Finding Us (Finding #2)

by Shealy James

  “That’s because you guys are amazing.” How’s that for a supportive girlfriend?

  “Yeah. I think it has more to do with the You Tube videos and the release of some of our songs on iTunes. It’s weird having that out there. The label even built Gray Matters fan site and Facebook page. Michelle, the PR girl, said we have over ten thousand followers on twitter now. It’s strange.”

  “I guess it’s good they gave you a name then. I know y’all didn’t love it at first, but I kind of like how it fits your songs.”

  “I guess.” Parker sounded down. He had been so upbeat each night, so I had been feeling like I needed to meet his enthusiasm, but tonight he sounded…different.

  “What’s going on Parker? You sound miserable.”

  “No. Not miserable, babe. I just have to something to tell you, and you aren’t gonna like it.”

  “Ok…” I waited patiently as I sat on my bed gripping my pillow waiting for the bad news.

  He let out a deep breath, and I could see him rubbing his hand through his hair like he did when he had to do something he didn’t want to do. Finally he spoke.

  “They asked us to fly to LA tomorrow to record a full album. They want to start right away, so the band can get a few songs down before Last Chance does the East Coast leg of the tour.”

  “They want you to continue on the tour?” I asked knowing I was ignoring the more immediate problem.

  “Yeah. We’re doing well. The fans love us, and they want to bank on the immediate success of the band.”

  “What about Alexis?” I asked trying anything to get my boyfriend back where I hoped he belonged.

  “She opted to do a 90-day treatment. I talked to her this afternoon. She wants me to replace her…permanently.”

  “So, you won’t be here for Christmas?”

  “No, baby. I’m sorry. I won’t be there.”

  There was a moment where we both said nothing. Then I let out a deep breath and asked the question I had been dreading since last summer when Parker started writing songs with Grady. “What about law school? Classes start in a couple of weeks. You won’t have the album done in time to come back.”

  “I don’t know,” Parker snapped. “I haven’t figured it all out yet, Maggie. All I know is I’m getting to do what I love, what my mom and I both thought I was meant to do. I’m not ready to give it up. I shouldn’t have to either. I shouldn’t have to pick my dream or your dream. I think we can both have what we want out of life.”

  His anger surprised me, but then I reminded myself that he was tired and sleeping on a tour bus. “I just want you, Parker,” I pleaded quietly.

  “No. You don’t Maggie. You want me there with you to take care of you. You want me to hold your hand through law school and then get married and have the white picket fence. What if I’m not the white picket fence kind of guy, Maggie? What if I’m meant to be in a band and travel the world?”

  I didn’t have an answer, but it didn’t matter anyway. If I spoke right then, he would have heard my tears and my fears and known my weaknesses. Thankfully, Billy, who had a squealing girl he was leading to the back of the bus, interrupted our call.

  “Look, I gotta go. Billy wants the back of the bus, and it’s his night. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  “Yeah,” was all I could get out before Parker ended the call.

  I sat in my bed staring at the ceiling with tears running down my cheeks. I didn’t sob, but my hurt and fear came out with my tears. I would like to say the crying was cathartic, but the next morning I felt as if I drank a gallon of tequila the night before, and my emotions were at an all time high. While my head hurt and my mouth seemed like it was full of cotton, my heart felt like it had plummeted down to my stomach. I was going to get up and run in an attempt to process mine and Parker’s phone call the night before, but my body wasn’t up for it. Instead, I rolled over and went back to sleep, and that was where I remained until Daddy came to check on me just before dinner.

  Parker

  The morning after I told Maggie I wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas I woke up with a massive hangover and even more guilt. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten so angry with her, but I had been going over and over this in my head and I couldn’t put my dreams on hold because she was afraid. I had asked her last week to come out and see us, to travel a few days with us, but she said no. She said she wanted me to enjoy it and come home to her when it was time. Well, it wasn’t time yet.

  The vibrating of my phone distracted me from my thoughts, and for a moment I hoped it was Maggie. If she were calling, then maybe she wasn’t mad at me, but I knew that wasn’t the case when I saw Max’s name on my caller id.

  “Hey, man,” I answered. My voice was gruff from my dry throat, and I could hardly swallow from the dryness.

  “Rough night?” He asked jokingly.

  “Something like that. How’s wedding planning?”

  “Oh, you know. The girls go do their shopping thing, and I sit around with Becca’s dad while he watches football. Considering how much I love football, it’s been a blast,” he explained sarcastically.

  “I can imagine. Good thing you love Becca even if you don’t love football.”

  “Hmm…yes, speaking of love, how are you and Maggie getting along these days?”

  “You talk to her lately?”

  “Not since yesterday after her mother tried to be nice to her. Why?”

  “Nothing.” I didn’t want to tell him what was going on. He would be on the next flight down there trying to cheer her up when he should be spending time with his girl instead of trying to fix mine.

  “Parker,” his voice was a warning.

  “The label asked us to go to LA. I fly out in…” I looked at the clock on my phone. “We fly out in four hours to start recording an album. They want us to stay on the tour to hit the East Coast venues after January.”

  “She didn’t take it well, I suppose.”

  “No...I don’t know. She just asked questions, and I didn’t have the answers.”

  “So, you blew up at her and she started crying.” He knew us too well.

  “Something like that.”

  “And now she’s alone and upset in the house with her mother?”

  “Her mom has been nice the whole time she’s been there.”

  “Do you know nothing about that woman? She preys on Maggie’s weaknesses. I should probably head down there. Becca and I were flying down the day after Christmas anyway. I can just go early.”

  Like I said, he would run down there to save her.

  “Nah, don’t do that. I’m going to call her in a bit to see if I can’t fix this over the phone. I just have to get over this massive hangover before I try to talk to her with any sense of reason.”

  “Fix this, Parker.” Max warned. “It’s Christmas, and she has enough shit to deal with without you being an asshole.”

  “Yeah. Look, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Sure. Fix this…” His last words before we hung up just pissed me off. As if I didn’t want to fix this. I wanted to be able to play with the band and have a good time, but I also wanted everything with Maggie. How I could “fix this” was beyond me, but I was damn sure going to try.

  Chapter 14

  Maggie

  Christmas morning came, and I still hadn’t spoken to Parker. I kept thinking he would show up and surprise me, but he never came. He had called me the morning after our fight but didn’t leave a message, and I didn’t call him back. I was still too raw. By that point I had started seriously analyzing everything that was wrong with me. I had come to one conclusion: the only person I had never tried to depend on was myself.

  I had tried to get my mother to love me as a child. My efforts were futile. Even as an adult, I knew she didn’t care about me. Daddy never let me down, but he was also a workaholic. I only depended on him in small doses. I had always had Max, but now he had a real job and Becca. That left me behind sometimes. I had been ok wi
th Max moving on as long as I had Parker, but now I wasn’t even sure I had him. Sadly, I needed him and Max more than I needed anything else in the world.

  In the back of my mind, I always wondered if Parker could really love me. I was sure he would eventually see the real me, the version my mother sees. It was ridiculous really. My brain knew that just because he was doing this one thing didn’t mean he didn’t love me, but my heart…it read everything differently. I was so codependent that I couldn’t even figure out how to be happy that my amazing boyfriend had the opportunity of a lifetime.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee when Eliza came in the through the garage carrying bags of groceries. “Whew! One store was open this morning. Your mom would have killed me had she realized we ran out of her low fat creamer.”

  I smiled at her efforts. She was always so eager to please my mother even though my mother treated her as nothing more than the cook. Of course, that was only when she didn’t want something from Eliza.

  “How’s Parker?” Eliza asked as she put away the groceries.

  I didn’t have the energy to tell her, so I lied. “He’s great. I miss him, but he loves playing with the band. You know, Dr. Pryce asks about you. I think he enjoyed spending time with you last year.”

  Daddy walked in the room just as I finished telling Eliza about Dr. Pryce. He didn’t miss her reaction one bit.

  She blushed a bright red. “Oh, Maggie. Don’t make an old woman blush.”

  Daddy smiled widely. “He’s a nice guy, Eliza. We’ve invited them back down for New Year’s again.” Eliza blushed again, but the smile on her face told us the whole story.

  Eliza was just a couple of years younger than Daddy and had lost her husband, the love of her life, in a car accident. Since then she liked working for my family because it was like she had a family. I liked having her there because she was more like a mom to me than my actual mother. While my mother treated Eliza like the help, Daddy treated her like a sister, and I always thought it was sweet how they interacted.

  Right then my mother burst through the swinging door. “Are you two ready yet? Carolyn is almost here.” She sounded almost cheery, like she was excited about Christmas. I had assumed since Catherine and Tom couldn’t make Christmas this year, she would have been less excited about the whole holiday. I was certainly dreading the Santa part of our morning more than usual because none of my buffers would be there other than Carolyn.

  “Merry Christmas!” Daddy said cheerfully and gave the top of my head a kiss once my mother had left the room satisfied that we were both dressed and waiting for Carolyn to arrive. “Sleep ok?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded before he sat next to me with his coffee.

  “You hungry?” Eliza asked.

  “No. Thank you though,” he said as he opened up his newspaper. Daddy looked over the rim of his reading glasses at me and said, “I don’t know what your mother has up her sleeve today, but she wouldn’t let me be involved in Christmas at all this year. I think we should all be worried.”

  “I’m probably getting coal. She’s been weird all week.”

  He waved me off. “Just ignore her. She doesn’t have anything to fuss over now that you girls have all moved on, and she isn’t on the board of the Junior League anymore.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s it,” I agreed. When I looked up and caught Eliza’s eye, the look on her face told me that she also knew it was more than what my father was making it out to be.

  It was another hour before Carolyn had arrived and my mother had Christmas ready. That meant she was dressed in a sheer red frilly blouse with winter white dress pants. She had on red Valentino pumps and her hair and makeup were perfection. It was Christmas morning for goodness sakes. Most people wore pajamas to open presents, but not my family.

  I was in jeans, an oversized sweater and barefoot. I stiffened while I waited for her assessment, but it never came. In fact it seemed her pleasant mood was extending toward me on Christmas morning as well. It made me even more nervous.

  She called us all into the living room where the giant, professionally decorated tree stood. She started to hand out gifts. Carolyn had piles of boxes wrapped in a shiny green paper. Daddy had a similarly large pile of boxes in shiny red paper. Eliza’s gifts were wrapped in gold. There were less of them, but it was a decent pile nonetheless. My mother even had her own pile of silver wrapped gifts. Once everything was handed out, my mother handed me one box wrapped in blue paper. It was fairly large and a little heavy, like a textbook felt heavy.

  It was odd to say the least. Usually our piles were fairly equal. My mother loved to shop. Most of my winter wardrobe was usually given to me as Christmas gifts, but apparently not this year.

  Daddy looked at me funny. “Where are the rest of Maggie’s gifts?”

  “That’s a really big gift, so it’s the only one she gets this year. Besides, I gave her a dress just the other day.” He looked at her funnily, but she widened her eyes and said, “Start opening, Jimmy.”

  He got to work on his pile while Eliza and Carolyn reluctantly did the same. Mother watched everyone as they ripped and tore, oohed and aahed. Of course, I would never seem ungrateful, so I just sat there and watched as everyone else opened his or her gifts.

  Finally the moment came for me to open my box. The attention was all on me. I gently peeled the paper off and lifted the lid of the large box. A card sat on top of a couple of files, so I opened it first. In my mother’s flawless handwriting, it said:

  Dear Margaret,

  You are an adult now, so I think it is time you know that you are not my real daughter. Your father had an affair a couple of years after the twins were born. That affair resulted in you. Your mother died during childbirth, so you were brought to your father to be raised. I agreed to raise you as one of our own out of the goodness of my heart, but it is time you grew up and stopped taking from this family. Hopefully the information enclosed in these files will give you everything you need to move on.

  Sincerely,

  Karen

  I was frozen. I read the card over and over trying to process everything that it said all the while trying to remember how to breathe. My brain wasn’t working properly. This was what she had been up to all week. I looked up at her. She had a smile plastered on her face reminiscent of the Cheshire cat. Daddy, Carolyn, and Eliza were all staring at me.

  “What the hell is this? Some kind of joke?” I asked her angrily.

  “Mind your language, young lady. And no, it’s no joke. It’s exactly what the card says.”

  I looked back down at the card and felt the bile rise in my throat. Someone started speaking, but I couldn’t make out the words as I looked down at the papers in my lap. I heard noise, but I couldn’t make out the words. It wasn’t like the “Wah wah, wah wah,” of Charlie Brown’s teachers and parents. It was more like I was under water and they were outside of it. I wondered if this would be what it felt like to drown: losing all of your senses one-by-one.

  When I lifted the first file open, there was a picture of a woman about my age. It could have been a picture of me. I looked just like her. I looked just like my mother, my biological mother, my dead mother who died giving birth to me. I pushed the box off my lap and was running out the front door before anything else could happen. I was running down the street without my shoes and without a thought as to where I was going. I stripped my sweater off because it was too restrictive and dropped it in the yard and kept running. I think I heard my name, but I needed to run. I would have run to California if I thought I could make it. I was running to get as far away from that vile woman as I could. Now, I knew. I knew why she hated me. She wasn’t my mother. She had been forced to face my father’s indiscretion in the eye every single day of my life. She truly hated me.

  I started to run harder ignoring the pain in my heart and focusing on the pain in my feet and legs instead. That was pain I could tolerate.

  Later I found myself out in the middle of
the eighteenth green looking up at the stars. Not sure how I arrived there or how long I had been there, I lay there on the cool green grass trying to process my relationship with my mother…no, not my mother. I was processing memories of Karen by reliving years of memories. I only had a few where she was kind to me, and none where she treated me like she did the other two girls. I couldn’t remember one time when Karen hugged me like Eliza did. I could list thousands of things she hated about my face, body, or hair, but I couldn’t think of one nice thing she had said about me. I wondered how it never occurred to me that she wasn’t my mother. We look nothing alike. I don’t even really look like my dad other than my eyes. I just thought I favored him more than Karen, but after seeing my real mother, I knew that wasn’t true. I looked like the woman I never had a chance to know. I felt so stupid and so blind.

  That’s when the tears started to fall. How did I never figure it out?

  Parker

  I was in my hotel room in LA dreaming about Maggie. We were in the ocean sans clothing and just about to find each other when I heard Bon Jovi singing. It took a second for my head to register that it was my phone. Maggie.

  It was still dark outside and in my room, but I could see the screen of my phone lighting up the space. I tried to grab my phone off the nightstand, but when I hit it, it fell off the table. “Fuck,” I snapped as I kicked off the blanket and found my phone on the floor. I hadn’t talked to her in days. I called, and she hadn’t answered the day after our fight. I had planned to call again, but once we arrived in LA, I’d barely had a break even today, Christmas day.

  “Baby?” I answered.

  “Parker,” she sobbed.

  “Maggie! Maggie, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?” I was wide awake now and sitting up in bed. My heart was racing from waking up like that only to find my girl crying on the phone. If I hadn’t known something was wrong by the way she said my name, I would have known from the timing of the call.