I was going to say next balls itself up in my throat. I had no idea he was ever at the perimeter of my life. Watching me with the same diehard secrecy I used to watch his, on television and in business magazines, through rumors and Filigree’s small but far-reaching grapevine.
“The acquisitions,” he adds, after a moment, “were highly publicized, that’s all. And with mostly family-owned companies who hadn’t finalized the deals yet. If word about you had gotten out, it...well, it would have disrupted everyone’s lives.”
It’s his use of the word “everyone” that enables me to speak again.
“Disrupted my life, how? I would have gotten to see you. Mom and I wouldn’t have had to keep struggling, the way we did.”
When he doesn’t answer the question, my brain fills it all in again.
“It would have disrupted your life. You were afraid of losing the deals. If definitive proof—me—got out that you were an adulterer...Fairfield Industries would have lost those contracts.” I pause. He sips his brandy. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“It wasn’t the main reason by far,” he says, “but...yes, it crossed my mind. So if I’d made it known that you existed, Jeannie would have left, the company would have suffered...and, truth be told, I wasn’t sure how I could have a relationship with you when your mother so clearly hated me.”
“I wonder why,” I snap, getting to my feet and slamming the chair into his desk as I leave.
He calls after me, but doesn’t follow. Finally: something about this visit that doesn’t surprise me.
17
The halls wind differently from my memory; my brain’s too clouded to remember the way out. I follow the school portraits of Caitlin-Anne until I see a table I recognize. Did we turn here? Or was it a straight walk down the rest of the hallway, back through the parlor?
I shut my eyes. It’s too much. This house, the anger—the regret.
I wish I’d never contacted him. I wish I’d never gone looking for answers.
My heart’s humming. There’s a ball of panic I can’t explain, nestled in my diaphragm. No matter how fast or deeply I breathe, it doesn’t feel like enough air, and I’m positive I’m about to be sick.
The door near the end of the hall looks promising. I basically sprint for it.
“Jesus,” someone gasps, as soon as I stumble inside. “What are you doing?”
I look around. It’s instantly clear that this isn’t a bathroom; it’s a home theater. Of course. I bet this place is filled with hidden, useless gems.
Caitlin-Anne gets up from her seat, part of a custom-built pit in the floor filled with cushions. Instead of a movie, there’s a video game tutorial projected on the screen, barely visible; every light is on. A boy with a tablet sits cross-legged in front of it and glances from the screen to his game every few seconds.
“I, uh....” The sour flood in my mouth makes me too dizzy to care or wonder about any of this. “Bathroom?” I pant.
Caitlin-Anne takes a dramatic step back, even with the ten or so feet already between us, and points to a door beside me. I nod my thanks and scramble inside.
I expect to be violently sick. That’s the feeling tearing through my stomach and chest: uncontrollable, frantic, and coated in fury. But instead, I just lie on the icy tile and breathe as the nausea ebbs out of me.
My heartbeat slows. I count it every minute until it reaches eighty or so, then push up to a sitting position and let my balance level out.
“Sorry,” I tell her, when I come out and see her waiting there for me, instead of lounging back on the cushions with her phone, the way I found her. I wonder if she’s just waiting to have security escort me out, the way she tried to do to Camille.
“You were, like, pure white,” she says, almost warily. She hands me a bottle of water from the shelves on the other side of the room, decorated with a neon “Concessions” sign. “Are you okay?”
I sip and follow her instructions to sit in the sofa pit. “I don’t know. I felt like...like I was going to be sick, and I couldn’t breathe very well. Everything got really hot and kind of hazy. I was trying to find my way out and just totally blanked.”
“Sounds like a panic attack,” she says, laughing. But the way she laughs doesn’t sound derisive, like Tim, or nervous, like Jeannie.
“You’ve had one before?” I ask.
“I’ve had hundreds,” she sighs, flopping back into her seat on the other side of the pit. “Not that anyone believed me.”
“Seriously? How could they not? That was probably the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life.”
“Well,” she smirks, “I was, like, really dramatic growing up. I guess I still am. So I think everyone thought it was some cry for attention.”
“Mommy, look!” The little boy comes flying into the pit, nearly smacking himself in the face with the tablet. “I got to the next level even faster than the guy in the video did.” He seems to notice me for the first time, shrinking back behind Caitlin-Anne’s shoulder. “Who’s that?”
“Silas.” She keeps scrolling through her phone. “He’s...your uncle. Kind of.” Her eyes flicker to mine. “Right?”
I shrug, then find myself nodding. “Yeah, I guess I am.” I scoot towards them a few feet and stick
out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
The boy hesitates, then crawls out from behind Caitlin-Anne to take my hand. When I ask him what his name is, he gets shy again and mumbles, “Banner.”
“Banner,” I repeat. “What game are you playing?”
“It’s a new game I got yesterday,” he says, tilting the screen so I can see. “You build this town and then bad guys keep trying to get in so you have to build a fence, but I just beat the bad guys and”—he pauses, swallowing the spit in the corners of his mouth—“now I’m a Level Four, so I get ships to go trade with other towns.”
I glance at Caitlin-Anne with a smirk, but her eyes are fixated fully on her phone. Not that it’s that surprising. As shocked as I was to learn she has a child, I still would’ve pegged her as one of those distant, let-nannies-and-tech-raise-the-kid moms.
“That’s pretty cool,” I tell Banner.
“I’ll show you how to play next time you come over.”
My heart picks back up a little, but I force the panic down. Whatever just happened to me, I definitely don’t want to feel it ever again. And, until I ran into Caitlin-Anne and Banner, I was positive I’d accomplish that by never setting foot back in this house. Now, I’m not so sure.
“Okay. Yeah, that’d be fun.” I get up slowly and blink the head rush away. “Thank you,” I tell Caitlin-Anne. “Sorry for barging in here, it’s just....”
“You’re fine,” she says, waving her hand. “I heard some of what he said, so like, I don’t blame you for freaking out. I would too.”
“You heard?”
“Yeah,” she says matter-of-factly. “Don’t judge me, I mean, I wasn’t like...eavesdropping. I had to ask him a question, but then I heard you guys talking.” She pauses and flips the phone back and forth between her hands. “Not that you don’t already know this, but he’s a huge—” She shoots Banner a look, then finishes, “A-S-S.”
“Ass,” Banner announces, still absorbed in his game. Caitlin-Anne and I burst out laughing.
“Anyway,” she goes on, after we’ve gathered ourselves, “don’t be sorry.” What looks like embarrassment crosses her face, but I’m sure I’ve got to be hallucinating. Of all the emotions a person like Caitlin-Anne seems capable of, I’d never guess that would be one of them.