He nods. “Totally. One hundred percent. And I’ll never expect you to pick someone. Like your loyalty to me can only come if you say your dad is a dick, or something.”
I laugh.
But then his expression sobers. “But I also hope you can see that he wasn’t that dad to me. He might have done some fun stuff when I was a kid, taking me surfing and whatever, but he never called during the year. Never checked in. Didn’t send a card on my birthday. So the guy I knew? He was just a man. A man that stopped coming around when…”
Lucas pauses, and I wait patiently for him to finish.
“Well… he just stopped coming around.”
I feel like he’s not telling me something, but with our emotions on high, I don’t want to push.
“So my only feelings about him have always been a little… different than yours,” he says, picking a piece of his crust up off of his plate and taking a bite, then glancing at the TV.
I’ve seen this episode before, and it’s one of my favorites. Hearing David Attenborough talk about nature is one of the most heartwarming things that exists.
We sit in silence for a few minutes, just listening to the Brit and allowing quite a large chunk of the next episode to play with only a few pieces of funny commentary from either of us.
Though, I can barely call what I’m doing listening. All I can think about is that my dad was a very different man than I knew him to be.
But I guess you can be a different type of dad than you are as a type of man. You can treat your children better, or worse, than your spouse.
Clearly I’ll need to sort through some of my memories of him and my mother. Though I’m not sure if tonight is the night for that.
“I appreciate you being willing to talk about him. To share, even if it makes you uncomfortable,” Lucas adds. Then he looks back to me. “My memories of Henry are minimal, and I’ll never get to know Joshua. So my only way to understand them is through you.”
I nod, though my throat is tight and I don’t add much more after that. Hopefully there will be another time for us to have a chat. A time when my memories of my dad won’t feel so fragile.
Because that’s how they feel right now. Like they might shatter and break at any moment.
And I know that’s not Lucas’ fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, really. Except for my dad.
And that’s a big and uncomfortable pill to swallow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wyatt
My parents told us we were adopted when I was really young. Probably around kindergarten, if I had to guess. It’s a hard concept for a child that young to understand. When you’re little, the idea that a parent wouldn’t want their child, so they gave him or her to someone else… it’s pretty startling.
But it wasn’t until I was in junior high and my mom got pregnant with Ivy that it started to consume my mind. I had to know who my real parents were. Because it felt like I didn’t really know who I was if I didn’t know where I came from.
The P.I. was surprised to get hired by a child, I think, but when a person gives you a job and waves a Black AmEx, it doesn’t matter how old they are.
It took him thirteen months to find my parents. He came by my house with a file of paperwork, a fairly thin stack, and let me know he’d found everything he could.
I waited almost a month before I had the courage to open that file. To look through the pieces of my past that I worried would change me forever.
Ultimately, the entire thing was exactly what I expected. A too young couple in high school tried to raise Ben. But when they became pregnant again with me a year later, they decided adoption for both of us would give everyone the best chance at a happier, more successful life.
At thirteen years old, I hired a driver to take me out to where they lived in Terra Bella, California, a town of about three thousand that’s an hour from Bakersfield. My parents were out of town at some function on the east coast, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to go meet Theo Marshall and Marie King. My birth parents.
We drove all the way there, into the mobile home park facility, and then parked outside for over an hour.
And then we left.
I never managed to muster up the courage to go introduce myself to Marie when I saw her leave her house, smoke a cigarette on the patio, then get in her car and drive away. She was leaving for work. I could tell because she had on a green polo shirt with a symbol for a local gas station.
After that, I had the driver take me home. I knew there was no reason to go by Theo’s house a few minutes away, where he still lived with his parents, my grandparents, at thirty years old.
It was at only thirteen years old that I realized something incredibly important, something most people don’t learn until much later in life.
No one else could be in charge of whether or not I felt like I belonged. I either decided to know myself, believe in myself, and carve out my place in this world… or I didn’t. And I couldn’t place blame on anyone else for that, ever.
So I went home, tucked that file into a drawer, and didn’t think much about it. I had a happy life. A weird older brother that I loved as much as young brothers who are always at odds can love each other. A mom and dad who loved me. And a new baby sister. “A happy accident,” my mom had called Ivy.
It was only two years later that Lucas asked me for the name of my P.I. so he could go in search of his own dad. A man who had spent some time with him when he was a kid, but who suddenly stopped coming around without explanation.
Within two weeks he came to me, his emotions in turmoil.
“He had another family,” he says, then takes a hit off the joint I bought from Otto’s dealer last week. I’d planned to save it for a special occasion, but it seems like Lucas needs it more than I do. “I mean, I guess I knew that already. I think I remember meeting his kids once. He brought them out here. Joshua and Hannah.”
He takes another hit, holding the smoke in as he passes it over to me. I take my own hit, deciding not to say anything until Lucas gets it all out. The level of drama in this town never ceases to amaze me.
“Really? Shit. That seems stupid if you’re trying to have a secret family.”
He shakes his head. “It wasn’t a secret. Well, I guess I was the secret. I mean, I never expected that he’d like, come back and be a real dad. But I didn’t expect that he’d be… gone.”
And that’s the real kicker. Finding out that the guy passed away a few years ago. Dying in a car accident along with his wife.
“What happened to his kids?” I ask.
Lucas’ expression pinches, true sadness crossing his face. “Joshua died recently, too. Some kind of accident at work.”
“Jesus,” I say, shaking my head. “Talk about bad luck in the family. Shit.”
“I just… I always thought I’d be able to talk to him again. You know? Like, I thought I’d be able to grow up and then maybe know him. And now… that’s just gone.”
I don’t know how to handle Lucas’ level of emotion about his dad, not feeling the same emotional connection to my own birth parents, so I pass the joint back, hoping he’ll take another hit and it’ll help him let it go.
“And now I have a sister,” he says. “I don’t even know how to handle this. Or what I should do.”
“Sisters aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” I joke, hoping to alleviate some of the tension.
But Lucas only gives me a half smile.
“Should I reach out to her? I mean, she has to be like… so alone, you know? Her parents and then her brother died.”
“Look. Don’t stress about it now. You’ve got plenty of time. You don’t have to make a decision today. Give it some time.”
He nods, looks back out to the ocean from where we’re seated on his balcony, taking a break from the party he’s throwing after the sophomore year Homecoming dance.
“What was your dad’s name?” I ask, holding my glass of scotch up in the air. I’m still trying to deci
de if I like the stuff, but it’s slowly growing on me.
Maybe, if we toast to the guy, we can try and salvage Lucas’ evening with an uplifting speech. Some shit about staying positive and living for the now.
For all I know, the guy was a useless piece of shit, but he was a man who had died, and maybe it will make Lucas feel better.
“Henry Morrison.”
At the name, a strange sensation runs the length of my spine, an uncomfortable feeling sounding an alarm throughout my body. An angry, banging, red light alarm in my mind.
I know that name.
How do I know that name?
I still toast the man. Give Lucas a small smile as we lift our drinks to the setting sun in his memory.
But the minute I get home, having left Lucas’ party early, I go straight to my mom’s room. I call it that because my dad is never here. Always off with some woman, though my mother always claims he’s at work.
She sleeps off her vodka hangover while I open her cell phone and scroll through her contacts list. And there, sandwiched between Joanne Mabel and Patricia Murphy, is Henry Morrison.
I click over to messages, searching for the name in the endless mass of texts to friends planning pedicures and salon visits and trips to the Galleria.
I miss you, I finally read. You need to come meet Ivy. She looks so much like you.
It’s a text from years ago, sent only a few months after Ivy was born. And his response is about what I would expect from a man having an affair when he had a family somewhere else.
Telling my mom he couldn’t come visit. That he had a family and he’d made that clear when she’d decided to keep the baby.
My head starts to pound, everything beginning to feel like a tangled web of lies and affairs and death and I can’t keep it all straight.
So I go straight back to Lucas.
The party is still going, and I can’t find Lucas anywhere. So I go to his bedroom and bang on the door enough times that he quits banging his girlfriend and lets me in. Remmy waves at me with a sneaky little smile from the bed, tucked under a sheet.
But I storm past her, out to the same balcony where we had just toasted his father.
“What’s going on?” he asks, coming up beside me as I stare out at the ocean. “Is something wrong?”
I laugh, though there’s absolutely no humor to be found anywhere in this fucked up situation.
So I tell him what I know. Which isn’t much, but it’s enough.
That Henry Morrison, his father, had also had an affair with my mom. That he was Ivy’s dad.
Lucas’ face says exactly what I feel.
That it’s too much information.
Too many secrets.
Too much to keep straight in the wake of everything else.
“So… that means Ivy’s… my sister, too?”
That hadn’t even occurred to me, and the reality of it pinches something inside of me, knowing he’s her real brother and I’m not.
I nod. “Probably.”
“So that means Hannah is also related to her.”
My brow furrows. “Who?”
“Hannah is Henry’s daughter. My half-sister. So, Ivy’s half-sister, too.”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t know what you’re thinking in your head, but Ivy is not going to get wrapped up in whatever ideas you have about meeting this… Hannah girl. I don’t want Ivy to ever know. She’s going to have enough struggles in life,” I say, referencing her how sick she got just last year, how she’d gone deaf. “She doesn’t also need to have strange half relationships with people who don’t fucking matter.”
Lucas shakes his head. “I can’t lie to Hannah.”
“So you’ve already decided you’re going to meet her?”
He looks unsure, so I play off that lack of certainty.
Because I don’t need any new shit in my life right now. There’s enough going on.
“I think it’s a mistake, Lucas. You’re inviting a host of problems. You think someone like her, who comes from a dad like yours, a guy who had affairs with any number of rich women in the South Bay, is going to be anything other than money hungry? If she just lost her parents, she’s probably living with an aunt or a grandparent. They’ll want some of the money that doesn’t belong to any of them. They’ll just use you, Lucas. We don’t need people like them in our lives.”
It was a low blow. Something I’ve never regretted saying but still wonder about.
Lucas’ biggest fear in life has always been that he will just be a vessel for other people’s desires. That the only thing people care about is his money, and not him.
He brushes it off. Pretends that isn’t the case.
But I’ve known him since we were tykes. And I knew that’s where I could hit him that would make him reconsider. Make him turn his head.
And he did.
I promised him back then that I would keep an eye on things. Watch over what was happening with Hannah. Let him know if he needed to know anything.
And I did. For the most part.
I got yearly updates on Hannah, her path in foster care. I saw how she was noted as being aggressive, sometimes violent. That she had substance abuse issues and lied.
I’ve always felt like seeing those reports has validated the choice I made to encourage Lucas not to reach out to her.
It wasn’t until Ivy got sick and I confided in him that she needed a bone marrow transplant that Lucas started making suggestions. Coming up with ways to help Ivy, the sister he’s watched grow up from afar. Suggestions that he might have the bone marrow match for Ivy.
Or that Hannah might.
I couldn’t do it, though, and I told Lucas not to, either. “Ivy will be fine,” I’d barked at him, as I sat in San Francisco and assumed the first doctor’s assurances were worth their weight.
But then he brought Hannah here anyway.
Against my wishes. But apparently with perfect timing. Because Ivy might need her.
I never expected to have the reaction I did.
To like her.
To want her to be around.
To think she’s beautiful.
She must take after her mom with that hair and her long, lean frame.
So I face two dilemmas, now.
One of conscience.
One of heart.
Do I continue to befriend her? Knowing I’ll keep falling for her? Do I use my own interest to push her close to Ivy, hoping for her to feel compelled to help?
Because that’s what the original plan was. What Lucas suggested to me. Back before he started to see Hannah as his sister, too. Back before she started to matter to him as a person and not just a conduit for saving Ivy.
I look down at my phone, at the text I’m preparing to send off to Lucas.
Me: Tonight. Bonfire at the dunes. Time to welcome Hannah officially into the group.
I wonder if I’ll ever recover from how this feels. This intentional attempt to make someone feel like they belong so we can manipulate her into giving us something we want.
But I also wonder if I’ll ever recover from the way she makes me feel when she looks at me. From those soft eyes that are both so world-weary and so trusting at the same time.
Because I know that everything I’m doing will scar her deeply, prey on the most intimate of fears she has.
Instead of thinking about it any longer, I hit send and tuck away my phone.
I’m going to hell. But as long as I go down by helping Ivy, I’ll take whatever I deserve.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hannah
I find Lucas waiting in the loading bay with a super smiley Paige, and a bike basket full of beer.
“Get ready for a fun Friday night, girl! We’re going to Sand Dune Park!” And then she tips back her beer and finishes it before chucking the bottle into one of the recycling bins behind Bennie’s.
I look back at Lucas. “Where?”
“It’s this huge mountain of sand in Manhattan Beach. It’s us
ually closed at night, but Wyatt’s mom is friends with someone in City Council and blah blah blah,” he rolls his eyes. “We can stay as long as we want.”
I feel a little ridiculous that my attitude about this sand mountain changes slightly when I hear Wyatt’s name mentioned. I mean, he might not even be there tonight. Right? Right. Besides, he just wants to be friends anyway.
“And what do we do there?”
Lucas shrugs. “Drink. Set up a bonfire. Sled down the mountain.”
“It’s really fun, and you’re going to love it,” Paige enthuses.
I laugh at how excited she is. “Alright, when do we leave?”
“As soon as Wyatt gets here.”
My neck flushes.
“He should be here in about…” Lucas looks at his phone. “Less than five minutes. Want a drink while we wait?”
He stands from where he’s seated on a bench near the bike rack, then pulls a beer out of the basket attached to the back of his bike.
I take it, twist off the top, and tilt it back.
Vodka is more my jam if I’m going to drink. Truthfully, I’m not really a beer fan. But the cool ale feels good as it rushes down my throat. And I just know I’m going to need a little liquid courage to get through this evening without feeling like a bumbling mess.
“You started without me?”
I choke. Spray some of my beer out of my mouth, luckily not hitting anyone since they’re standing to my right. I cough a few times, then glance over at Lucas, Paige and Wyatt through watery eyes.
Paige is giggling, Lucas looks concerned, and Wyatt has a grin on his face.
“Someone’s thirsty.”
Paige continues her giggle fit, though she smacks Wyatt in the chest.
Promise Me Nothing (Hermosa Beach Book 1) Page 17
