I poke my head farther into the apartment. “Should I just … leave this in the front hall, or—”
“Shit. I thought you were Steph.”
“No, just…”
When Georgie whips around to face me from her couch, she looks like a ghost. All her makeup has clearly been cried off, her mound of curls has been yanked into a scrunchie, and she’s sitting in an oversize NYU T-shirt and a pair of leggings. She looks startlingly young—at least, younger than I’ve ever thought of her, behind the armor of her bold blazers and jewels.
She turns away and shoves something under her coffee table, but not fast enough for me to miss it: the telltale shine of my notebook. The one I’ve been writing in the past few days.
The one I must have left in her office this morning on the way out.
I take a step closer to her, hovering in the open space that divides the kitchen from the living room. It feels like I’m walking in a dream, or maybe like I’ve stumbled into someone else’s. Georgie won’t even look at me.
“How long have you known?” she asks.
“Known … what?”
“That I’m your—that I’m your…”
Mom, my brain supplies, when neither of us will. I take a step back, stumbling on her carpet.
“I called HR to cut you your paycheck. They told me your last name was Price,” says Georgie. She glances at the notebook. “I didn’t mean to read it, but it fell with the pages open, and when I picked it up … you wrote that you found your mom.” She swallows with her whole body, like she’s trying to pull something back in. “How long have you known it was me?”
There are so many potential minefields here, but I can’t do anything but keep walking in them. The conversation just keeps moving forward before I can catch up.
“I—I thought it was Steph.”
“Steph?” she asks hollowly.
I’m still standing there in the space between her kitchen and her living room, her dry cleaning in my hands and my heart in my stomach. I can’t stop staring at her. It’s like I’m willing her to stare back at me, but I also don’t want her to. I want all of this and none of this, and I can tell just from the way she lets out a shaky breath that she feels the same way, too.
But we’ve trapped each other in this moment. Unintentionally, but irreversibly. It may not be a show, but it has to go on.
“I mean, I know she’s not, but … that’s what I was doing there. My dad. He wrote about someone called Fedotowsky, I thought…”
It doesn’t matter what I thought, because what I know is right in front of me. What I know are the things I’ve been seeing and looking right past for weeks. Little things that all add up to a big one. Georgie’s intensity. Her competitiveness. Her honesty. Her love for musical theater, and how it carved her path in life. Her hair, the exact reddish-blond shade mine was before I dyed it post–“Little Jo.”
And even if that weren’t enough to seal it, it’s right here. It’s in the way she’s looking at me right now. The way I know the feeling without ever having felt it before—that this is what it’s like to be looked at by your mom.
“I’m Fedotowsky.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. “I changed my name when I started the business. Check is my mother’s maiden name.”
I’m about to ask her if I can sit, but we’re way past asking for things now. We’re already in the give-and-take. I’m just not sure who’s doing which.
She watches me out of the corner of her eye, so still that she doesn’t move a muscle when I sit on the other side of the couch, laying her dry cleaning on the coffee table.
“I know … I know you told my dad not to talk about you,” I say. “And he didn’t. I just wanted to be clear that—this is my fault.”
Georgie lets out a choked laugh. “It is very clearly mine,” she says, as if she’s offended that I might try to take the blame from her.
I stare down at my lap. I’m not sure if she means us finally meeting, or if she means having me in the first place. This seems to occur to her the beat after it occurs to me, because she straightens up and looks at me.
Except a moment passes, and then another one. She doesn’t say anything. Just stares at me, like she has to account for every freckle, every hair, every limb.
“Jesus,” she finally breathes. “Look at you. How did I not know?”
“Did you … not even know my name?”
“Of course I do. It’s Camille,” she says, without missing a beat. “Camille Rose Price. My mother’s name and Cooper’s grandmother’s. Your birthday is in four days. You love mint chip ice cream and those penguins at the Central Park Zoo.”
She says these facts out loud like she’s guarding them, like she has held them so close to her chest for all these years that she’s afraid even to say them out loud. I sit in the aftermath of it, but I’m not thinking of Georgie, or even of myself. I’m thinking of my dad, who took me to see the penguins every weekend that summer my obsession was at its peak. I’m thinking of Heather, who has probably made me more mint chip milkshakes than even Ben and Jerry themselves could count.
I’m thinking of my dad diligently sitting in front of a computer and typing this all out to her while I slept in the next room, telling the story of my life to a person who left him in charge of it.
“I haven’t seen a picture of you in years,” says Georgie, staring at my notebook where it’s peeking out from under the coffee table. “Not since that video.”
I shut my eyes. “Please tell me my dad didn’t send you that stupid ‘Astonishing’ clip.”
I brace myself for it the way I’ve braced for it for the past five years, every muscle in my body poised for impact. But Georgie shakes her head, still staring at the notebook as if the words didn’t even fully reach her ears.
“It was a video of you on a subway platform. You were only five. A street performer was singing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ and apparently you took it upon yourself to make it a duet.”
I wait for the relief to hit, for the long-overdue exhale. That was the nightmare, wasn’t it? That she’d see the clip, and that mortifying, infamous moment would be the only thing she knew about me? This is my best-case scenario, what I wanted most: to be my own person when I met her. To feel fully formed in a way I wasn’t then. To be free of this thing that followed me so long.
But instead it feels oddly like disappointment. This thing I’ve tethered myself to, this thing I’ve used to define myself in so many moments she wasn’t around to define herself—she never saw it. She doesn’t even seem to know what I’m talking about. Her eyes are so distant in the memory of something else that for a jarring moment I’m there with her, in a world where that video never happened. In a world where all the things I did to outrun it didn’t happen, either.
Then she goes somewhere further than the memory, somewhere I can’t follow. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone smile and wanted to look away. There’s so much sadness in it that it feels like something else entirely.
“I knew I couldn’t see you again,” she says.