Chapter Four
I was up and out of my chair before I could think twice about it.
Samantha stood like a statue, her face frozen in a mask of shock. “You’re what!?” she cried, her voice breaking on the second syllable. “No, no that’s bullshit…”
Dawn shook her head. “It’s not, sweetheart,” she insisted. “I started feeling poorly before the wedding. I brushed it off at first; I figured it was just me getting older. Or nerves about Warren and I showing up at the reception without you knowing ahead of time—”
“You’re lying!” Samantha sobbed. It was probably the first time in my babygirl’s life she wished her mother were lying to her. “You and Dad always lie, you’re lying about this, Victoria put you up to this—!”
“Cut,” I said, gesturing at the nearest member of the crew. “Stop the cameras.”
Nobody stopped. The guy behind the nearest camera glanced over at Fiona, who sat spellbound by the drama unfolding in front of her. She hadn’t even noticed me get out of my chair.
“Stop the goddamn cameras!” I roared.
It came out louder than I’d intended. The camera guy flinched; a boom mic hanging near the ceiling trembled as the person holding it almost dropped it. Neither Samantha nor Dawn noticed.
Fiona gave a start like a woman coming out of a trance. “Jack, the interview’s not over—”
“You are not filming this,” I said.
I expected my voice to do that commanding thing that always made the coeds around me simultaneously shiver and get turned on, but what actually came out was a snarl so angry that Fiona did an honest-to-God double take.
She lifted a hand and made a short chopping motion. The red lights on the cameras and the one over the window of the sound booth all went out at the same moment.
“Okay,” Fiona said. “We’re not rolling. Listen, we should—”
Behind her, Dawn was standing up. “Sweetheart, I am so, so sorry,” she said, spreading her arms.
To her credit—and admitting anything to Dawn Lowry’s credit pained me—she didn’t reach for my babygirl. She just stood there, waiting, leaving the decision to her.
I watched Samantha make it.
Three steps separated my babygirl from her mother.
On the first, her expression collapsed. By the second I’d watched my twenty-two-year-old wife turn back into a girl, terrified and reaching for the safety of her mother’s shoulder.
Now Dawn’s hands stretched out, going to caress my babygirl’s shoulder blades.
They came closer, then closer, and—
And Samantha made a different decision.
Her whole body locked up like her brain had just hit the brakes.
She stayed there for a second, tears streaming down her face, then turned until there was air between them again.
She took the arms that had been about to be hugging her mother and wrapped them around herself, shaking like she’d just been dumped into a blizzard.
Dawn’s hands stayed up for a second longer, aching to close around someone that was already gone.
Don’t get me wrong on this: at no point have I ever liked Dawn Lowry.
Even at her best, my wife’s mother was both a narcissist and a narcissist’s enabler.
She’d wrecked Samantha’s life in ways so bad that it was a miracle my babygirl had found her way to me.
A bigger one still that she’d been able to drop the walls she’d been throwing up her entire life and admit her love for me.
But the look on Dawn’s face when she realized that even in a moment like this, after everything she’d just said, Samantha still couldn’t bring herself to give her mother a hug?
I didn’t want to feel sorry for her. But I couldn’t help it.
I could tell it devastated her even worse than whatever diagnosis she’d been given.
“What is it?” Samantha asked through her tears. “What do you have?”
Dawn lowered her hands, wounded to her core. “Sweetheart—”
“What. Is. It?”
She couldn’t bring herself to guess. To say any of the words that would have meant making what was happening to Dawn even more real. As if the disease were a dog that might not wake up if they were all quiet enough around it.
Dawn braced herself.
“It’s called Huntington’s,” she said, lowering her chin. “It’s a… the doctors call it a genetic disease. It has something to do with chromosomes and genes and proteins that your body shouldn’t be making… they explained it to me, but a lot of it went over my head.”
Samantha was doing her best to try and keep calm. “How long do you have?”
It took Dawn a moment to answer. “It’s already progressed quite a bit,” she admitted. “Getting around is a lot harder than it was this time last year. There are things they can do to slow it down, but obviously they can’t make it stop—”
“Mom.” There was a note in Samantha’s voice when she said that word that probably hadn’t been there since she was sixteen years old. Dawn nearly unraveled when she heard it. “I just… please. How long?”
“They say I’ll be in moderately good health for another year or two,” Dawn said, licking her lips. “After that… it depends.”
It depends.
Samantha looked appalled. “Oh my God, Mom. I… I don’t even know what to say…”
She might not have. But I did.
God help me, I did.
I wish I could’ve kept my mouth shut. But I was an engineer with an engineer’s brain, and the moment it heard the words genetic disorder it started doing the thing it always did when faced with a problem—collating data.
A half-dozen things I vaguely remembered from medical dramas or blog posts flickered through my head, even as I followed a train of thought that veered straight to a cliff.
Genetic means inherited. Inherited means passed down. And passed down means…
“Dawn,” I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from someone else. “Huntington’s is hereditary, isn’t it?”
Dawn made a noise like I’d just said the thing she’d spent the last two weeks praying I wouldn’t say.
Samantha turned to me.
I watched it hit her. Watched as the conflicted feelings she was having towards her mother were torn away like the hand of a giant had just ripped them out of her chest, replacing them with pure, primal panic in turn. She stopped being angry. She stopped being sad.
She stopped being anything other than the most horrified young woman I’d ever seen.
Dawn nodded, trembling. “Yes,” she whispered. “There’s a fifty-percent chance it gets passed from parent to child.”
On the word child, Samantha’s body jerked like she’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. All the color drained from her face as she looked down—down at the small, gentle swell beneath the black bodysuit Mona had picked out that morning to hide what was happening to her body.
I watched her realize that fifty percent applied not only to her, but the life we’d made.
And that’s when the real bomb went off inside my babygirl.
Her knees gave out completely. Thank God there was still a chair next to her—if she hadn’t reached for it, she’d have gone straight to the floor.
“Oh god,” Samantha said. “Oh god oh jesus fuck fuck FUCK—!”
I was already moving.
I reached her before Dawn or Fiona could, wrapping my arms around her like I could shield her from the news. Like my embrace could soothe it all away. And goddamnit, I tried.
Samantha squirmed in my grip, not really seeing me or anything else for a moment. Then she snapped out of it, buried her face in my chest, and began to sob like I’d never seen a human being cry before.
“Daddy,” she whimpered, clinging to me like the room had suddenly caught flames and I was the only tiny spot of shelter remaining. “I’m going to die. I’m going to fucking die—”
“No, you are not,” I assured her, holding her tight.
Somewhere behind me, the door to the studio opened. I heard a couple of crew members making noises to stop the newcomer, and just as clearly heard the newcomer telling them to step the fuck back. Mona was here. Caroline slipped out from behind her, already making her way to my babygirl.
“You heard her!” Samantha pulled back, her fingers digging into my shirt so hard it nearly tore.
“It gets worse and worse and there’s no cure!
I’m going to end up in a wheelchair, Daddy!
” She pulled away, hyperventilating, her hair a wild halo around her face.
“I’m not going to get to watch my baby grow up!
I won’t be able to walk them down the aisle!
I’m going to stop being able to walk and then I’m going to go blind and Kiki and Marcie will have to take care of me on top of everything else!
I’m gonna… I’m… I’m…oh fuck…oh fuck I can’t get air… !”
Jesus, she’s going to pass out, I thought.
And then, with a clarity that shocked me: because she’s having a panic attack.
“Look at me,” I said, taking her shoulders. “I said look at me, babygirl!”
I knew what to do when someone was having a panic attack. Thank God for Kiki's mother and her lessons.
She looked. Somehow, I managed to make her look.
“In through the nose, out through the mouth,” I said, taking charge of her in a way that felt incredibly familiar but usually had a very different context. “Put your feet flat on the floor. Look at me, don't look anywhere else. I've got you.”
“I can't,” Samantha blubbered. “I can't, I fucking can't...”
“I am going to take care of you,” I said, meaning every word to the depths of my soul.
“And I’m going to take care of that baby.
Whatever happens, whatever happens, I am not going anywhere.
Do you understand me, babygirl? I’m right here, and nothing that happens to you is ever going to change that. ”
Samantha got quiet. Her hands clutched me, trembling. Something broken escaped her throat.
“I won’t be your babygirl anymore,” she whispered, like she’d just learned that her winning lottery ticket was actually a clever counterfeit. “How can I be your babygirl if I can’t even walk!?”
I held her tighter, like I could squeeze those feelings out of her body. “Stop,” I growled, a hand finding the spot between her shoulder blades. “Samantha Avery, stop that right now. You brought me back to life when I was dead inside for fifteen years. You will never not be my babygirl.”