Chapter 18
Eighteen
Henry
Jason’s not a huge talker, and that suits me just fine. After lunch, we walk around town. As we walk by the antique shop, I peer inside.
My heart skips a beat.
Maddie and Tabitha are in there, looking at an old map.
“So what’s going on tonight after the rehearsal dinner?” Jason asks me.
I shrug. “Nothing that I know of. Hasn’t Angie filled you in?”
He rubs at the back of his neck. “I’ve had back-to-back cases for the past two weeks. I haven’t gotten to talk to Angie as much as I’d like. Just our good-night-I-love-you call.”
“Understood. But as for any plans after the main event, I honestly have no idea.”
Unless… Is he expecting me to throw him some bachelor shindig tonight? I’m the only one in his party.
If we had a bigger wedding party, I’d have absolutely planned a bachelor party. Maybe I’d have even hired a stripper. But one stripper for a party of two guys just feels…weird.
And I have a feeling that’s not Jason’s MO, anyway.
“You and I could head into town to a bar for a couple of drinks if you’d like.” I pull up the maps app on my phone and search. “I’m afraid we don’t have a strip club here in town.”
Jason lets out a guffaw. “That’s not what I was talking about. Strip clubs aren’t my jam anyway.”
“Glad to hear that.” I pocket my phone. “They aren’t mine either.”
He chuckles. “Not that I don’t enjoy looking at beautiful women, but my wife-to-be is about the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and any strip club I’ve ever been in, the women just seem…
I don’t know. I know a lot of them do it because they need the money, but they always look so hard and strung out. ”
“Agreed.”
I think about my birth mother.
Her name is Francine Stokes, and I assume she’s still alive. She wasn’t a stripper, but she was a topless showgirl.
For some reason, I open my mouth. “My birth mother was a Vegas showgirl.”
Jason stops walking. Literally stops in the middle of the sidewalk, right in front of Rita’s coffee shop.
“What?”
“Didn’t Angie tell you? I’m only her half brother.”
He widens his eyes. “No, I don’t think she did.”
“Yeah. I mean, Marjorie adopted me and all, and she’s my mom. I don’t even remember my birth mom. When I was older, my dad told me about her.”
He scratches the side of his head. “A Las Vegas showgirl. Really?”
“Yeah. Not that I’m comparing Las Vegas showgirls to strippers or anything. I mean, noble professions, both. The ladies make good money.”
He looks down. “You don’t have to justify what you said. I get it.”
I nod. “She did perform topless, though, apparently. So there’s a little crossover. But yeah, my dad had a fling with her, and she got pregnant with me. So they got married, but then…”
“Yeah?”
I can’t help myself. I chuckle. “My dad caught her fooling around with the pizza delivery guy.”
He widens his eyes. “No shit?”
Not exactly the reaction I was expecting. “Shit,” I reply.
“That’s crazy.” He strokes his chin. “I guess I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, you look a lot like her dad, but that didn’t mean Marjorie couldn’t be your biological mother.”
“I can’t believe Angie didn’t tell you.”
“She probably doesn’t even think about the fact that you’re a half brother. She considers you her full brother.”
“Yeah, that’s how I consider her too. Same with Sage and David. But for some reason, when we were talking about strippers, I thought of my birth mother.”
“Yeah, but as you said, Vegas showgirls—”
“Apparently sleep with pizza delivery guys,” I finish for him.
He laughs at that. “At least you have a sense of humor about it.”
“It’s kind of weird,” I say. “My mom—Marjorie Simpson, that is—is my mom. I love her as much as I love my dad. But ever since…”
“Ever since what?”
“Ever since… You know…”
“Ralph?”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “Ever since Ralph, my birth mother has been on my mind.”
“Is she still alive?”
“To be honest, I have no idea. I’ve never once had the desire to look for her, and my dad and I don’t talk about her.
” I sigh. “All I know is that she exists. Or existed, if she’s dead.
I’ve never felt like I needed her in my life.
I have a mother and a father who are awesome, who’ve given me everything. ”
“What you’re feeling is normal, I think. I’m no psychiatrist…” He laughs. “In fact, a year ago, I barely acknowledged psychiatry as a legitimate medical profession. But anyway, I think sometimes when something happens in your life—something traumatic—you tend to see things in a different way.”
I look into his eyes. Jason’s eyes are a very vibrant green. Not unlike my cousin Dale’s. “I shouldn’t bother you with this. You’ve been through something much more traumatic than I ever have.”
“I won’t disagree with you there,” he says, “but I’m okay talking about it.
For those three years after Julia and Lindsay died, I wasn’t really living.
I was just…existing. I thought about a lot of things I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
” He gazes absently down the street. “About why I became a doctor in the first place. Why I became a surgeon. I thought about the people who had died on my table. Things that I had compartmentalized before then. You kind of have to if you’re going to keep doing a job as a surgeon.
But when I couldn’t cut anymore, things came back to the surface.
I kept thinking about how I had deprived someone of a child, a wife, a husband.
It almost felt like losing Julia and Lindsay was this karmic retribution.
” His lip trembles slightly, but he steadies it.
“It was… It was a hard three years. It’s still hard.
But meeting your sister has changed me.”
“Yeah. She told me you didn’t think much of her chosen field.”
He sighs. “For a long time, I didn’t. I didn’t feel that psychiatry ever helped me, and I sure as hell didn’t see how it helped Lindsay, because as far as I knew, she ended up taking her own life.”
“Yeah.”
“Turns out—though, I guess we’ll never know for sure—that she probably didn’t take her own life. In fact, she never seemed suicidal to me. She was devastated, of course. Didn’t talk a whole lot. But she got up every morning, did her chores. She hadn’t gone back to work yet.”
“Right. It’s not as if she’d return to normal immediately. Those things take time.”
“Yeah. Losing our little girl killed her. Killed me too. But we were both trying. And things seemed to be getting slightly better. Which made her suicide all the more odd. So when I finally found out the truth about Ralph, it made me wonder. Maybe we just didn’t give psychiatry enough time. Maybe it could have helped her.”
“There are some things I’m not sure you ever get over,” I say.
“You mean like you shooting Ralph?”
I grimace. “Yeah, that, but I’ve got an uncle and two cousins who have been through far worse. They were trafficked, abused in the worst way.”
Jason’s eyebrows nearly fly off his head. “Oh?”
“Shit. Maybe that wasn’t my story to tell.” I rub at my forehead. “I guess Angie hasn’t told you about all the skeletons in our family’s closet.”
“Angie’s a positive person,” Jason says. “She’s told me that your family has been through a lot, and it’s not all peaches and cream. I’ve told her she can share the details with me if she wants, and she said she will one day, when she’s ready.”
“I get it.” I nod. “We were all adults by the time we even found out any of it. Except for Dale and Donny, my cousins. They actually lived it when they were kids.”
“Yeah,” Jason says. “I had a feeling trafficking had something to do with it. When I looked up your foundation and found out your mission is to fund research on mental illness and to fight human trafficking, it was pretty clear.”
“Yeah. My grandmother—well, Marjorie’s mother—struggled with mental illness her whole life. Depression, anxiety, and dissociative identity disorder. Thank goodness none of her children and grandchildren seem to have inherited it.”
“That’s not overly surprising.”
I cock my head. “You think so? I always thought there was a chance it could be inherited.”
“It can be, sure. But not always.”
“Then what causes it?”
“Sometimes it’s trauma. Something big happens—something that shakes you—and your brain rewires itself to survive it.”
“So it’s like…brain damage?”
“No. It’s adaptation. Your mind does what it has to do to keep going. It just doesn’t always know when the threat’s gone.”
“I thought it ran in families.”
“It can. There’s always a possibility for predisposition.
But things like dissociative identity disorder usually need some sort of triggering event to occur.
And obviously all the Steels of your generation have been raised by loving parents in safe environments.
Just because someone in your family struggled doesn’t mean her children and grandchildren are doomed to the same thing. ”
“That’s good to know. My siblings and cousins have all been brought up in loving homes. My grandmother… She was too, but there was definitely a traumatic event when she was a teenager.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She was gang raped by three older teens.” I clear my throat. “And one of them was my grandfather. My father’s father. So you can see why I’m glad you said it’s not always inherited.”
Jason leans against the brick wall. “Wow. Your family has been put through the wringer.”
“Yeah. So while I don’t have to worry about my grandmother’s mental illness, I still have to worry about the fact that my paternal grandfather was a psychopath.”
“Not necessarily. Psychopathy isn’t always inherited, either.”
“But isn’t it a brain thing?”
“It can be. But it can also come from extreme trauma, neglect, abuse. Sometimes the environment carves it into a person.”
I frown. “So you’re saying it can be created.”
“I’m saying not every psychopath is born that way. Some are made.”
I swallow. “That’s worse, somehow.”
“It’s complicated. The brain adapts.” He taps at his skull. “If you grow up in chaos, your mind learns to survive however it can. Empathy, connection, fear—they all get rewired.”
“Can it be reversed?”
“Not usually. But understanding where it came from matters. It always matters.”
I scratch my chin. “Unfortunately, I don’t know much about my grandfather’s childhood. Only that he and the others got involved in some cultlike group in high school. They got into some really nasty stuff. A lot of innocent people paid the price.”
“Did you ever know your grandfather?”
I shake my head. “He died when I was a toddler. In fact, he’s the reason why my birth mother’s not in my life. My grandfather paid her a hundred thousand dollars—basically bought me for my father.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Wow. Your family does have some stories.”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg, man.” I laugh darkly. “My cousins, siblings, and I only learned about this pretty recently, and I’m sure there are stories even our parents don’t know. You sure you want to marry into the Steels and Simpsons?”
He smiles. “There is no doubt in my mind. Your sister is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And I had a hard time accepting that. I still feel a little twinge of guilt now and then, if I’m being honest.”
“Guilt?”
He nods slowly. “I loved Lindsay. And I adored my daughter. Still do and always will. But there came a point when I realized that I actually love Angie more than I loved Lindsay. Dealing with that fact was hard to come to grips with. The guilt weighed on me for a while, until I realized that it’s okay to just let myself be happy. ”
I smile. “Sounds like my sister’s a lucky woman.”
He shakes his head. “I’m the one who’s lucky. It was a mess at first, of course. I mean, she was my student. And she’s so much younger than I am. But it seems to work.”
“Good.” I punch him gently on the shoulder. “So I guess I don’t have to kick your ass.”
“Nope. I promise you I’ll be good to her.”
“You’d better be.”
We begin walking again.
“So,” Jason says, “how serious are you about finding your birth mother?”