22. In Which Juniper Finds the Fuchsia
IN WHICH JUNIPER FINDS THE FUCHSIA
W aking up in Aiden’s bed feels weird and surreal and way too good.
This is not something I should get used to.
But that doesn’t stop me from memorizing every inch of how I see the room from where I lie sprawled starfish-style.
The side he slept on has long since gone cold, and I’ve migrated to the middle of the mattress.
I take in the ceiling fan, impressed by how quietly it rotates, and I examine the way the dust particles dance in the stream of light coming through the window.
I wonder if Aiden has laid in this exact spot looking at that exact stream of light. Did all the dust make him want to clean?
I bet it did.
I am afflicted with no such compulsion. I stretch and then sit up, rubbing my eyes.
The revelations from yesterday are nudging and pushing at my mind like passers-by on a crowded street—trying to make room for themselves, forcing me to rearrange the contents of my brain like Tetris blocks so that everything fits and everything makes sense.
The fresh infusion of grief is potent, a stain in my heart.
For weeks after my mom died, I would wake up every morning and remember she was dead, and it was like she had died all over again.
The same thing seems to be happening now.
My time-worn heart shreds itself, tears and rips and busted seams as the full weight of her death hits me once more.
It’s heavier, somehow, and more tragic, knowing the truth about what happened to her.
Knowing that she was assaulted and possibly even killed by someone she had considered a friend.
I sigh, scooting to the edge of the bed and letting my feet dangle over the side. I just stare at them for a second, at my stubby toes and chipped polish, and then finally get up and moving.
I have things I need to do. I can’t sit here thinking about my mother, or about the dead chicken someone dumped on my doorstep, or about any of the things that are haunting me. I need to find answers, not wallow in my hot roommate’s bed.
As tempting as that sounds.
So where to start?
I bite my lip, staring around the bedroom as I think, trying to organize my thoughts.
It’s my suspicion that Lionel Astor is my father, and that he killed Sandy because she found out he had a daughter.
There are other possibilities, but I’m not sure how they would work.
So I think it’s best to start with this assumption.
And when I fill in the blanks with those answers, I’m left with fewer holes in the narrative.
But one of the biggest is that I have no clue how specifically Lionel and Sandy crossed each other’s paths. It’s a long shot, but maybe I could find more about Lionel’s history with beauty pageants and start there.
So with one last look around Aiden’s room, I walk out the door and head back up to my own room. I need my laptop.
I take the big stairs two at a time. At first I take the little stairs two at a time as well, but my leg muscles quickly talk me out of that unnecessary exercise.
I just hurry up them instead, bursting through my door full of breathless anticipation.
I grab my laptop from my desk and then settle on my bed, propping up the pillows behind me so that I can work comfortably.
And then I pull up my search engine.
I run through every variation of Lionel’s name combined with beauty pageant terms that I can think of. And what I’m able to determine, after ten minutes of the kind of googling only an author can manage, is that Lionel Astor has a type.
Tall, busty, and brunette. Sort of like if the Kardashians were super tall.
It’s that kind of woman he always seems to have his arm around.
And, when I start digging into family photos, it’s clear that his wife is cut from the same cloth.
She’s older now, of course, but she has that same look about her.
I continue scrolling through family photos, pulled along by morbid curiosity, past pictures of Lionel and his wife that have been taken over the years. They don’t have any children, which I find curious?—
Well. I guess Lionel might have one child. Me.
I clear the search bar and enter a new search term: Lionel Astor children. Maybe he’s talked about it in interviews before. Someone has probably asked, as rude as it would be. It’s no one’s business why a couple does or doesn’t have kids.
I would argue, however, that in this case it’s at least partially my business. So I proceed with my search, scrolling slowly at first and then faster as I pass by the string of irrelevant articles.
I switch to an image search instead, sitting up for a moment to adjust the pillows behind me. Then I resituate myself and resume scrolling, slower this time.
Most of what I see are pictures of Lionel Astor with various groups of children—him in front of a school for some kind of ceremony, an orphanage fundraiser, that kind of thing. But my hand freezes when something different shows up, my fingers twitching to a halt as they hover over the laptop.
It’s a photo of Lionel Astor as a child—four or five years old, probably. He has dark hair, bright eyes, and cheeks that still haven’t completely lost their baby roundness. He’s completely cute.
That’s not what stops me, though. What stops me is the bolt of recognition that hits with that photo.
Because Lionel Astor as a child looks very much like me as a child.
I grab for the photos on my nightstand without looking, fumbling for a second and knocking one over before I reach the other—cold metal and smooth glass clutched in my hand as I pull it to me, lifting it to inspect the picture more closely than I ever have before.
I’m older in this photo than Lionel in his, but even so—yes.
My eyes dart back and forth between my computer screen and the picture in my hand, and it takes less than three seconds to realize that we look alike.
More alike than we should if we aren’t related.
Though my hair is blonde and his is dark, we have the same eyes, I realize with a start. The same vivid blue. We have the same smile, too, even despite the pictures’ age differences.
And the truth settles in my chest, a heavy, terrible weight: Lionel Astor is my father. He has to be. There’s no way we can look so similar and not be related.
He assaulted my mother and got her pregnant. He most likely killed Sandra von Meller because she found out. He may even have killed my mother and Thomas Freese. This smiling, sparkling-eyed little boy grew up to become that kind of person.
I push my laptop away, slamming it closed as a sudden disgust fills me. I don’t want to look at him, not as a sweetly cheerful child or a grown man or anything in between. I don’t want to think about the half of my DNA that comes from him.
“Nothing has changed,” I tell myself firmly as I push the laptop even further away, until it’s all the way by the foot of the bed.
“I’m still exactly the same as I was an hour ago.
I’m the same person with the same brain and the same body and the same thoughts.
My parents are still the same as they always were. I just know more now.”
But how is it possible that our thoughts don’t change our bodies on a cellular level? It seems inconceivable that the workings of my blood and bones and organs aren’t affected by the knowledge I obtain. How can information that shakes your reality be limited to the thoughts that dwell in your mind?
I jump off my bed, feeling somehow wired and exhausted at the same time.
Like I’ve been awake for three days but have also consumed copious amounts of caffeine.
It’s not a pleasant sensation, but I don’t know how to get rid of it, so I just go with it for now.
Maybe later I’ll be able to sleep. I know that if I tried at the moment, I would lie awake for hours, my thoughts rushing like big city traffic.
I check the clock, calculating. I have forty-five minutes before I need to leave for work. What can I do between now and then? How can I be productive?
I run through a list of ideas—search more for the relationship between Sandy and Lionel; hunt for details about my mother’s death; work on my book.
In the end, I abandon all of those possibilities and lie on my bed instead, motionless, staring at the ceiling and listening to music. I have to remind myself every ten minutes or so that rest is productive, and that I’m allowed to sit here and do nothing but process information.
It’s a nice thought, and I do applaud myself for thinking it. But I rest productively for a total of thirty minutes before I can’t stand it anymore. So I reach for my phone to call Aiden.
“Hey,” I say when he picks up. “Are you busy?”
“Prepping for my next class, so no.”
I snort. “You’re quite the teacher.”
From the other end comes a little bark of laughter. “I know. What do you need?”
I hesitate, debating how best to lead into my news before finally deciding to just drop it on him. “I found a picture of Lionel Astor as a kid,” I say, “and there’s no way I’m not related to him.”
“Really?” Aiden says after a second of silence. He sounds both skeptical and intrigued. “You look that much alike?”
“We really do,” I say with a sigh. “I’ll send you a side by side.
Hang on.” I lower my phone from my ear and do a quick search to find the photo of Lionel as a boy.
Once I send Aiden the screenshot, I take a photo of the picture on my nightstand of me as a nine-year-old, sending that one too.
“Okay,” I say. “I sent them both. Look at them and tell me what you think.”
Another second of quiet from Aiden, but when he returns, I can tell he’s on the same page as I am. “Wow,” he says, his voice heavy. “Yes. You look incredibly similar.”