Chapter 21
C HAPTER 21
For the first time in memory, I didn’t need to take pills to get on a plane. I was like a zombie. Shellshocked and eager to get home. To get into my own bed. To get back to familiarity so that I could try and make some sense of myself. I needed that. I couldn’t do it while I was away. I needed comfort and safety. I needed a grandmother that was dead, and a mother who had never particularly cared. I needed my friend who was in another country, and going to stay around the world from me. I needed a lot of things I couldn’t have, so the indignity of flight wasn’t quite what it normally was. I was like a husk of a person the whole way to Auckland, where I sat by my gate, occasionally wandered listlessly, and sat more for the hours long layover I had before the plane departed for LA.
I didn’t sleep.
Not on the whole eleven-and-a-half-hour flight. We landed at one p.m., the same day that we left. Like we had gone back in time. But, of course, we hadn’t. Because if we had, maybe I could redo everything with Ryan. Except I didn’t know how. Because I wanted him. That was the problem. It was just impossible. If it was as easy as just deciding to have him, then maybe I would’ve done it.
But one of us would have to give something up. When we would have to . . . risk so much. We could barely get along for extended stretches. We had only just tested out this whole relationship thing.
How could we dump ourselves into forever?
But I kept thinking back to how he had looked at me. The way he had told me that he was sure. That I was the one thing he had ever been sure of.
He loved me.
But it couldn’t be that simple. He couldn’t just love me. He couldn’t have just looked at me and seen what no one else ever had.
My own mother hadn’t wanted to keep me.
When I dragged my bags out of customs, out of the airport and into the California sun, I squinted against the harshness of it.
It felt far too bright, and far too optimistic.
I hated it.
I took a car to my hotel and was too early for check-in. I stashed my bags at the concierge, and I went back outside and stood there on the sidewalk for a long moment.
And then I decided.
I got a car, and I gave the driver an address I usually pretended I didn’t know.
Maybe she wouldn’t be home. The odds were low, after all. She might be on location.
But, I unfortunately also knew which lot her show was filmed on, which meant not even that was an excuse. Though the layers of security would make it a little bit harder to get there.
Not that there was an absence of security at her home.
I sat with my hands folded tightly in my lap the whole drive to my mother’s gorgeous house in Beverly Hills. There were high walls and a gate around the outside. It felt like a metaphor. It felt about right.
We pulled up, and I got out.
“You’re stopping here?” my driver asked.
“Yeah. Why don’t you . . . just one second. I might need a ride straight back.”
I walked up to the gate and pushed the button. “I’m Poppy Love. I’m here to see Caroline Love.”
“You’re who?” A man’s voice came back over the speaker.
“If Caroline is home, if you could just tell her that Poppy is here. And ask if she has a minute to see me.”
I waited. It was torturous. And insulting, really. Having to wait to see if your mother had a minute to check in with you.
When you were there in person for the first time in five years.
“You can come in, Miss Love,” said the man’s voice.
I turned and waved my driver off as the gate opened.
And then I stepped inside my mother’s world.
I hadn’t been to her house before. The last time we’d seen each other, we’d had dinner at a restaurant. I walked up the glorious, paved path, surrounded by beautiful flowers and plants.
My mother had always loved beautiful things. I had just never been beautiful enough. Interesting enough. Fulfilling enough. I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to be.
I wanted to know. What was it that made me less? That made me so unimportant. What was it about me that made me so easy to forget?
So pale next to the oleanders and Hollywood sign.
I walked up to the front door, and stood there, unsure about whether or not I was supposed to ring the bell. But then I didn’t have to worry anymore, because the door opened.
“Hello,” the woman said. “Caroline will see you in the sitting room.”
I followed her, my heart pounding hard.
The woman was about the same age I was. Working for my mother.
Maybe if I was willing to take a job for my mother, I would be able to see her more. I would probably finally have a use as far as she was concerned.
The house was done all in white, bright and airy.
The sitting room was even more aggressively clean. My mother was sitting on a long white sofa, dressed in bright pink. She was the only color in the room. Suddenly I understood the color scheme.
Nothing was ever supposed to outshine her.
Her face was unlined, her hair dark and shiny. Her makeup was pristine. She didn’t look surprised to see me. But that could be a function of the Botox I was sure she got regularly. Because while good genetics could certainly account for use to a point, her aesthetic was more frozen in time than well rested. And that, I figured, could only come from procedures. I probably had more lines when I smiled than my mother did.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.
“I wasn’t really expecting me either. I had a flight delay. I thought that I would stop and say hi.”
There was no point getting into the details.
“I’m glad that you did,” she said. Ever gracious and smiling. You didn’t read bad stories about my mom in the media. She was never rude. She always tipped. She was very conscious of her image. I didn’t think she particularly wanted me there, but she would never say that. Because what if I went to the press? The truth was, I always could have. It wasn’t like the existence of her daughter was a total secret, but it was definitely little-known. I had never gone to a single event with her. I could make sure that the world knew that Caroline Love had abandoned her only daughter in order to pursue her dreams. But to what end?
Still, I always had the feeling that my mother was careful with me just in case I ever did decide to do that.
But doing so would only expose my own insecurities. My own issues around being wanted.
Not high on my list of things to experience. The problem was, though, I wasn’t just there to say hi. I hadn’t known why I had come here. Not until that moment. But it wasn’t to say hi.
I needed to understand. Because . . . a man had just stood in front of me and told me that he loved me. That he always had. That I was important to him, and I hadn’t been able to tell him I wanted that. That I loved him too. Thinking those words was like a knife wound straight to the soul. Because I realized then that they were true. It was just I didn’t know how to claim them. I didn’t know how to say yes to him. I didn’t know how to stop being so afraid. And instinctively I had gone back to the source of that fear. Of that abandonment.
I wanted my mother. But not in the way a lot of people did. I had wanted my mother because I needed to ask why. To ask if it was worth it.
“It’s amazing that you caught me. The show is on hiatus right now, but I just landed a role in an upcoming rom-com.”
She would be great in a rom com. She was beautiful and vivacious. She had the kind of sunny energy that made everyone want to get closer to her.
I was eighteen years younger than her and that gap had never felt smaller. She really could have been my sister.
“Great.”
“We’re going to be filming in the Pacific Northwest.”
“I live in the Pacific Northwest,” I said.
“Oh, not there, honey.”
“Okay.”
Meaning she wasn’t going to visit me, and wasn’t inviting me to visit her. But adult daughters hanging around on sets would probably ruin her mystique.
“I need to talk to you about something,” I said.
“What about?”
“I . . . was there something that I did? Was there something that I did to make you leave me? Like specifically. What’s wrong with me?”
She frowned, at least, I was pretty sure she was trying to frown. “Honey, I didn’t abandon you. You went to be with your grandmother because it was just a much better life than being bounced around film sets. You always got taken care of.”
I stared at her. “Mom, I was seven years old and you just left me with Gran without explaining it. I didn’t know that you weren’t coming back.”
“It’s too hard to explain those things to children. When you’re a mother you’ll understand.”
As if she was a mother. As if she had really been a mother. “I don’t think I will ever understand. And if I have my own kids, I think that I’ll understand even less.”
“Are you pregnant? Is that why you’re here? Because I think it’s pretty unbelievable that I’m the mother of a twenty-five-year-old, much less that I could be a grandmother.”
“I’m thirty,” I said.
“If anybody asks in context with me tell them that you’re twenty-five. I can’t have people thinking I have a thirty-year-old.”
“Mom,” I said. “You abandoned me. I can’t have a normal fucking relationship because of what you did to me. I . . . a man just told me that he was in love with me. He stood in front of me and said that he loved me, and that he wanted everything, and I couldn’t give it to him, because I feel like there’s something wrong with me. And I can’t for the life of me sort out exactly what it is. And I came to you to find out if you could tell me. If you could help me make sense of it, and you don’t even . . . you don’t even know what you did to me. You don’t understand how much you . . . screwed me up.”
My mother’s face went stony.
“Honey, you say that, and you have no idea how much being around this industry could’ve screwed you up. I did you a favor. Do you know how many pervert directors would’ve wanted you on the casting couch the minute you got a training bra? I was giving you a different life. A better one. You didn’t choose to have a mother who was famous, and I wanted to protect you from it.”
Her eyes were round, her voice affected with sympathy and a small amount of sadness. It was tempting to believe her.
She really believed it. She really had absolutely no insight into what she’d done, and she wasn’t going to. She had written a new story. One where what she had done was benevolent. One where her actions somehow made her the best mother, even though she hadn’t raised me.
When she knew full well she never talked about me in an interview, when she knew full well she didn’t even send me cards on my birthday. I couldn’t be certain if she actually didn’t know how old I was, or if she just couldn’t admit that her daughter was thirty, but either way, my mother really did live in La La Land. In all the ways that it could apply.
And the fortress that she had constructed for herself was so strong I wasn’t going to be able to demolish it. Not just because I showed up wanting a reckoning.
“You didn’t protect me. You fucked me up. I just want you to know that.”
She sniffed. “I get that it’s popular to blame your parents for everything, but this is taking it a little far.”
I didn’t even have the power to hurt her. Because she didn’t love me enough. What she cared about was nothing disrupting her narcissistic story. The one where she was good at everything. The one where she had done the only thing.
She loved herself and this house and her career. She didn’t love me.
That meant that standing there screaming at her wasn’t even going to work. Wasn’t going to accomplish a damned thing.
I could hate her all I wanted, but it wouldn’t change it.
“I’m not going to come back,” I said. “I’m not going to worry about you anymore. The only time you were ever a good mother was on a TV show. And I get that you actually don’t care about that, but I did. And someday, when this place spits you out, when you need somebody, and you don’t have them, I hope you remember what I said. That you hurt me . You didn’t do it for me, you did it for you. And I . . . I thought all this time that maybe you loved me. So there had to be something big that was wrong with me to make you treat me the way that you did. But you don’t. You love yourself. The problem is not me. The problem is you .”
I turned around, my heart thundering hard.
And I walked right out of the front door, right out of the house. I ended up wandering up and down the sidewalks in Beverly Hills. I ended up walking until my legs hurt.
Only then did I get a car back to the hotel. I wanted to call Ryan. But I couldn’t. Because he didn’t want me now either, because I had messed that up.
But there was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing wrong with me. My mom didn’t want to be a mom. She wanted to be an actress. She didn’t want her actions to affect other people, even though they had.
It hadn’t hurt her to leave me behind. And that wasn’t a problem with me.
I sat there, dry eyed. I wanted to cry about it, but I couldn’t even bring myself to do that. Because I was just so . . . shellshocked. Because this had taken my wound and aggressively flushed it out. It hurt. But it also felt cleaner. It felt better.
It felt closer to healing.
I just needed to get back home. Because back home things would feel better.
I ordered dinner in my room. And the next morning, was at the airport ridiculously early. I took the morning flight back to Pineville, and by the time I got to my house, I was ready to weep.
But once I got inside I didn’t feel what I had hoped to. I didn’t feel home.
Panic clawed at my chest. Because how could that be? This place was the most important thing to me. This house.
I was supposed to come back home and everything was supposed to feel like it made sense.
I had exorcised the demon that was my mother, and I . . .
I didn’t feel anything.
I just missed Ryan.
I wanted him here with me.
I had felt more at home in another country than I did here, because I was with him.
I sat in my living room. In that place where Josh had broken up with me. But hadn’t broken my heart.
I looked around, and I couldn’t make it feel right. I couldn’t make it feel real. I couldn’t make it feel like it was mine.
But Ryan wasn’t here. And for all the years before the possibility of him had existed, he had always been there.
And whatever I felt for him had been an underlying presence for so many years.
It had always been him.
That sudden thought hit me. Out of the blue.
It had always been him.
And I had been so uncomfortable with it, that I had pushed him away at every opportunity.
I had dated the wrong man. The one that didn’t make me feel even half as much as Ryan did when he was looking at me. I had done everything in my power to push him away.
Because I had known that losing him, really losing him, all the way, was the one thing that I couldn’t bear.
But I . . . I couldn’t be safe. Not with the way I felt with him. It was too much. It was too intense. I couldn’t control it.
And if I lost him . . .
You did. You lost him, and it wasn’t because something was deficient in you, it’s because you’re too scared.
I had. I had lost him. And that was why this place didn’t feel right anymore. I had changed. What I wanted had changed. But I was trying to force it to stay the same. Because stepping out, taking hold of something new, that was . . . it was terrifying. Because being with him would mean stepping out of my comfort zone. In a huge way. It would mean leaving this life behind. It would mean leaving behind all of my comfort, all of my defenses.
It would mean stripping myself bare, and finding the heart of who I was.
It would mean trusting somebody else to love me. To be there.
I had chosen Josh because I could fit him into my life. I couldn’t fit Ryan into the life that I had. I was going to have to change and rearrange. I was going to have to be different.
I was going to have to disappoint people. And take risks.
I kept thinking that I had done it all. That I had fixed myself. That I had solved my issues. I had known that I was a people pleaser, so I had been convinced that knowing it meant fixing it. I had thought that being in a relationship, being in love, meant that I was healed.
But I was just putting Band-Aids on wounds that were bleeding out. I was covering up all my own issues with incomplete self-awareness and everything that I did was about fear.
I had been so sure that wasn’t true anymore. I had been so certain I had broken generational trauma when the truth was, I had just become an expert at bending around it. Finding ways to contort myself into new shapes but didn’t push against that pain.
And maybe I had always known about Ryan too.
I’d had the realization earlier that I was worried he would see me. But I hadn’t really figured out why being seen would be a terrible thing.
I had thought maybe it was that he might see my inadequacies. But there was so much more to it than that. I had been afraid of wanting someone so much that the loss could actually destroy me. And if I was really seen, if I was really understood, if I was really cared for, then that relationship could become everything.
But that was how you became the kind of person who was afraid to stay. The kind of person who was afraid to love. The kind of person who shut everything off.
My grandmother. My mother. I wasn’t as different from them as I wished I was.
Fear was a fist, balled up at the center of my chest. It kept me from being open. It kept me from love.
And I knew that.
Because I hadn’t loved Josh. Because I had closed myself off to the reality of that relationship, to the issues in it, because I was so dedicated to constructing a life that made me feel safe. And in that way, I wasn’t as different from my mother as I wanted to be.
Of course, I hadn’t realized that Josh was trying to play games with me. He hadn’t mattered enough to me for the game to resonate. I hadn’t meant to do that to him. But I had just been so obsessed with things going the way I wanted. I had thought because I was open to love, I was different than my grandmother. I had thought because I was happy to be in Pineville, I was different than my mother. I was repeating that same cycle of trauma. That same closed fist.
I took my phone out of my pocket and scrolled back through my photos until I got to the selfie.
The one with Ryan.
The one where we were kissing.
I saw myself, away from home, on a mountain, happier than I’d ever been. I saw him. I really saw him. And I saw how he loved me.
I was so focused on how I loved other people, and how I could get them to want me, that I’d never given any thought to how I wanted to receive love. What I had wanted was for people to stay. I hadn’t cared how.
Poor Josh hadn’t been horrible. But his insecurity had changed me in small ways. I had become his mother, cleaning up after him and paying the majority of the bills, because I wanted his life with me to be easy.
I wanted to be a soft place for him so that he wouldn’t go somewhere else.
But Ryan wasn’t looking for a soft place to land. Ryan wanted me. The me who had dropped a bowling ball on his science project. The me who had said the worst thing possible to him the first time we’d kissed.
But he needed me to stop being scared. Because his love wasn’t a soft place. And I could recognize now that a love like that wasn’t real. It wouldn’t stand up to hard times. It wouldn’t endure.
I touched the screen. I touched us.
We had already been through so much. We already knew how to survive. We knew how to climb the mountain and take in the view, even though that view didn’t erase the bad things behind us.
We didn’t need them erased. We just had to choose to make a better future.
I had rejected a man who loved me. A man that I loved.
Out of fear.
But safety didn’t mean what it had meant before I left Pineville for New Zealand. And home wasn’t the same either.
Because home was Ryan.
It was an idea as thrilling as it was terrifying.
As revelatory as it was obvious.
It had always been him.
Always .
When I had first seen him, when I had smiled at him, I had known something too.
I knew that in order for the two of us to make it work, we were going to have to give something up.
But I suddenly felt more than willing to drop everything I was holding to grab onto him instead.
I had good employees to help run the bakery. I could hire a manager. I could delegate my next wedding.
And maybe the bride would be upset. Because I had said that I would do it, and it was going to be somebody else.
But there was time, and if she wanted to get someone else, she could.
What I needed was more important than making someone else happy.
I stood up. I was going to have to get on another plane.
I picked up my phone, and I called Josh. “Where exactly is Ryan?”
“What?”
“I need to know.”
“He’s in Dubrovnik.”
I sighed. “I know that. But do you have any idea where he’s staying?”
“What, like the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure his mom does. She always gets that information.”
“Do you have his mother’s number?”
“Yes.”
“Great. I need that.”
“Why?”
It wasn’t his business. I didn’t have to tell him. But I decided that I was going to.
Because I decided that I was going to throw myself into this with everything. “Because I have to go to Dubrovnik to be with him. Because I love him.”
There was a strange pause on the other end. “I knew you did,” he said.
He didn’t even sound angry. “You knew?”
“Yeah. I mean . . . I don’t know. I always thought there was something between you guys. And then you were traveling with him . . .”
“Nothing happened until after we broke up.”
“I know that,” Josh said. “Because neither you nor Ryan are shitty people.”
Josh wasn’t really either. That was the thing. He probably had done some things during our relationship that weren’t very good, but I had allowed it. I hadn’t done anything about it. I hadn’t asked for different.
Because I wasn’t really in the relationship that we had both thought we were in. It wasn’t only because of him. It was also because of me. Because my emotions had been tied up, not just in Ryan, but in my own fear. My own issues.
“He said that you were jealous of him,” I said.
Josh coughed. “Well, who wouldn’t be?”
That was honest.
“I actually do hope you find what you’re looking for,” I said. “And I really mean it now. I wasn’t actually in the relationship the way that I thought I was. So, if something felt wrong, it wasn’t just you. It was definitely me.”
It was complicated. It was like he was the world’s best boyfriend, but it was also understandable that he’d had insecurities. I hadn’t been in love with him. I had been hung up on somebody else.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I really did think we might get back together. But . . .”
“Then things changed,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Things have changed.”
It was the most real thing either of us could have said.
Things were just different now. We didn’t want the same things.
I didn’t need to be in Pineville.
And it was a change I wouldn’t have been able to make for anybody else. Anybody but Ryan.
He gave me Ryan’s mom’s number. And I hung up. And called her again. “Hi . . . Mrs. Clark?”
“Yes.”
“This is Poppy. Poppy Love.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly confused about why I might be calling her. “Nice to hear from you.”
“I know our families are feuding,” I said.
She paused for a moment. “I don’t think we’re actively feuding.”
“Well. Ryan seemed to think we were. When we were twelve.”
She laughed. “I told him all about our family history because I wanted him to realize that he was part of it now. And . . . so are you.”
So was I.
We were like Quinn and Noah in that way. Except we didn’t get brought together because two people were nice to someone. Maybe we were doomed because two people fucked in the 1850s.
Or we weren’t doomed at all.
We were connected because my mother couldn’t handle me. Because my gran held onto me. Because his parents had seen a little boy who needed them, and they’d known he wasn’t broken.
Because my gran and his grandpa weren’t speaking to each other, so I’d had to deliver the mail.
Maybe we were meant to be all along.
Maybe it was fate.
Because of all the people who had held onto us, when the wrong ones let us go.
It had just taken me an absurdly long time to see that.
To realize I had to hang onto him.
“I . . . I was wondering if you could tell me what hotel Ryan is staying at in Croatia?”
There was an even longer pause. “Why?”
“Because I’m in love with him. And I need to go tell him that.”
“Then I’ll get you the address right away.”