44. Emmy
Beverly and Bradley Grimm no longer own the small house they had back when she and I were friends. They moved into an apartment above the store shortly after my dad left, and suddenly, the timing of that seems suspicious.
Suddenly everything seems suspicious: The fact that Bradley wasn’t allowed in my home, that we had to keep Bradley’s attendance on those weekend outings secret.
Or the way my father would sometimes wrap an arm around us both and refer to us as “his” girls. All that time I’d assumed he was just being nice to Bradley because he pitied her, but maybe he wasn’t being nice at all. Maybe he was doing the absolute bare minimum he could as a father.
My finger is poised over the intercom buzzer for their apartment. Liam—who’s with me for moral support—nods, and I push it. A few moments later, a woman’s voice comes on, irritated and fatigued. “Yes?” she asks with a deep sigh.
“This is Emerson Hughes. Can I speak to you for a moment?”
There is a long moment of silence. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“It’s about my father.”
There’s another moment of silence. “Fine, but make it snappy. I don’t want Bradley seeing you if she gets home.”
Bradley, the ultimate bully of my childhood, wouldn’t want to see me. That’s rich.I narrowly refrain from saying it aloud.
Beverly buzzes us in and we climb a dank, narrow staircase. The smell of fried food hangs heavily in the hall, accompanied by the sour stink of a very old, very dirty building. I’d never have guessed that Bradley, with all her judgment and condescension, was living here.
We knock on the door, and Beverly answers. I’d always thought Bradley looked exactly like her pretty mom, and now I see all the ways she doesn’t…Bradley’s eyes are a paler blue, like mine, and her full lips didn’t come from Beverly either. Aside from the pale hair, they really don’t look much alike at all.
Beverly begrudgingly ushers us inside. The apartment consists of a tiny studio kitchen and a combined living and dining area that is smaller than my mother’s family room. The walls are stacked high with boxes from food distributors—she’s using her tiny apartment as a storage area too. There’s a pillow and blankets folded on the floor beside the couch as if someone has been sleeping out here.
Jesus. Is it Bradley? Has she been sleeping on a pull-out bed in the family room for the last seventeen years?
My first impulse, of course, is to be angry. She talked so much shit about my weight and my hair and my clothes and my shoes while she was living like this?
Sympathy comes a moment later. Maybe part of the reason she talked so much shit was because she lived like this. If Liam’s right, and we had the same dad, but only one of us benefitted from it…I can see why she’d be a little ticked off.
“I’m not sure what you think I’d have to tell you about your father,” Beverly says, lips pressed tight as we take a seat on the couch. She waves to the room around her. “He left us high and dry decades ago, clearly.”
I inhale in surprise. She’s already answered my question before I could even pose it, I think. “So he’s Bradley’s father too?”
She rolls her eyes. “Do you really expect me to believe you didn’t know that?”
I sink into the couch, shocked. Yes, I’d been…coming around to it. But the confirmation is something else. Something far worse.
Liam’s hand squeezes mine. “She didn’t have a clue, Bev,” he tells her quietly. “When I suggested it to her after I saw Bradley yesterday, she laughed in my face.”
God. I’m twenty-eight. How could I possibly be learning this now? Did my father know all along? My mother? Bradley? The whole goddamned town?
I just don’t understand how information of this magnitude never made its way to me.
My eyes close as I try to gather my thoughts. The temptation to blame Beverly is strong, but it won’t get me anywhere. “So,” I begin, my voice clipped, “you had an affair with my father and decided the best way to handle it was never to tell me or, I presume, Bradley?”
She waves a dismissive hand. “Bradley had put it together on her own by the time he left, whereas you’re so smart, in theory, that you’ve only worked it out now. Guess that shows which one of you really deserved to go to Princeton.”
“If my mother ran around sleeping with married men all the time, I might have put it together sooner.”
“Em,” Liam says quietly, placing a hand on my knee—a silent way of saying, “Don’t piss her off until you’ve gotten what you came here for.”
“I’m the one he cheated on. He’d already told Sandra he was leaving, but they were waiting for the end of the school year so Jeff would have some time to process it. Your manipulative shrew of a mother seduced him and got herself knocked up. And she was so fucking awful that he didn’t trust her to raise you alone, so he stayed.”
I have no idea if anything she’s saying is true, but it’s clear that there are only villains in this story: Beverly was sleeping with a married man, my father was cheating on someone, and my mother…well, I already knew she was terrible. Nothing surprises me there. And between the group of them they created two of the worst people to ever come out of this town: me and Bradley.
“Even if Bradley knew,” Liam says, “and even if she thought Emmy knew, that doesn’t explain why she was so awful to her for so long. I mean, she discovered she had a sister, for Christ’s sake. You’d think she’d be excited.”
“Excited?” Beverly cries. “Are you fucking kidding me? Our whole lives were uprooted when Doug left. We had to move into this dump, and I had to cut back on staff at the store, which meant Bradley had to spend every afternoon and evening with me while you were living in that big house and strolling into school in fancy shoes. Did you ever notice that suddenly, only one of you was in all the honors classes? You had endless time to study. You had tutors. Bradley had to start working in a goddamn store when she was ten because your father put all his assets in Sandra’s name. I couldn’t even sue for child support because he was gone, and it was her money.”
I had one tutor, ever, and I wore Nikes, not Louboutins, but I perhaps can almost see her point. My life superficially remained the same after my dad left while Bradley’s was decimated. I guess I’d have been pretty bitter about it too. “So my father was supporting you?”
Her eyes narrow. “Don’t make me sound like some kind of trophy mistress. I was doing okay when I was single, running the store. I just didn’t want that life for Bradley, and Doug didn’t either. He took extra work to make ends meet over here. It’s clear how that turned out.” She shoots another angry look my way. I’m not sure if I’m annoyed or amused by the amount of blame she’s placing on someone who was a baby when all this unfolded. “He’d never have gotten involved with those guys otherwise.”
A logical part of me has understood why my father ran away, even if I hated the way he did it. But I never understood, until now, why he started doing all that shady stuff in the first place when he’d spent so much time talking to me about integrity and doing the right thing. I guess supporting two households might drive you to do a whole lot of shit you normally wouldn’t.
“It seems to me that your anger, and Bradley’s, should have been directed at my parents, not an innocent ten-year-old who didn’t know it was going on.”
Beverly’s mouth pinches. “He chose you over her. How was she supposed to feel?”
I throw out my hands. “Your reframing of this situation is incredibly bizarre. He didn’t choose me. He remained with his wife and two children.”
“He made it pretty clear for years that you were his favorite,” she argues, “and when he ran, he only took you. He didn’t even ask me if we wanted to come.”
“Did it somehow escape your attention that I remained in Elliott Springs for the next eight years? I didn’t run away with him. He used me to get away and threw me on a train back home when he’d made it far south enough.”
“Of course he was taking you!” she shouts. “Why else would they have found all that stuff in his car—the fake passports, the clothes?”
“They found his car?” My voice is barely audible. My breath stills.
Liam’s arm goes around me, pulling me close, and for the first time, Beverly looks uncertain.
“Jesus. Sandra really didn’t tell you anything, did she?” Her shoulders drop. “They found his car about a year after he left with all his stuff inside. And your stuff too. He had fake passports made for both of you. John and Jenny Smith. He was a creative guy. I’m not sure why the names were so boring.”
My arms prickle with goose bumps. I do. I know why he chose those names.
John Smith was one of Dr. Who’s aliases. Jenny was his daughter.
And if you go to the trouble of buying a fake passport for someone, you’re not using her to get away. I think of our conversation on the way down to Santa Barbara, my blathering about going to Harvard, about working on Wall Street, about the strength of an alumni network.
My dad wasn’t ever planning to leave me behind.
I talked him into it.