“Is it possible to love two people at the same time?” I ask.
“Oh god,” she says. “Yes. Sure. But what does that have to do with this?”
“Everything. Nothing. I don’t know. Is that me?”
She studies my face. The kettle whistles and she gets up, turns the burner off and pours the hot water into a pot for tea.
“I know it’s me. Mom’s name, the date—of course it’s me. My real question is why does David have it? Why does David have my ultrasound?”
Emmy returns with a tray and sits back down beside me on the couch.
“You should talk to your mom.”
“I can’t. I need you to tell me the truth.”
She pours tea in two cups, hands one to me. “I … Pippa, it’s not my place to tell you. It’s none of my business.”
“You have to. I … I just want to know. I don’t want Mom to know that I know. She’s obviously kept this from me for a reason. But I have a right to know, don’t I? If David’s my father?”
“Pippa …” Emmy blows on her tea. How can she drink tea? I want to, want to believe it will take the world’s problems away, but it feels implausible. I set my cup on the table.
“She cheated on Dad?” My voice quivers. “So what, she wasn’t sure about Dad? She was going to break up with him? Did he even know that I wasn’t his real daughter?” Another tear escapes. “Or he knew and he just … he just let her get away with it? He stayed with her even though she had sex with his best friend?” Suddenly it all makes sense. Why Mom doesn’t like David. Why Dad and David never saw each other anymore. “Or does she even know who the father is? I don’t know whether to hate Mom or Dad more. I feel so betrayed and, like, I don’t even know them.”
“Pippa, that’s not how it happened. Not even close.” She puts her cup back on the table, then places a hand on my knee.
“How else could it have happened? Mom met Dad, dated him, cheated on him with David and had me. The only thing I don’t know is whether Dad knew what Mom did to him.” I shake my head. “How can I go home and face Mom? I don’t—I don’t even want to go home.” The tears are coming quicker now. I swipe at my cheek with the back of my hand.
Emmy swivels me to face her, gripping my shoulders with her hands. “You don’t understand, Pippa. Your mother never cheated on Evan. She …” She trails off, then pulls me close and hugs me. Outside there’s the incessant honking of an irate driver, but inside, it’s quiet, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator. I wait, hoping that Emmy just tells the truth. Finally, she pulls away from me, looks at me, her mouth a straight line across her face.
“OK, listen,” she says seriously, then inhales deeply. Exhales. “I’m going to tell you what I know. The truth I know.”
My breath catches. I’m frozen, afraid to move, afraid to lose this moment, whatever is persuading Emmy to tell me what she knows. I watch her, as she releases her grip on me, then fiddles with the hem of her shirt. Takes another deep breath. And then she starts.
“Your mother met David and your father at the same time. David and your dad were best friends, yes. But it was your mother and David who started dating each other first.”
I let this sink in. Emmy watches me.
“My mom was with David before she was with my dad?” I clarify.
“That’s right.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“Why?”
“She never talked about it with me.”
“Would she, though? Has she ever talked about any of the boyfriends she had before she met your dad?”
“I just assumed she never had any boyfriends before Dad.”
“Pippa …” Emmy smiles, and now that I’ve said it, it does sound naïve. “You know how beautiful your mother is. And when she was young, she was even more beautiful. She was … vivacious.”
I think about Mom, back before Dad got sick, when she wore skinny jeans and makeup and they’d go on dates. And then, she just sort of let herself go. “She isn’t exactly vivacious anymore.”
“Cut your mom some slack right now. And I’m not talking even the last few years … Well, people change.” She looks down at her tea. Emmy sighs. “Should I put out some cookies?”
Answers? Yes. Cookies? Not so much.
I shake my head but Emmy gets up anyway. “Just going to get more milk,” she says. But instead, she just stands there at the counter in the kitchen. Long moments pass. Eventually she returns, setting the creamer on the table and sighing as she sits down again.
“People fall in love, they break up, they fall in love again. Are you going to be with Ben for the rest of your life?”
“Ben?” Have I mentioned Ben so much to Emmy that she thinks he’s my boyfriend? “I’m not with Ben. My boyfriend’s Dylan.”
“Right, sorry. OK—are you going to be with Dylan for the rest of your life?”
“I thought so, yeah. I thought we were going to be like my mom and dad. True love. Together forever.”
Emmy stands. “Do you want to walk? I could use some fresh air.”
I don’t respond, but I get up and follow Emmy to the door. We slip our shoes back on, grab our coats, and then we’re out, down the stairs and onto the street. It’s already dark. Emmy turns right and I walk beside her.
“Pip, your mother was the kind of girl boys fell in love with the moment they saw her. She had plenty of boyfriends.”
“But she was only ever in love with my dad?”
“Oh Pippa, wouldn’t that be so simple if that were the case? But no. Your mother was in love with David first. And before David there were other loves. She was a model in New York in the ’90s. She had plenty of love affairs. Did she ever tell you about the time she dated Moby?”
“Who’s Moby?”
“The musician?” We cross a busy intersection. “He had a tea shop. He was very cool. You know he’s a photographer too—published a book of photographs from his tour a few years ago, did a show in Hollywood.”
“OK, great, fine. Why didn’t it work out with that dude?” I say, getting more confused by the minute.
“He was going through a cleanse. Which entailed not showering. He smelled terrible. OK, we are totally off topic. Her other boyfriends are not the point.”
There’s a silence while about a billion different thoughts buzz through my head.
“David and Holly started dating after they met that night at the bar. They fell in love. Your mother loved him, she truly did. But David …”
“What?”
“He was David. He was exactly like how David is now. He loved your mother, for sure, but he was a player. He was good looking and knew it. All the girls loved him. He was the male version of your mother, in some ways. Just as full of life as she was.”
“My mom? A player?”
“Well, didn’t want to be tied down is maybe a better description. And why should she be? She was so young.” I dodge a guy on a bike coming toward me. People behind me shout at him to get off the sidewalk.
“They must’ve made quite the pair,” I say, thinking about how pretty Mom was when she was young. And how cute David was. Like Mila and Ashton, maybe? Or Leo and his supermodel of the moment?
“They would walk into a party and, you think I’m kidding but seriously, the conversation would stop. I’ve never seen anything like it. They turned heads like no one else.”
“What about my dad? Was he in love with someone else too?”
“Well, that was a funny thing. Your father was always around. He was never dating anyone else, not as long as I knew him. I always thought it was kind of weird, because he didn’t actually seem like he liked being alone. It felt like he wanted to be with someone but just … couldn’t find the right girl.”
Snow is starting to fall. I do up the top button of my coat. We keep walking for a while, a few blocks, neither of us saying anything. A storefront plays “Silver Bells” as we pass.
“So how did they end up together—Mom and Dad?” I say finally. “Mom
… cheated?” I hate the idea that Mom’s still a cheater, but at least with this story, Dad’s actually my dad, and David’s just some weird ultrasound collector.
“Pippa, no. Not at all. These are things you should ask your mother.”
“Emmy, my mother’s kept this secret from me for 16 years. You think she’s suddenly going to tell me the truth when I ask?”
“David’s been your mentor, this week, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he reliable? Dependable?”
“Well … what do you mean?”
“Has he shown up to everything on time? Totally acting professional?”
I think back to yesterday, to the photo shoot we had to save for him. Because of him. And all I got in return was a Thx and a vague See u later text in response. I had fun and whether Mikael and Gabrielle like the work I did or not, I know I actually learned something. But yeah, he should’ve been there. Even the first day to meet me, he was late.
“I guess he’s been pretty flaky.” I relay the past week and a bit.
“Sounds about right. Your mom thought she could change him. Oh, she was so in love with him. Or infatuated with him. One or the other. And then she found out she was pregnant, and she told David, and they made plans to move in together. They did—she moved into his place, the studio.” I’m surprised. All this time, the studio, I’d been picturing Dad there, but it was Mom who was actually living in it. I try to picture her there, pregnant with me.
“This was about three months before you were born. She moved into his studio, and for a while we all thought it might work out. That somehow she’d changed him. Or he’d changed himself. He seemed like a reformed man. He stopped staying out until 4 a.m. He turned down this great gig in London to stay with Holly. He went with her to buy a stroller.”
The London internship. The girl was Mom.
“They were happy?”
“Happy? Oh god, I don’t know about happy. They were two intense people at an intense time of their lives, and they’d have these intense fights and intense reconciliations. One time your mom called me up in Spalding, just because she needed someone to talk to, and I asked her why she stayed with him. Or—no, what I said was ‘You must really love him to stay with him through all that fighting.’ And I’ll never forget what your mom said.”
Silence fills the space between us, for what seems like forever. We’re just walking. It feels like we’ve been walking on this street forever. We’re on Avenue of the Americas, passing big building after big building. There aren’t many shops, not like on 5th.
Finally I feel the need to fill it. “You’re going to tell me, right?”
“I’m just trying to get it right. She said, ‘Love?’ But in this way, like it was a foreign concept to her. She said, ‘Love? When there’s a baby involved, maybe you have to give up on love.’ And then you were born.”
I wince a little thinking about how hard it must’ve been for my mom; no wonder she never mentioned the loveless part of my origin story. “Mom said it was a hard birth.”
“It was, and your mom stayed in the hospital for a few days—she had to be monitored—and David, very dutifully, stayed with her until the last night. He was supposed to go home and get everything ready. The nurses discharged your mom the following morning, and David was supposed to pick her up and he didn’t show. She had to take a taxi to the studio, by herself. When she got home—”
“There was a woman there.” I know it. I can’t even imagine Mom walking in with a baby and some other girl, a Talia, standing there. But Emmy shakes her head.
“There was no one there. An empty studio, an unmade bed, the stroller still in the box—not exactly the homecoming you want your baby to have.”
“Where was he?”
Emmy shrugs.
“So she broke up with him?”
“Basically. He showed up a day or two later, but by that time she’d packed up everything into a couple of bags. She couldn’t rely on him, so she decided to go where she could have someone to rely on. Someone to count on. Back home. To our mom and dad. Your grandma and grandpa.” Emmy stops and rubs my back, just like my mom does when I’m upset. “Your dad and I helped her get you and the rest of her stuff into a cab, and your dad went with her to the bus station. That was supposed to be it. Your mom would get on the bus to Spalding, move back into our house, that was it. She’d never see David or your dad again.”
“Oh god.”
We turn into a plaza, and I realize we’re at the Rockefeller Center. The Christmas tree shoots into the night sky in front of us. There has to be at least a thousand lights on the tree. We approach the railing, the one with flags of the world all around it, and stand overlooking the ice rink below. It’s packed with couples holding hands, single people, skating all in the same direction. A girl in a white fur-trimmed coat does a spin in the middle. Like we’re on the set of a movie. I stare, waiting for Emmy to go on.
“Holly was crying while she was holding you, just about to get on the bus, and your dad took both of you in his arms on the platform. One last hug. And who knows what it was—maybe it was the smell of her hair? Maybe it was you swaddled in your little receiving blankets. Maybe it was the fumes from all that bus exhaust? But your dad found the courage to tell your mom what he’d hidden from her as long as he’d known her. He told her he loved her, that he would always love her. That he would spend the rest of his life trying and failing to find a girl who lived up to Holly Masterson. Your mom was blown away—she’d just been abandoned by the guy she thought she’d be with forever—the father of her child. She’d thought that would be the start of their family together, a real family. And here she was, alone. And then, suddenly, here was this friend of hers professing his love, not only for her, but also for her baby, because he did that too. He told her he would love you forever.”
My breath catches. “And what happened?”
“He got on the bus with her. He helped her settle in Spalding, and you know the rest—he stayed. He was true to his word. Your dad was always true to his word. And your mom loved him back. The bus trip was so easy with your dad, when something like that would have been hell with David. I think there was a part of her that always knew.
“And that was that. They had no money, and your father still had his place in New York, this place, and I’d been planning to move to New York after I finished high school anyway, so we kind of switched, and I moved in here, and Grandma and Grandpa let your father move in with them, and your dad figured out how to make a business with his photography in Spalding. And all of a sudden they were this little family. And it was like it was always meant to be. They knew each other so well, they’d been friends for so long—it was like they were just meant to be together. And then they were.”
Neither of us says anything for a few moments. As it all sinks in. I lean over the railing, hands on it, breathing in the cold night air.
“So that’s why Mom was always weird about David,” I say finally, turning to Emmy. She nods.
“She’s always been worried that he would try to come back into your lives, that he’d try to be your father. Not because she didn’t want you to know who your real father was, but because …” she trails off. “Well, she was sure that if David tried to be your father, that he would mess it up somehow and let you down. And your father was a natural. Your mother didn’t want your dad—who was being your dad every single day, just like you were his own—to be hurt by David’s actions.”
“What about Dad? Did he ever talk to David again?” As much as Dad always praised David’s work, I realize I have no idea if they ever spoke, ever saw each other. I always assumed they did, in that way that you don’t really think about who your parents email or talk to when you’re not paying attention, but now I wonder if that was when their friendship ended. If all Dad ever had left was nostalgia. Even that seems hard to swallow, though.
“Of course their friendship was never the same—for so many reasons. But David wasn’t upset wi
th your father for being with your mom, and your father, he wasn’t one to hold grudges. To say things happen for a reason feels like such a cliché. It is such a cliché but in this case, I’ve always thought, maybe it really rings true. How could your dad really hate David for what he did, if it meant he ended up with the woman he always loved and a child he loved so, so dearly? And he wanted you to know David’s work too—to be inspired by David and look up to him, even if he wasn’t going to be a father to you.”
“I always felt like I was the reason Dad wasn’t as famous as David. And I guess I was right, I just didn’t know the whole story.”
Emmy hugs me as snow falls on us. “Your dad wouldn’t have changed anything for the world.”
CHAPTER 16
The next morning Ramona pulls me out of bed, basically dresses me, feeds me a mocha and a chocolate chip cookie and gets me to class. I can’t imagine how I’ll be able to focus on anything, especially when I keep checking my phone and still have no texts from Dylan. But when Mikael starts talking about the end of camp reception on Friday I realize that this camp—this experience—is almost over, and then I’m fully engaged. We have to exhibit something—but what, they’re really leaving it up to us to decide. A single photo or a series, something we’ve already completed or something totally new, even if the instructors haven’t seen it. After all the criticism of the week, this free for all seems kind of like the opposite of everything we’ve learned. “Show us what you’ve got. Give us the photos that represent you best. Not because we told you so, because you believe it. Photography is subjective. It’s an art. But it’s also a business. Show us you have what it takes to make it.”
And so, we spend most of the day studying various techniques, and then we’re on the computers learning photo-manipulation techniques, and then the day’s over, and I realize tomorrow’s our last night left. Before we go home.
I have an idea.
“I’ll meet you at the dining hall,” I tell Ramona when we’re almost at the dorm. Then I take off in the other direction.
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