Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ross found Eliza at the table she’d snagged in the corner of the café. He set her cardboard cup down in front of her, steam escaping through the small slit in the plastic lid, and pulled out the chair opposite to sit.
“Okay. Talk,” he said, without preamble.
Eliza put her freezing hands around the warm cup. How was she supposed to begin? Despite all the space Ross had occupied in her brain, she’d never actually thought about what she’d say in this moment. How she’d explain. She took a deep breath. “So, my dad died a couple months ago.” Had it really only been two months?
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, in a tone that sounded like Yes, and...?
“You probably know that my mom died ten years ago.” Oh my God. What if he didn’t know?
He closed his eyes and sucked air in through his nose. “Yes, I did know that. I went to her funeral.”
That was news. “I didn’t know that. It was a really hard time for me.” Way to state the obvious.
“I didn’t talk to anyone, really. Just wanted to be there.”
Eliza nodded. She opened her mouth to go on with her story but was surprised when he continued to speak.
“I’d heard she was sick and wanted to come see her, but I didn’t think I’d be welcome.”
She blinked at him. This was new information, too. She automatically raised her cup to her lips but realized she wouldn’t be able to swallow and put it back down. “So,” she continued, trying to find her place again in this uncharted territory. “After my dad died, my aunt Claude, my mom’s sister...”
He was watching her intently and nodded in recognition of Claude’s name.
Eliza continued. “...gave me a letter my mom had written me. In it, she said...” She swallowed, imagining this must be what it would feel like in the moment before a skydiver jumped out of a plane. Especially if they weren’t confident that their parachute would open. “She said that you’re my father.”
She could see as the words entered his ears and made their way through the nerve endings to his brain, and the moment at which he deciphered what they meant. He looked like he’d been punched.
“I’m sorry, your father?” He shifted in his seat.
“She said that at your reunion...”
“Yes, I know what happened at the reunion,” he said impatiently, covering his face with his hands for a moment and then slowly drawing them apart like curtains. Seeing his features again, Eliza knew for sure what it meant when people described faces appearing “like thunder.” And then he opened his mouth.
“I’m sorry, but what the fuck? I got her pregnant and she never told me? How the hell does she even know it was me?”
Eliza’s eyes stung, and part of her wanted to just walk out and never look back. What was he mad at her for? She wasn’t the one who’d kept the secret. She wasn’t the one who’d cheated on her husband. She stopped just short of the thought that came next?—the one that blamed Laura for all of this.
“I don’t know what to say. This was news to me, too.” She swiped at her eyes, frustrated with herself for crying in front of this angry stranger who happened to share her DNA.
Ross suddenly stood up, and she thought he was going to leave. But when he stalked away, he left his jacket on his chair. She watched him scrub at his thick hair with his hand as he stared, probably unseeingly, at the menu board above the counter. And then he swiveled and returned to his seat.
He huffed out a long breath. “Wow. This is a lot to take in.”
She widened her eyes. “Um, yeah,” she said, trying to indicate through her intonation that she wasn’t exactly an uninvolved bystander here.
Ross drummed his fingers on the table. “Right. Of course. Look. I don’t even know what to say. All this time... And otherwise, she never mentioned me?”
Eliza shook her head. “Not a word.”
“And when’s your birthday?”
She sighed. “March nineteenth.”
“And our reunion was in June, so that’s...” He looked at the ceiling as his fingers moved, clearly counting.
She felt a flash of annoyance. “You really think she didn’t do the math?”
He focused on her again. “Look. I don’t know what you expect from me. You drop this on me out of the blue?—you can’t expect me to accept it like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“I don’t expect anything at all. Don’t worry,” she retorted. How did Mom ever feel anything for this guy?
“And besides,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “am I supposed to believe this is all some sort of weird coincidence? You show up at my talk and tell me about NOY and now all of a sudden we’re working together?” Not surprisingly, he pronounced NOY with something bordering on disgust.
She clenched her fists and tried to steady her breathing. “The first time I ever heard your name was two months ago. Obviously, I tried to find out who you were, and, yes, I did figure out that you teach at NYU. When I saw that you were giving a public lecture, I decided to go. Just to see. Obviously, this hasn’t been easy for me to accept either. I didn’t plan to talk to you?—if you’ll recall, we literally crashed into each other. It’s completely unrelated that NOY was looking to work with education faculty. Believe me, it was the last thing I wanted to happen. I wanted more time to absorb all of this and figure out how best to handle it. But it all got taken out of my hands.” She picked up the cup of tea and managed to take a sip, needing to focus on something else, if even for a moment.
He nodded slowly. “I can’t imagine Laura thought I’d take this well. Why did Claudia only give you the letter now?”
“That’s what my mom wanted. She said to do it after my dad died.”
There was a long silence before Ross spoke again. “Look. I’m gonna need some time. Interpersonal relations aren’t my strength under the best of circumstances?—and these are hardly the best of circumstances. I know we’re going to have to deal with each other for this collaboration project. But I can’t...” He stopped abruptly.
“Got it.” She stood and picked up her mostly undrunk tea. “Have your people call my people,” she said roughly, over the clog in her throat.
“Wait. Eliza...”
She paused, but he didn’t have anything else to say. So she walked out of the fake French café and remembered to stop at Duane Reade for a box of tampons she didn’t need before going back to the office.
The rest of the afternoon at work was a nightmare. Eliza made up a story about bumping into an old college friend at the pharmacy to explain why it took so long for her to return with her feminine hygiene products. And then she had to sit through Vanessa, Patrice, and Davin bringing her up to speed on the plans moving forward. Davin was going to write a press release about NOY’s collaboration with these esteemed education scholars, and Eliza was going to use that content to update the gala attendees about the exciting presentations that were going to be happening in place of the promised keynote speaker.
The whole time, all she could think about was having to watch Ross in the spotlight at what she had come to think of as her gala, knowing what a jerk he was.
On the other hand, she argued with herself, what should she have expected? Surely she didn’t think he would have just embraced her, delighted to learn that he had a twenty-six-year-old daughter he never knew about? A dream come true! Not.
She left for home as early as she possibly could, given that she had come in so late. She wished that her lie about the dentist had been more elaborate. If she were recovering from a root canal, it would have been easier to duck out.
She went straight from her front door to her bedside table, still in her coat. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Yanking open the drawer, she pulled out the diary. She needed to see what else Laura had written about Ross.
As she’d noticed the first time, there were big gaps between Laura’s entries. She wrote a few times as she was preparing to leave for college?—including some very dull paragraphs about a new quilt and her phone conversation with her assigned roommate. Finally she found Ross’s name again.
Everyone keeps saying I should break up with Ross before we leave for school. That I’ll be missing out and that it won’t last anyway. And it kills me that we’re going to be so far apart, but I love him. I truly think he’s THE ONE. And he keeps saying that he doesn’t know how long he’ll last in college anyway, so maybe he’ll be able to come to the West Coast. Not that I want him to drop out of school, obviously. I don’t know. It’s just so hard. And meanwhile he keeps saying we should have sex before we leave. And I want to. I really do. But I’m so scared of getting pregnant. I know I’m being ridiculous. That’s what condoms are for, like he says. And I definitely worry that if we DON’T do it, he’ll just sleep with some random girl at Hampshire. But that’s not a reason to do it. But the other thing is?—I feel like if we do it, it’s going to be even harder for me to be away from him. Does that make sense?
It was so bizarre. Laura was younger than Eliza when she wrote these words, and yet the Laura she knew, of course, was an adult. A mother. Someone who definitely would not have sounded like this. Meanwhile, she had to keep pretending to herself that the writer of this diary was not her mother. In Eliza’s fantasy world, in which her mother was still alive, she would have been the cool mom. The one who would have helped her decide among birth-control methods. Who she could have confided in, no matter what. That was the beauty of a fantasy mom. She could be perfect.
The next entries were about college. Not much about Ross, except that they talked on the phone. And then there was his name again, in January of their freshman year.
I don’t even know why I’m writing about this. It’s not like I want to remember this forever. But I don’t even know who to talk to. Ross and I broke up. Nobody ever thought it would last, so they’re all just saying, “oh well.” But that’s not how I feel. I don’t know if I’ll ever love anyone again like I love him. But he says we want different things. And maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I want a family. I mean, I want a career, too, but I want to have a life like I had growing up. And Ross is talking about joining the Peace Corps. Backpacking around the world. He doesn’t even know if he ever wants kids! I keep telling him that we should just give it time. That we can work it out. But he said it’s not fair to me. That he’s a bad boyfriend. What does that even mean? I asked him if he cheated on me, and he said no, but maybe he did. Maybe it’s because we didn’t go all the way. And now we never will.
I guess you were wrong there, Mom. Eliza skimmed the rest of the entry, in which Laura expressed over and over again how devastated she was. It was so hard to square her mom’s words with the man Eliza had spent time with earlier that day. How could Laura be so sad over the loss of him ? And it sounded like, even back then, he was displaying some of the qualities he’d shown off to Eliza in living color.
She turned the pages and found that Laura expressed the same feelings on several separate occasions before she stopped writing entirely. Nothing about meeting Jack, or anything else for that matter.
So that’s that, she thought as she closed the book. There would be no other words or thoughts from Laura. And that’s all she wrote. Literally.
Realizing she was still wearing her coat, she rose from her bed and headed to the closet to hang it up. She poked gently around the edges of her emotions. She felt... numb.
Fishing her phone out of her purse, she texted Mo a brief Hey, you around? message. Almost immediately her friend responded.
At Nik’s. You ok?
No, she wasn’t okay. But what could Mo do to fix it?
Just checking in.
She put her phone in her pocket and, absentmindedly, started to sort the laundry from her hamper to keep her hands busy. She’d gotten used to not relying on anyone. People had a tendency to disappear. Better to not depend on anyone but yourself. It was probably why she always picked the wrong men. If she picked the right ones, she might be inclined to actually count on them to be there for her. In her experience, that never worked out.
But right now, being alone was making her feel... hollow. She knew she should probably reach out to Scott. It didn’t feel right that she hadn’t told him about her legal plans. And now that she’d actually met Ross and told him the truth... how could she not tell Scott? But Maren’s words echoed in her mind. Scott can’t be there for everyone. How could she dump this burden on him?
She left the laundry piled on the floor of her bedroom and went to the fridge, where she opened the door and stared inside before shutting it again. Then she pulled her phone out of her pocket and scrolled through her contacts. Somehow, she’d known this was what she was going to do, and she’d just been delaying.
Hey.
Josh responded immediately.
Hey.
She paused and then typed again.
I told Ross the truth today. It was pretty bad.
Oh, E. Where are you?
I’m home.
Give me your address. I’m coming over.