I think that drive was the most uncomfortable situation that I have ever been in my entire life, and yes, I am counting that time when I found myself outside Farrell Manor in a yellow evening gown, and I am also counting that time when Cora beat me so bad that I stopped talking. Because neither of those uncomfortable moments lasted two and a half hours, which is how long it takes to get from Solvang to Los Angeles on a Saturday night.
James sat in the front passenger seat as promised. His continued silence hung over the car like an arctic blanket as we drove out of Solvang. There was a moment of activity when we got on to the 101 South. He called Mildred on his BlackBerry and told her to box up anything of mine that was in the house and mail it to my apartment first thing the next morning.
After he hung up, he hit the glove box with the palm of one hand and covered his eyes with the other. I was afraid he might be crying. Like that one time in the high school locker room.
“Please don’t cry,” I said in the backseat. “I’m not worth crying over.”
“Shut up,” James whispered. “Please, just shut the fuck up.”
It was the meanest thing he had ever said to me, and at that moment I thought of Elmer, sitting in Cora’s living room long after she had rejected him and gone out for the night to find another man to have sex with. I had never thought I’d be able to do to another human being what Cora had done to Elmer. Apparently I had been wrong.
Elmer had only come around a few more times after that, but as I sat in that car behind James, Elmer’s words the night Cora rejected him, suddenly came back to me.
“She don’t love me. She don’t care if you got a daddy or not,” he had said. “She don’t think about nobody but herself.”
The memory sent a little lightning bolt through my mind. What had he meant by, “She don’t care if you got a daddy or not”? Was Elmer, not the supposed “David,” my real father? And had I not realized it back then, the way I hadn’t realized that Cora was my mother for the first few months after she came to live with me?
The possibility froze me where I sat. Was I just like Cora?
There had to be something of Cora in me. Something so mean and evil that I would rather have James Farrell believe that I didn’t love him enough to marry him than actually tell him the straight truth.
. . .
One would think that my hugest regret in this entire situation would be what I did in the past, before I met James again. But it’s not. I absolutely don’t think there was anything else I could have done, given who I was and my history. No, the thing I truly regret is being too chickenshit to say anything on that ride home.
I regret opening my mouth several times to say it and then closing it before any words could actually come out. That’s what ate me up at night for months afterward.
My phone rang several times on the trip back. First it was Chloe, then Nicky, then Russell again. I didn’t answer any of their calls, just checked the caller ID.
If I couldn’t talk to James at that moment, I doubted I could get through a conversation with Chloe about the show or Nicky about the club or Russell about his latest breakup—which he must be going through, if he was calling me twice in one day. I switched the phone off.
It seemed for a while like the trip and the indecision would never end, but then we were driving up James’s gated driveway and pulling up in front of his house.
I was so despondent that it took me a second to realize that there was something on the steps that shouldn’t have been there.
It was Veronica Farrell, standing at James’s door, dressed in black city shorts and a sleeveless black cowl-neck shirt that highlighted her toned arms to perfection. I caught myself wondering if she had a personal trainer, before I remembered to wonder what the hell she was doing here. The last I had heard, she had flown back to New York right after the Dinner Party Debacle and hadn’t spoken to James since.
But now she was running over to the car and yanking open James’s door before it had even come to a complete stop.
I heard the words “private investigator” and “Erica London” and “Corey Mays” and “your psycho girlfriend.” And then I knew exactly why she was there.
Truth be told, there were a few things that I did not include in the “In Between Then and Now” section.
PART IV
In Between Then and Now