by Peak, Renna
She slid into the back seat next to me, slamming the car door behind her. She turned to face me.
I stared over at her, my mouth still hanging open. I wasn’t even sure it was really her. I reached out to touch her, my eyes still clouded from the dizziness, the fogginess of my head.
She took my hand into hers, squeezing it gently. She pressed her lips together, and I swore I could see tears in her eyes. “Jenna, we need to talk.”
Mistaken 6
The Mistaken Series - Part Six
1
“Will you two find an open store, please? We need to get her something to wear. She can’t wear this ridiculous ball gown.”
Krystal’s words sounded as though she was at a distance, even though she sat right next to me. On some level, I had some awareness that she was talking to the driver and to Cade, my bodyguard. My thoughts were so scrambled that nothing was making sense anymore.
“Jenna, are you hungry?”
Again, I knew that the voice I heard was Krystal’s. I knew she was sitting next to me. All I could do was watch the lights drifting by as the car raced down the street. There was a weird tingling in my chest and it was all I could do to keep my eyes focused on the lights outside the window.
“Get her something to eat while you’re in there, too. I’ll stay here with her.”
The car stopped. We were parked outside a store that had bright lights in the parking lot. I stared out the window at a red car parked a few spaces away, but I wasn’t really looking at anything at all. It felt like I was falling. It was the same sensation I’d had when they told me that Daniel was dead. I was there, but I wasn’t really there. I was just drifting through space, unable to piece myself together, the world pulled out from under me with nowhere for my feet to land. My parents had sent me off to the loony bin after that to “recuperate.” That’s how they put it. Recuperate. As if you could just recover from the death of the love of your life by sitting and making sand castles all day long. That somehow you could recover by having some know-it-all counselor come and ask you how you feel about your sand castle. What having fourteen buckets of sand in your castle means. What the number fourteen represents. When all you really want to do is scream at the guy and tell him it doesn’t mean anything. That nothing means a damned thing. That you really wish that you had been in the car with him when he died so you didn’t have to feel like you felt right then. That you wish you never had to feel anything ever again. But you don’t because you’re a Hennessey. You’re a Davis. You don’t show your feelings; you don’t lose control, not ever. You keep those feelings in, damn it, and you plaster your best prim smile on your face and tell the people what they want to hear. You don’t ever let on that you can’t take it, that you’re weak or that you’re sad or that you have any feelings at all. Hennesseys don’t feel sad, not even when one of them dies. They face the negativity, that fucking fake smile sewn into place.
I remember someone telling me that my tendency to feel depressed was genetic. He said my “mother” suffered from anxiety and depression. He said that it ran in my family on my mother’s side. He said genetics played a huge role in what I was going through and that there was nothing to be ashamed of, feeling that way. He told me that there was something in my DNA that made it more likely that I’d feel like I hit rock bottom when I suffered a terrible loss like having my fiancée commit suicide. Because that’s what DNA does. It’s the fucking foundation of our lives. It’s what makes us, us.
I turned my body around to face the woman sitting next to me, the sister of the man I had thought I loved until a few hours ago. “How do you explain that now?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. She licked her lips and I could see she was considering her response carefully. She knew; I could see it in her eyes that she knew. She knew how close I was to the brink, how tenuous my sanity was at that moment. She gulped down what I can only assume was a lump of fear. For all she knew, I was about to take off running from the car, bare feet and all. Her eyes were soft, though. She pitied me. Everyone would, I knew that, even though I didn’t know much else. A small smile came to her lips. “What do you mean, Jenna?”
I started to laugh. It started out as a small chuckle and quickly turned into a full belly laugh with me throwing my head back against the back of the seat of the car.
When she finally reached out and took my hand into hers, the tears started. Just one or two at first, then full blown sobs. I pulled my knees up and buried my head, sobbing into my lap, into the ridiculously expensive ball gown that hadn’t impressed anyone. Krystal didn’t say anything to me, just held my hand.
I fell asleep at some point during my hysteria. When I woke up, we were on a highway and Cade was driving the car. The driver that had been there was gone, but Krystal was still holding my hand.
I looked over at her. She was staring out the window, deep in thought. She must have felt me looking at her. She turned to face me, the tiniest smile on her lips. She squeezed my hand. “Better?”
I shrugged. My eyes were swollen to the point of being painful, but the tears had needed to fall for a while, even before that night.
She nodded. “You should eat. There’s a sandwich…” She released my hand when she reached down for a bag that was on the floor.
I shook my head. “Not hungry.” I turned to look out my window. It was dark and there were no streetlights, just the occasional light from a house or another car. “Where are we going?”
“To the cabin.” I heard her rustling through another bag. She pushed it toward me. “Here, you should change before we get there.”
I could only shake my head again. Calling it a “cabin” was an understatement if there ever was one. The home that was known as “the cabin” to my family was a huge, private estate in northern California. The cabin itself wasn’t so much a cabin as it was a large house. Not as large as the main house in San Diego, and not even close to as big as the houses that my family owned on the east coast. Most people would have thought that the cabin was a mansion in itself, but to my family, it was the smallest of the many places that were called home.
I took the bag and looked through it. There was a pink t-shirt, shorts and some flip flops. I pulled the shirt over my head and unzipped the back of the gown I’d been wearing, wriggling it down over my hips. I said a little prayer of gratitude that I’d chosen the strapless thing. At least it made changing in front of two other people a little less embarrassing.
“We’re still a ways away, Jenna. You really should eat something.” Krystal picked up the bag from the floor again.
I shook my head one more time. “No thanks. I’m not trying to be a martyr or anything. I’m really just not hungry.”
She nodded and set the bag back down on the floor, looking back out the window.
I pulled on the shorts and slipped the flip flops on my feet. I let out a long sigh of relief; just getting the stuff from the gala off was a huge load off my mind in itself. I shoved the gown into the bag that the clothes had been in and tossed it onto the floor. I turned to face her again. “How much further?”
She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “Another half hour, at least. You slept for quite a while.” She turned to face me. “It’s good. You needed it.”
“I guess.” I turned back to the window and looked out for a long moment. “Did you know?” I couldn’t even turn to face her.
“That this was going to happen tonight? Of course not.”
I looked over my shoulder at her. She was turned to face the window, not looking at me. “But you knew it was going to happen.”
“We opened the cabin two weeks ago.” She turned her body slightly to meet my gaze. “I knew it would happen, just not tonight. The plan was to get in front of this. To get you up here before the press ran with the story.” She turned back to the window. “Your father should have told you this morning. I asked him to.”
“So it’s true?” I felt my heart sink into my stomach. I guess there had been a part of
me that hoped that the things the paparazzi had asked had been made up, that they’d been rumors or lies. It all made too much sense to not be true. The way my mother had always looked at me—the woman I had always thought was my mother. The way she had treated me; how she seemed to delight in my misery.
I heard her take a deep breath and blow it out. “Yes, it’s true.”
A new batch of tears stung behind my eyes. I refused to let them fall this time. “How long? How long have you known?”
She shook her head and turned back to face the window. “A long time, Jenna.”
I felt a sick feeling come to my stomach. I felt like I might vomit right there. “You’re not…”
She chuckled under her breath. “If you were my daughter, I never would have let it get this far. I would have told you from the beginning.” She turned to look at me. “I could only be so lucky to have you as a daughter, Jenna.”
2
Krystal turned her body to face me. She rubbed at the space between her eyebrows, her eyes closed. “It’s a long story, Jenna.” She opened her eyes and looked into mine. “Just know that if you were my daughter, you never would have gotten past first base with my brother, okay?”
I nodded, a sense of relief flooding over me. “It would have been my luck, you know.”
She let out a small sound through her nose. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not. If I can tell you one thing with any amount of certainty, it’s that I’m not your biological mother. Okay?”
I pressed my lips together, nodding. “Do you know who she is?”
She shook her head. “No. Do you really want to talk about this right now? It might be better to wait, sit with it awhile.”
“Sitting with it for almost twenty-four years isn’t long enough?” I could barely meet her gaze in the darkness of the car. “I used to fantasize about it. I used to pretend that my nanny was my mother. I wished for anyone else to be my mother. Marian Davis has hated me since the day I was born, and I never understood why. I think I’ve been sitting with it for long enough.” The tears behind my eyes were threatening to fall again.
She let out a heavy sigh, shaking her head. “Oh, Jenna. I had to keep myself away from it. I couldn’t stand seeing what she did to you.” She sighed again. “You were an innocent bystander in all of this, but you’re going to take the brunt of the misery.” She shook her head. “I’ll do what I can to minimize it, but you’re going to have to prepare yourself for the questions.”
“Who was she?” I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to know, but it was all I could think about, all that mattered. Did I have a mother out there that wondered about me? Did I know her?
She licked her lips. “I don’t know. I honestly would tell you if I did. I swear I would.” She shook her head again. “Are you sure you want to hear this right now?”
I nodded. “I need to know.”
She pressed her lips together, nodding slowly. “I have to tell you from the beginning. Okay?”
I nodded.
She nodded in return, her face only barely lit by the ambient light from the night sky. “Okay.” She took another deep breath. “My mother died when I was seventeen.” I saw her turn her eyes to her hands, twisting them together in her lap. “Brandon was still just a little guy. He was only four.”
I’d heard this before. It was part of what made him so angry, but that was all I knew.
“I was a mother figure to him. Our mother was gone all the time, off with Brandon’s father. They left us a lot. We were on our own.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about this right now.”
“I want to know.” I needed to know. Not just about my own mother, but what he had been through. Even if he was lying, even if what we had was never real—I needed to have something to hold onto. Something real that made sense.
“They died in a boating accident when I was seventeen. I couldn’t take custody of him. I was too young. And I was going to college in a few months…” Her voice trailed off. “His father’s mother, his grandmother, agreed to take him.” She chewed on her lips. “He was so upset, so angry. He never forgave me for leaving him.” Her voice hitched in her throat, dropping it to a whisper. “I never forgave myself.”
I reached out my hand for hers. She took it, giving mine another squeeze.
Her shoulders dropped and she blew out another breath. “His grandmother didn’t care for me; I never really understood why. She just didn’t like me.” She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment. “So I let him go. I tried not to interfere. I knew she could give him a life I never could, not with me being that young.” Her eyes dropped to her lap again where her fingers were twisting the fabric of her pants. “So I threw myself into my school work. I had an opportunity between my second and third year of college to work for your father’s campaign.” She looked up at me with a small smile. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime for me. I had admired him for so long already.”
I nodded, urging her on with my eyes.
“I interned with his campaign manager. Your father was an incumbent congressman, so it wasn’t a tough election or anything, but I learned a lot. I worked hard.” She pressed her lips together, nodding. “Two years later, I was invited to work on his next campaign, a paid position. I was over the moon. I had just graduated from college; I was twenty-one years old and had a real job in politics.” She looked up at me. “And not just in politics, but with a man I was sure was going to be president. And his campaign had invited me.”
I turned my lips up into a small smile. I could only imagine what it must have felt like. She hadn’t been much younger than me.
She nodded. “Two years after that, I was a permanent staff member, working in D.C. with your father. I was on his staff, working in his office.” She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. “We were in the middle of a campaign again. I was in his office, the one in the little white building, not the one on Capitol Hill.”
I nodded. I knew the building she was talking about; I had been there hundreds of times.
She took another deep breath and gave my hand another squeeze. “The congressional session was over, they had been out for a few weeks. I was pretty much the only one left working in the office, and you know, just because they aren’t in session doesn’t mean there isn’t still a shit ton of work.” She looked up at me. “Sorry.”
I lifted my shoulders in a small shrug, giving her a small smile.
She squeezed my hand again, nodding. “Okay, so I was in the office. It was July 21st.”
My breath caught in my throat. I pulled my hand back into my lap, entwining it with my other. July 21st was my birthday.
She pressed her lips together. “He came in the office that night. It was late, probably at least eleven.”
My mouth went dry and my hands felt clammy. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more of this story. My heart began to race.
“He asked me who else was there.” She tried to catch my gaze. “Jenna, he was out of breath. I thought he…” She closed her eyes again before opening them and trying again to meet my gaze. “I thought he was finally making a move on me. I mean, I knew he was married, but I didn’t care. I knew all the rumors were true, his history with women…”
I shook my head. “I don’t…” I gulped at the dry lump in my throat. My voice was only a whisper, my heart thudding in my ears. “I don’t need to…”
She shook her head. “No, no, no. He wasn’t, Jenna. I would have welcomed it…” She winced a little at the reaction on my face. “But he wasn’t and we never did, okay?”
I nodded, looking out the window over her shoulder.
“He asked me who else was there and told me he’d be right back when I told him I was alone.” She chewed her upper lip and I could see she was trying to decide whether to tell me anything else. “He came back with this…” She motioned with her hands like there was a beach ball between them. “…This towel. It was a mess. You were in the middle of it.”
I dropped my he
ad into my hands. It was more than I wanted to know. More than I could handle, I was sure of that.
“He asked me to take care of you until he could come back for you. I had to do it for him. And for you. You were so tiny…” She pressed her lips together, and shook her head again. “So I did. He came back for you at the end of the summer. But I was the one who saw your first smile. Heard your first coo. I named you.”
“Stop. Please. You were right.” I shook my head, fighting at the tears that wanted to streak down my face. “Please.”
“Jenna, you can think what you want about your father. But the man loves you. He did what he had to do to make it right for you. I don’t know how he convinced your mother.” She looked up at me again, wincing. “Marian, I mean. How he convinced her to raise you as her own. She had been holed up in Maine at the Hennessey compound all summer. They convinced the press that she was having a difficult pregnancy and didn’t want to be seen in public. The press bought it. Everyone did.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks. My voice couldn’t rise above a whisper. “And you’re the only one who knew?”
She nodded, pressing her lips together. “Only Cade and I outside the compound.” She shrugged. “I don’t know who knew on the inside. I got a call one day that September to bring ‘the package’ to Maine. Someone picked you up from a gas station about a mile away from the estate.” She let out another long sigh. “That was the last time I saw you for a few years. I had to make a point to keep myself away. I wasn’t your mother, but I always felt this bond with you that I shouldn’t have. Not really.”
I just felt numb inside. It was all so easy. Too easy. The manipulations and deceptions ran as deep as my life was long. My whole life had been one deception after another and I’d never even seen it.
