My Life After Now

3

Send in the Clowns




One of the best conversations of my life, one year earlier:

Ty: (floating on an inner-tube in his pool) My sister’s getting married.

Me: (sitting on the pool’s edge, dangling my feet in the water) Really?

Ty: Yeah. She announced it last night. The wedding’s gonna be on New Year’s Eve, in the city.

Me: That’s amazing!

Ty: Wanna go?

Me: (blinking in surprise) With you? To your sister’s wedding?

Ty: Yeah.

Me: (giddy with excitement) Yes! Yes yes yes! But…are you sure you won’t change your mind? New Year’s is over five months away…

Ty: (pulling me into the water, close to him) Of course I’m sure. I love you, Lucy.

Me: *Gasp!*

Ty: (kisses me passionately)

Me: (grinning like a crazy person) I love you too.

End scene.

There were a lot of awful things about breaking up with Ty, but one of the worst was having to tell people. Because you can’t just tell them that you and your boyfriend of a year and half with whom you were never anything but happy are suddenly not together anymore and leave it at that. They want to know why. And it’s really embarrassing to admit to your parents and friends that you were cheated on.

Word spread fast. I told Max and Courtney what happened, and they immediately told everyone else. They weren’t gossiping—they just wanted to make sure everyone was fully informed, so everyone would take my side. It did seem to work—I noticed people giving Elyse a wide berth and throwing her dirty looks during all nonperforming moments. But it was hard to feel victorious when I was being pitied. If one more person asked me how I was doing or told me what a d-bag they thought Ty was, I was going to scream.

To make matters worse, Ty would not stop apologizing. But there was a caveat: he was only apologizing for the way I found out, not for having cheated. The distinction was not lost on me.

I tried to believe Max and Courtney’s words of support—that I was better off without him, that I deserved better—but I couldn’t help holding out hope that he would realize his mistake and want me back.

But then I saw them kiss.

We were all gathering up on the stage at the start of rehearsal, and it was impossible to miss the way Ty’s face lit up when Elyse entered the room. They ran over to each other like they hadn’t seen each other in years, and I watched, powerless, as he cupped her face in his hands and leaned down to kiss her, the way he always used to do with me. The sting I felt at witnessing that was a hundred times worse than the hypothetical mental image of the two of them in her room that had been on a constant loop in the back of my head.

After that, all hope was gone. I ran home and threw away every single memento of our time together. Pictures still in the frames, the favors from his sister’s wedding, the dried corsage from his junior prom. I deleted every photo of him from my phone and blocked him on Facebook.

But I couldn’t delete him from my mind. Especially since I had to watch him and her being all Romeo and Juliet-y in rehearsals every single day. It was torture.

Elyse herself never said a thing to me. But the smugness was seeping out of her pores. I’d never wanted to punch anyone as badly as I wanted to punch her right in her perfect little surgically-altered nose.

• • •

I came home after rehearsal Friday and went directly to the kitchen on a quest for comfort food. I deserved to overdo it on the calories—pressing pause on the actor diet was my reward for making it through the week from hell. Well, that and a glorious weekend free of Elyse St. Life Destroyer.

I slathered two pieces of bread with butter and added three slices of artificial cheese product. The skillet sizzled and hissed, and I stood in front of the stove, hypnotized, as the flame warmed my face and the gooey orange stuff melted over the crusts. My mouth was actually beginning to water when I heard Dad’s voice coming from the living room. That was weird. My dads usually had their date nights on Fridays.

“Lu?” he called to me. “Can you come in here for a minute?”

I flicked the burner off and went into the living room. “What’s up?”

And then I saw her. Problem number three.

Lisa Williams was lounging in the big red armchair, legs crossed, looking like she actually thought she belonged there. She flashed a crooked grin at me. I glanced at my fathers over on the couch. Dad had a strained smile on his face, and Papa looked like his head was about to explode. I knew how he felt.

“What’s she doing here?”

“Aw, that’s no way to treat your dear old mum,” she said.

“You are not my mother,” I snapped, refusing to look at her.

If only that were true.

See, Dad, aka Adam Moore, went through a bit of a “finding himself” phase his last year at Columbia, where he was studying Art History. He had a brief affair with his female best friend, Lisa, and bam, Lisa got pregnant. She was on a student visa from the U.K., planning on becoming a traveling rock photographer, and not too keen on the idea of having a kid. But Dad, his hetero experimental period all but over, knew it might be his only chance to have a biological child without employing a surrogate. So they made a deal—if Lisa carried me for nine months and gave birth to me, Dad would take over from there. They both upheld their ends of the bargain. For three years, while Dad got his art dealing career started, he and I lived with his parents in Brooklyn. Then Dad met Papa, aka Seth Freeman, attorney-at-law, we moved to our five-bedroom house in Eleanor Falls, Seth legally adopted me, and our family was complete.

I never wondered “where I came from” like most adopted or single-parent kids. My dads were always so forthcoming with information about Lisa that I rarely had any questions. One of my earliest memories was of a much-smaller me sitting on Dad’s lap, looking through pictures of the beautiful woman with hair so red and long that it looked aflame, and realizing for the first time that my auburn hair was an exact blend of Lisa’s red and Dad’s brown locks.

But being fully informed about my mother’s identity didn’t prevent me from missing her. Every year, we sent Lisa holiday cards and my school photos. I loved going to the post office and telling them we were sending the letter overseas. It made me feel important, special. I always hoped the mail lady would bring me my very own letter from England, stamped with the Queen’s face, but that never happened. The first time I heard anything from Lisa was when I was eight years old and she showed up, unannounced, on our doorstep.

At first I didn’t believe that she was the same woman from the photos. She was incredibly thin, her hair now a dull orange, her face hollow. She said she’d been back in New York for about a year, and she needed money. She said she had nowhere else to go. She stayed with us for two days. She slept in our guest room, ate our food, used our shower. She didn’t hug me or ask about my best subject in school. Her blue eyes darted around nervously, never resting on anything, even me—especially me—for longer than a second. And then she left, with cash in her purse and a promise to stay in touch. We didn’t hear from her again for five years.

The second time she turned up, she again materialized at our house with no warning. But this time she seemed a lot more put-together—she was wearing makeup and looked a lot healthier. She didn’t ask for money—she said she just wanted to get to know me. This time, my dads deferred to me—did I want Lisa to stay with us again? This was my chance—I was thirteen and growing breasts and had recently gotten my period, and the idea of having a mother around was incredibly appealing. I nodded shyly, and Lisa moved in. And it was great. I took her to see my favorite Broadway shows and played her the songs I was learning in my guitar lessons. She told me stories about traveling around Europe and Asia and North America with rock bands. We went shopping and got pedicures. I even introduced her to Max and Courtney.

And then one day, after she’d been living with us for about a month, she was gone. She left a note on the kitchen counter saying that this was all too much too fast and that this life was not what she wanted for herself. I cried myself to sleep for weeks.

And now here she was, sitting in my living room for the third time in my life.

“What is she doing here?” I asked again.

“Lucy,” Dad said, “why don’t you sit down?”

“Just answer my question.”

“Well,” Dad said cautiously, “Lisa has asked if she can stay with us for a little while, and I think we should all sit down and discuss our feelings on the subject.”

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t deal with this right now.

“I’m going to spend the night at Courtney’s,” I said, and ran upstairs.

I logged onto my laptop and three-way Skyped Courtney and Max. “We’re going out tonight,” I declared.