Chapter Twenty-Three Cammie
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cammie
“You know, one thing about becoming a single mom in my early twenties, far from home and completely terrified,” Mom muses, lying beside me on her bed a few hours after I left West’s room, both of us staring up at the ceiling, “was that I read a shit ton of parenting books.”
The unexpected curse earns a surprised snort-laugh from me, though it shouldn’t. I heard her yelling at Johnny Russo, after all.
She goes on. “And would you believe that not one of them told me how to discipline your nineteen-year-old, after she pulls off an elaborate scheme to find the father who you never let her know of, because you yourself had been conned into believing he didn’t want either of you, when, in fact, he was under the impression that he didn’t even have a kid? ”
I hum thoughtfully. “Yeah, that is a pretty unique set of circumstances that I can’t imagine a lot of moms relating to.”
“Well, aren’t they lucky?” she scoffs.
I give her a conflicted sort of smile as we turn toward each other, just a few inches between us on the pillows. “Yeah. I think the answer is you just have to have some difficult conversations.”
“I think you’re right,” she agrees, “and I think I probably should have tried that a long time ago.”
I feel a pang of sympathy for twenty-years-ago Alex, who I’ve gotten to know pretty well by now. A young woman not much older than me, who was just trying to figure it all out as she went. Exactly as I am.
“I also could have asked,” I say, “but neither of us is that into the hard conversations.”
She reaches over and takes my hand in one of hers.
“You are handling all of this almost scarily well,” she says, a little accusation in her voice.
“But I’m so sorry you have to handle it at all.
That I got us into this mess twenty years ago and couldn’t even manage to sort it out until you grew old enough, and sharp enough, and doggedly persistent enough to sort it out yourself. ”
“I tried to, anyway,” I correct her, “but the truth was beyond the scope of my imagination. Maybe even beyond the imagination of, like, Shonda Rhimes herself.”
Mom laughs. “She would totally write a Johnny Russo type of villain.”
“Right?” I agree.
Her voice turns serious again. “But now that it’s all out in the open, or, you know, at least the essentials are, can I clear up anything else? Other things you want to know but might have been afraid to ask?”
I consider the question for a minute. “Is he like…the one that got away?” I try at last, forming the thought carefully.
I don’t have to say who “he” is. Besides Johnny, who we more often call “that bastard” or “dickhead” or other derogatory names, there’s only one man who’s monopolized our conversations and thoughts since last night.
The man who stayed down in the depths of Villa di Bronzo with us for nearly an hour after the others left, in the aftermath of his entire world shifting irrevocably.
He did an admirable job of pretending he wasn’t losing his grip on his sanity, but when the silences between the three of us grew longer, conversation more stilted and less meaningful, as it’s wont to do when all parties are dealing with everything they thought they knew changing on a dime—and are up far past their bedtimes—we said our good-nights, with the vague agreement to talk again soon.
I assume he went back to his place on Via Camilla, while Mom and I returned to Villa Russo, both of us too physically and emotionally exhausted to talk anymore.
I’d rested well in West’s arms, safe and warm and loved.
But learning he was hiding stuff from me again came as a rude awakening.
Now I feel similarly to how I did from my first and only hangover not that long ago.
I guess I am emotionally hungover. But the espresso Mom fetched for me from downstairs is gradually reviving me, as is the knowledge that’s slowly setting in amid all the chaos from last night and this morning: I know who my father is.
I just didn’t expect the information to be brand-new to him as well. And if Mom is offering, I’m certainly going to pump her for all the details I can on my no-longer-a-mystery parent. The next time I see him, I’ll go into the meeting armed with intel, if few other defenses.
She takes a while to form her answer, which is a sort of answer in itself, though I don’t make fun of her for it.
“ ‘The one that got away’ feels so melodramatic,” she says with a groan, pinching the bridge of her nose in a familiar gesture.
It wasn’t my intention to make her cry. But it’s probably healthy, in light of all she’s reckoning with.
“I do believe we were very in love—deeply, authentically. I mean, you read our letters to each other, as absolutely mortifying as that is.”
“You think you’re mortified,” I grumble with mock indignation that I don’t have the right to even pretend is there.
“Okay, you snoop, watch it.” Her laugh turns into a wistful sigh.
“But of course that’s one of the hardest parts of this whole thing.
Wondering what could have been, had he just gotten my letter.
Kicking myself for not, I don’t know, trying to follow up in person when I thought he’d dumped me by proxy.
Though he skipped town so quickly, it would have been tough, but I could have tried harder.
I was just heartbroken, thinking he’d left me, and left you, and the one person I thought was really it for me had turned out to be the biggest letdown of them all.
That’s an awful feeling, and the would’ve, should’ve, could’ves will probably haunt me for, oh, forever.
” She has to pause, her voice wobbling as she gets a hold of her emotions.
“But we’re all going to have to live with that and figure out how we go forward now, you know? ”
She’s voiced many of the same thoughts I’ve had in the last twelve-ish hours. Moving forward feels daunting, terrifying, and, okay, kind of thrilling.
“My turn to ask you a question,” Mom begins. “Camilla Lovett…you just found your biological father, against all odds and the nefarious machinations of a fake-Italian sociopath. What are you going to do next?”
I scrunch my nose. “Go to Disney World?”
Mom makes a buzzer sound. “Try again. Pretend either of us is capable of dealing with serious, completely life-altering matters without using humor to mask our real feelings. When you first decided you wanted to find your dad, what were you hoping would come next?”
I think about it before answering slowly, carefully, like I’m unsure yet how high I can aim.
“I loved to imagine that he would be thrilled to meet me, and we’d have a relationship, as wildly unlikely as that seemed.
But as we’ve already established, the wildest possibilities I thought of don’t even touch the reality.
So I guess…” I take my lower lip between my teeth, biting back the truth for a few last moments before setting it free.
“I guess I hope that Luca is game for getting to know each other, and, I don’t know, we go from there. ”
She gives me a soft, encouraging smile, and I see the tears welling up again in her blue eyes that are so like my own. And not unlike Luca Goedhart’s.
“Okay,” she says, barely a whisper. “I support you, Cam. Whatever you want, I want to do what I can to give that to you. And Luca…” She sighs, the sound of it doing nothing to dispel my suspicion that she still has the hots for my long-lost dad, all this time later.
“He has no idea how lucky he is to get the chance to know you. But he will very soon. I’m sure of it. ”
In a turn of events I absolutely did not see coming this summer, let alone only twenty-four hours after learning my dad’s identity, I think he and my mom are on a date.
“It’s not a date,” she told me while she put on a dress that I had definitely never seen before.
I’m shocked she even packed it for her time here, most of which has been spent digging in the dirt, walking through the dirt, covered at any given moment in dirt.
But she wasn’t tonight, when she set off in her slinky cocktail dress.
“It’s not slinky” had been her retort when I referred to it as such in front of her. More denial of reality. She’s even wearing perfume; I didn’t know she owned perfume.
Now that she’s left me behind, I’m wandering Villa Russo like the ghost of a woman scorned here or something.
The word around the residence hall is that John Mark has fled the premises, and his resignation from his role as director is anticipated any time now.
I didn’t realize, until I found out he was gone, that I’m much more comfortable knowing I won’t turn a corner to find him looming there, all creepy and angry-eyed.
I’m not sure what to do with myself, since I’m still frustrated with West and how he handled telling me about Germany.
He was doing the whole “I don’t know if I can be what you deserve” bullshit again, and I hate that.
He needs to get it through his beautiful, apparently brainless head that he is exactly who I want, exactly as he is.
But that would probably be a more effective message to deliver when I can do it without sounding so angry. Still, I need to assure myself he’s okay. Not having heard any sounds in his room when I stopped by, I head to the library, where I find the door ajar and voices drifting out to the hall.
Dr. Danny and West.
Apparently I haven’t quite learned my lesson when it comes to eavesdropping, because I tiptoe closer, nearly pressing my ear to the door. They’re discussing…is that math terminology?
“Okay, I know what ‘linear’ means and I know what ‘algebra’ means—well, sort of—but it’s when you put them together that you lose me,” Dr. Danny cracks with a laugh.