The Accidentals(88)

It’s the bedroom of a girl’s dreams. When I was little, I’d always wanted a fancy room like this.

I walk over to perch on one of the window seats. The room is too nice for someone who only needs it during vacations. It would be a waste, really. At that realization, a brittle piece of my heart chooses to splinter and break.

“Don’t you like it?” Frederick asks.

“Of course I like it,” I whisper. “But…” My eyes fill up with tears, and a sob escapes from my chest, unbidden.

“Rachel, what’s the matter?” Frederick wears a panicky, what-have-I-done face.

“It’s just… WHY? Why now?”

At first I think he doesn’t understand the question. But then I see him swallow hard. “By ‘why now’ I suppose you mean why not a long time ago?”

I can only nod. The tears have begun to stream down my face.

“Oh, honey.” He turns around in a complete circle and puts his hands on top of his head. “The reason you can never have an answer to that question is because I don’t have one to give.”

“But what were you thinking all that time?” I gasp. “And don’t say it was a long time ago, or that you don’t remember.” I slip a photo out of my back pocket and hold it up. It’s the one with my mother at the drums.

Frederick flinches as if he’s been slapped. He sits down on the wood floor in the center of the empty room. “Have I ever said one unkind word about your mother?”

I shake my head.

“We were young and stupid. I was stupider than she was, trust me. But it takes two people to have a baby.”

I sit lean back on the window seat, putting a little more distance between me and Frederick’s story.

“We were great together, actually. She was smart and funny. But she was also full of opinions about my career. And I was a twenty-one-year-old jackass who didn’t want anyone’s help.” He stops, swallowing hard. The sun angles in the window to put a spotlight on his shoulders. “Music was the only thing I’d ever been good at. And when the producers finally started showing up with offers, they didn’t want Wild City Blues. They said blues weren’t hip enough. They wanted the solo stuff I’d been recording on the side. They gave me a contract and I…” He takes a deep breath and sighs. “I signed it.”

“She didn’t want you to?”

He stares at a patch of the polished floor. “She thought if we went on tour, it would work out for both of us. But I wasn’t willing to wait.”

I tried to imagine how that would feel for my mother. But since I’d never known her as musician, I can’t picture that dream.

“We fought about it,” my father says, his voice dropping low.

“Is that how it ended?” I can’t get those happy images out of my head—my mother and Frederick with love on their faces.

“Almost. I did something awful just to prove she didn’t own me. I…” His confession seems to lose steam. “I didn’t come home one night after a gig. And then she retaliated in a way that was designed to hurt me too. That’s how it ended.”

I try to decode this last bit of information, and find it impossible. “She cheated? With who?” It’s hard enough to imagine my mother taking off her clothes for Frederick. But for a stranger?

He looks up at me and shakes his head. “She was really upset with me. And probably afraid. I think she already knew she was pregnant. But I was clueless. And then I went on tour, leaving her behind. The tour went really well, and I basically never came back to Claiborne.”

He stares at the pretty slanted ceiling, as if the story is written up there. “She didn’t even tell me about you until after you were born. She sprung it on me just as I was about to go to L.A.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to L.A. I told her I had to do it for my career. I didn’t want to be forced into coming back.” He leans back on his hands and looks up into the dust motes floating on the sunshine. “I didn’t know any babies, Rachel. I didn’t have a clue what they needed. Your mother, on the other hand, was the most competent person I’d ever met. I didn’t think you needed me.”

“But you sent us money.”

“Well, she didn’t ask right away, because she was smart and she knew there was no point. I get that now. So it happens that she asked right after my first album. But I didn’t see her timing as good common sense. I felt manipulated.”

“But you paid.”

“I did. And it made me feel very benevolent. The rising star pays off his little people. I doubled it at some point too. She didn’t even ask me to. Every month I mailed a check, and every month she cashed it. And those months, they turned into years really fast. If you have a child you’ve never met, every year it gets a little easier to tell yourself that the kid is better off without you.”

“But it wasn’t true!”

He nods. “See, but she was very nice about helping me to perpetuate the myth—that I fulfilled my obligation with those checks. She never wrote me a letter, never sent me pictures. I sent the money, and she was willing to leave me in perfect ignorance. The problem was I never got a whiff of what I was missing, either.”

“She did that because of pride,” I sob.