That Time I Joined the Circus

by J. J. Howard

  And she did. Callie Ryan, or whatever she was calling herself these days, looked almost exactly like me, except that she had hazel eyes that were almost gold. She had only been eighteen when she had me, and she looked very young up there. She was even dressed like me — in a black top and denim skirt — and her hair was wavy just like mine, and almost the same length. I felt sick.

  Eli had grabbed my hand again, but I had the urge to take it back and wipe it on my skirt because it felt cold and sweaty, along with the rest of me.

  I knew the exact moment she saw me standing there because she stopped singing. Just awkwardly stopped — the band behind her kept playing. She stood there for a second, looking like someone had punched her, and then she ran backstage.

  She was actually running away from me. My own mother was running away from me. I fought back tears. I mean, I hated her, but who should have this happen to them? Eli gripped my hand harder. Nick had noticed the snafu on stage, and then noticed us, had shaken off the blond and was walking toward us. I realized I wasn’t so good with standing, but Nick was already behind me, and though Eli still had my hand, I realized I was leaning against Nick.

  I heard his voice say my name, low in my ear, but whatever else he said I couldn’t process.

  And then my mother was standing in front of me; she seemed a little out of breath. There were tears coming out of her eyes, but she didn’t make a sound until she said a few seconds later, “Lexi.”

  I was propped up by Nick and Eli, and I couldn’t speak. I still hadn’t been able to downshift from the impression that my mother was running away from me.

  I saw Callie’s eyes shift to Nick’s; there was recognition there, and in her voice when she said his name a moment later. She sounded almost as confused as I felt.

  Some kind of jarring techno music had been put on the sound system in place of the singer who now stood in front of me. It made my head hurt, but its discordant crashing noises seemed the perfect soundtrack for this moment. Some people had started dancing, and someone crashed into me, and I felt Nick steering me off what had now become the dance floor. I let him pull me along with him, and a minute later we had walked through the back of the club and into some kind of office. I heard Nick say something to Jamie, then he shut the door, and the crashing music grew instantly quieter.

  I turned out of Nick’s arms to him to ask for an explanation first, because I trusted him. I had trusted my mom, too, but that had been when I was eight.

  “You know my mother.” I didn’t really phrase it as a question. “My mother works for you.”

  The room got a little bright for a second, and I felt unsure on my feet. Since Nick was all too familiar with my new, charming ability to faint, he took my unsteadiness as his cue to help me sit down on the black leather couch that took up most of the back wall of the office. I sat still for a second, closed my eyes, and reminded myself to breathe. When I opened them I saw that Eli was standing awkwardly by the door, clearly not wanting to leave me, but also not feeling comfortable about staying. Jamie, I was sure, had chosen the correct side of the closing door and was probably out making new friends in South Florida.

  Nick was leaning against the desk that dominated the wall opposite the couch. My mother was standing between the two of us.

  “So you were saying you know my mother.” I wasn’t letting Nick off the hook.

  He nodded slowly. “Your mother has performed here before.”

  “And you knew who I was — I mean, who she was to me.”

  He nodded again. “I just figured it out. My cousin gave me some headshots and CDs to sort through, find some acts to book for the year. And when I saw her picture —”

  “Nick called me,” I heard Callie say. “And I’m so glad he did. Because I really need to talk to you, Lexi.”

  “What are you going to say to me, Mother?” I asked her. “Are you going to explain to me why you left me when I was a little kid and never checked on me? Are you going to explain why you took the money Gavin left for me and ran off with it?”

  “Yes, Lexi — I’d like to explain all of those things. Especially the ones that aren’t true.” I felt the anger well up in me, and she saw it. “I’m a lot of things, Lexi, but I’m not a liar,” she said fiercely. “I lied once, for what I thought was a good reason, but I learned my lesson. Please, just hear me out. Give me twenty minutes. I won’t say you owe me that, but for your own sake, you should listen.”

  I nodded mutely. There had been something in her voice when she promised me she wasn’t a liar, something that made me at least want to hear the rest.

  I looked at Eli, standing by the door, and then at Nick. As nice as it had been to lean on both of them, I suddenly wanted them to not hear whatever Callie had to say. Or see my reaction to whatever it was. Eli figured it out first. “Um, Nick, maybe we should give them some privacy. We’ll be right outside.”

  I nodded and watched them leave the office. I got up off the couch and started pacing. Callie took the place that Nick had abandoned and leaned against the desk. I heard her draw a deep breath, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

  “First, I am so sorry about your father. I am so, so sorry. You were … alone. Because I was gone.” Callie’s voice sounded angry, and I thought she was probably angry at herself until she said, “But for purely selfish reasons, I have to say I’m glad he’s gone.”

  My head jerked up at that. “What?”

  She raked hands through her hair in frustration. “I don’t want to speak badly about Gavin to you, Lexi. It’s not right. But I can’t explain this to you any other way. I don’t want to make your life any harder than it’s already been. But you need to understand what happened. Why I left.”

  “I don’t think you could make it any harder than you already have. And you left because you wanted to leave,” I said, each word deliberate. “It’s the only explanation — otherwise, why no contact? No nothing for the past decade …”

  I looked at her briefly and saw that she wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye. Then I looked away again. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her.

  “I didn’t leave, Lexi. Not exactly. I was forced out.”

  “You were forced out of where, the city? Um, sorry, I don’t remember exactly everything about the world from the time I was eight, but I’m pretty sure it was a free country then, too.”

  “It was Gavin.”

  “Why would Dad do that? How would he do that?”

  She hesitated, pushing herself away from the side of the desk, and then she started to pace. I sat back down on the edge of the couch. “I did something, something very wrong. I had an affair. Gavin found out about it. That’s the lie I mentioned. It was with one of our friends. There is … no excuse for that, what I did. I’m not going to try to make excuses. Gavin and I had problems, we had grown apart, I thought I loved Max … but in the end, all of those things are just excuses. I broke my marriage vows, and Gavin was … well, at first he was hurt. But then it turned into something else.”

  “He was really mad at you,” I supplied in a small voice, remembering. Callie was right. It started out with a broken heart. And then Gavin had been really angry. All that anger had been meant for the woman pacing in front of me, but since she had been gone, it had landed lots of other places instead. Like on me.

  “There was this one time I forgot to feed Mrs. Henderson’s cat,” I began. Mrs. Henderson had lived next door to us for my whole life. Every fall she went back home to Pennsylvania for a week, and we took care of Oscar, her cat — a series of cats named Oscar, really. “I forgot to feed Oscar number three when I was supposed to. Gavin turned over the dining room table, and all that stuff was still on top of it, and it all broke, went everywhere …”

  I couldn’t bring myself to keep telling this story, though. Gavin hadn’t hurt me, just scared me. He had gotten so much more chill over the years, I’d made myself forget that time. I looked at Callie and saw that her face had drained of color.

&n
bsp; “I’m so sorry, Lexi. I know it’s not enough, but I am. That anger that you saw, there was a time when I got the full force of it. I did betray him, but what he did to me …” Her voice had begun to quaver, but she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and then spoke in a low voice she kept even, almost monotone. She had stopped pacing and stood motionless in the center of the little office. “Your father hired a service to pack up everything that was mine; it was all sitting in the lobby of the building, labeled with my first name and my maiden name. He closed our joint account, served me with divorce papers. He was very … efficient in the way he got rid of me.”

  “Okay, so Dad kicked you out and all that. I know you guys went to court. But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t take me. Or at least ask for partial custody. Or even visitation. I never saw you again, not until today.”

  Her eyes closed again, and she took a deep breath. “I did ask.” She sighed. “I did,” she repeated fiercely.

  “But why? You were my mother — I thought they usually ruled for the mom in custody cases.”

  “I guess they do, when the mom isn’t so messed up.” Her voice was louder now. “I tried — I asked for full custody. But I was twenty-six years old, had cheated on my husband. I sat down in court that first day and faced that same man, the one I thought I’d loved, and he was sitting on Gavin’s side of the table. Gavin convinced him — probably paid him — to testify against me. And I’d never held a decent job, had no money. Gavin’s family had so much money, and those lawyers. When they were done painting their picture of me, I sounded much worse than I was. They dragged out some charges from when I was nineteen. They even convinced the judge that I’d been abusive to you.”

  “But you weren’t!” Whatever Callie had done before or after, she hadn’t been that sort of mom. As much as it killed me to admit it, even to myself, she’d been a good mother, for the brief time I’d had her.

  Her voice dropped to the smallest whisper. “But I was — once. It was a very bad day, I was so angry that day, and you weren’t listening to me. You wanted your father, you kept saying, ‘I want to play with Daddy!’ But he was at work, like always. You just kept asking for him, and I needed to go out to the store, but you wouldn’t budge. I picked you up and … I shook you … pretty hard — I mean, I shouldn’t have shaken you at all. Gavin came home, caught me — he stopped me. It was when you were very small, maybe three … and it never happened again.”

  Callie took another ragged breath and looked up at me. “From that time on, Gavin got in my head. I had already told him about how my father was with me. And he had me half-convinced that I was set to go down the same path. He kept asking me about what I did all day, and I’d tell him, and then he would ask again, like he was trying to trip me up.” Callie broke off and started crying. She lowered her head right where she stood and let the tears run down her face. I sat frozen for a long minute.

  Finally after what seemed like forever, she sighed before continuing. “I lost custody. I was only offered court-supervised visitation of my own child — of you. I should have taken it — I know — I know that, now.” Her voice broke. “But back then, I felt so small, so horrible, and like I was so bad for you. In the end I convinced myself that you would be better off without me. So I left, and I didn’t go back.”

  The planet tilted on its axis; I felt it shift beneath me. The colors, even in the dark office, seemed too vivid, like I was in a painting. Everything I thought I knew about the last eight — or more — years. It was all different. Maybe even wrong.

  “Why did he do all that?” I finally breathed.

  “Gavin thought he was doing what was best for you,” Callie said. There was a folding chair beside the couch, and she picked it up, set it up, and then sat down, concentrating like it was a very complicated task. She then went on to speak even more carefully. “He was a good father to you. He didn’t expect to be dead at forty-one. If he hadn’t been killed, you would have been fine, as you were before. But that’s why I said from a selfish point of view, I’m glad. If he hadn’t died, you never would have come to find me.”

  “But why …” I was still putting the pieces together as I spoke aloud. “Why did Dad’s lawyer tell me that he left me money, and that he’d sent it to you?”

  Callie’s face filled suddenly with such hatred, much more extreme than what had shown on her face when she’d talked about Dad. “Is this lawyer of your dad’s named Max Neville?”

  “Oh my God!” I yelled. “That Max — the guy you …” I trailed off, not sure how to phrase it.

  “If there was any money, Max probably kept it,” she said scornfully. “But what I’m trying to figure out is, how did you get to the Europa show?”

  “Max Neville,” I told her. “He said he tracked you down.”

  I watched a series of emotions play across my mom’s face: anger, pain, and something else, something soft, just for a moment — a yearning that she soon mastered. Max had completely betrayed her, but she had loved him. And maybe he had tried in some small way to make up for what he had done to her. He’d sent me to her. At least, he would have, if she had still been at Europa when I’d arrived. As it was, it took Nick to bring us together.

  “So Nick called you — is that how you got here?”

  “It was his cousin Dominic who called and hired me, offered a great rate, said he really wanted to get me back down here. Now I guess I know why he was so adamant about it — or at least why Nick was. I think he wanted it to be a surprise.” She rolled her eyes and made a rueful face. “Surprise.”

  “Understatement,” I managed. I shook my head. “I just can’t get over it, about Dad.”

  “He loved you more than anything, and he wanted to keep you with him. And he couldn’t bear for me to be in his sight. So in a way, he did what he had to do. I played my part in it, too, Lexi. I admit it. And I hate that I had to tear him down in your eyes for you to even think about giving me a chance. But he’s … he’s gone, and I think whatever I may have owed him is paid. I want a chance with you now, if you think you can give me that.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “This is a lot to take in. This is a continent to take in. And I got pretty used to hating you.”

  She nodded. Her eyes were wet, but she didn’t cry again. I nodded back.

  We walked together toward the door that led back into the club, to the rest of the world. And the rest of my life, maybe with my mother back in it.

  Miami, Florida — The Second-Longest Night of My Life

  Callie went to apologize to the band and to Nick’s cousin. I had faith in her. If she could get me to even consider forgiving her, those guys should be cake.

  Nick was back to work when we returned, as in working the room, which seemed to be his unofficial job. He was sort of wearing a black-haired stick figure clad in tall boots with high heels. I felt so young, so awkward, and I resented him for making me feel that way.

  When he spotted me, he untangled his limbs from the stick and made his way to me. I saw that Eli had been sitting over in the corner, and he started walking toward me, too, but Nick got there first.

  “Are you all right?”

  I had no idea how to answer that question. “I’m … I’m … I don’t know. She told me lots of things. She thought you maybe wanted to surprise me — when you figured out who she was? Is that why you didn’t call me?”

  The rational part of my brain knew that I hadn’t called him, either, but that part of my brain wasn’t really functional just then. I had been waiting for him to call me — and he hadn’t, not for a solid week. I could take a hint. Of course, then I disregarded that hint and came chasing after him like a crazy person, but that was beside the point.

  “Callie’s right, it was meant to be a surprise — for Christmas. I was hoping to bring her to you — to where I thought you were — later this week.”

  “No, I mean, why haven’t you called me? At all …”

  “I’ve called you — a few times. You didn
’t answer. It just rings and rings.”

  I pulled out the crummy pay-as-you-go phone that it turned out my mom’s ex-boyfriend had bought me. It lit up, but the screen was blank. “Are you kidding me?” I cried. I threw the phone against the wall at the back of the club.

  “Remind me never to get you a decent phone,” Nick said, leading me back into the little office.

  “I had a nice phone once,” I heard myself say softly when we got inside. Eli had been watching me with Nick, but he hadn’t come any closer.

  Nick wrapped his arms around me, though there was something different in this embrace, different from before. He held me a little apart from him. And suddenly, I knew. I understood it all. I stepped back out of the circle of his arms.

  “You found my mother and you were bringing her to me,” I told him.

  “Yes,” he said, sounding wary of the tone of my voice.

  “You found my mother and you were bringing her to me,” I repeated. “You didn’t want me to be alone, or in trouble. So you could leave me and not feel bad.” I saw the truth of my words in his eyes. “Why?” I managed, though the word barely disturbed the air.

  He shook his head sadly and reached out for me, but I stepped back. “Lexi, you know why. We’re not in the same place. You need to go to college.”

  “I’ll go to college!” I told him. “It’s not like prison. They let you out to, like, see people — all the time.”

  “Lexi, this isn’t going to work. You and I both know it.”

  “You have a girlfriend here,” I said, remembering the blond and the stick. “Or girlfriends.”

  He shook his head. “Lexi, I don’t have a girlfriend, or I would never have … back at Europa … But the fact remains, I still should not have let you — let myself. But I’m stopping it. Now.”

  “You don’t want to see me?” I asked, not looking at him, looking at some promotional poster in the office like it was the most interesting thing in the entire stupid world. I knew that if I looked at him I would start crying.