Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(114)

This time Ma’s hand went to her mouth. For a moment she looked like she might cry. Trisha didn’t know if it was because she saw how much she’d hurt Trisha or because none of her children ever spoke to her that way.

Trisha wanted to apologize. But she also wanted to scream!

“Was nothing more important to you and Dad than ‘your dream’? Wasn’t I?”

“That’s unfair. You children are more important than everything.”

“If I’m important, then why didn’t you stand up for me? Why don’t you ever stand up to him, Ma?”

“Stand up to him for what? What does he ever do that’s not for the good of us all?”

Trisha gulped down the muffin. It wasn’t easy, because really, swallowing cardboard and crap at the same time made her want to gag.

Ma watched her for a while wordlessly, then she turned and walked to the couch. “Come here. Sit with me.” She sank into the couch and patted it. “I’m going to tell you why. I guess it’s time.”

Something about her tone made Trisha do as she said.

“You know how your dad and I met, right?”

Trisha nodded but she was seriously not in the mood for another rendition of how the perfect prince swept the perfect film star off her feet.

Ma didn’t look like this was going to be a romantic story, though. She shifted in her seat until she was pressed into a corner and stared at her hands. It made her look awfully small and more unsure than Trisha had ever seen her.

Just when the silence had stretched so long that Trisha thought Ma had changed her mind, Ma spoke. “When we first got together, there were only two things people ever asked me. The press, our friends, they were only interested in knowing: one, what it was like to give up stardom, and two, how on earth had I landed a prince?

“I had to make up answers to both those questions because no one wanted the truth. Getting rid of stardom was something I had been trying to figure out how to do for years. Not because I wasn’t ambitious, although I wasn’t, or because I took for granted something everyone else coveted, I didn’t. But because of the price I had to pay for it.”

Trisha sat up. Ma’s face had paled, her usually bright eyes dimmed beyond recognition. The way she was looking at Trisha, as though she were trying to soak up how Trisha was looking at her—it was as though what she was about to tell Trisha was going to change how Trisha saw her forever.

It made Trisha want to ask her to stop. But Ma’s jaw was set. “All the things you hear about men in power in the entertainment industry—they were doubly true in my time. But we had none of your hashtags, no movements to give us voice, to help us. Not that all the help in the world could help a child . . . a child of five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . .” Her voice cracked. Fractured innocence from a long time ago glittered in her eyes. Trisha couldn’t move, couldn’t react, all she could do was hold herself motionless.

“A child does not understand power and silence, actions or reasons. She just feels dirty.” Her fingers twitched as though she wanted to rub at her arms, but she held herself still. “Filthy. Grotesque. Ugly. When millions of people sob at her beauty, write poetry about it, paint pictures in bright colors she can’t bear, it makes her want to slash her own face to ribbons. But she’s too scared to do even that. When the person who should protect her is the person she is most terrified of, she dies. She dies. She’s a corpse.”

For a long time, she said no more. The hand in her lap fisted and loosened. Fisted and loosened. As though she were working an invisible stress ball.

Then suddenly her gaze fell on Trisha’s hand pressed into her belly, and she took it and stroked it. A smile softened her face, brought the strength back to it, as though a memory had parted its way past the ugliness of the words she’d just spoken. “The first question your father ever asked me when I . . . when I jumped on him”—her smile turned real, her trance broken—“and landed in his lap, and told him he’d ruined my escape, was: ‘But why? Why are you trying to run away?’

“It was probably my utter dismay at having been caught before I had made it out of the hotel premises, at knowing that my only chance at escape was gone, that I answered him honestly. For the first time in my life I told the truth. That if I didn’t run away I would kill myself.

“You know what he said? He said: ‘In that case we’re going to have to make sure you escape, aren’t we?’

“I remember thinking, ‘He sounds so posh, like an actor playing a prince in a Hollywood film.’ Isn’t that funny?”

It was. It was funny as hell, because HRH did talk that way. Ma reached out and lifted Trisha’s glasses and wiped her tears. Her fingers on Trisha’s cheeks were so warm and steady, so Ma.

“He talked like a prince, but I didn’t give a damn.” She actually blushed at the swear and Trisha wanted to hug her. But she wasn’t done. “Every man I’d ever met had made my skin crawl. Every producer, actor, all those men, they knew I didn’t want to do what I was being made to do. They took it all the same. Even the ones who never touched me—there were some who believed they were decent enough for that—even they never thought to help, to remove me from my father’s control, to stand up to him. They thought of me as my father’s property. They had this code, like they didn’t mess with another man’s property.