31
Olive
Afterward…
As soon as he leaves, I break down. My feet, as if frozen in place, refuse to cooperate and I simply crumble to the floor.
I wrap my arms around my shoulders and sob, holding nothing back.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear Owen’s forceful knocks and pleas to let him in.
“Go away,” I manage to utter through my tears.
I cry until my eyes dry out.
When I get inside the bathroom, I notice that my shirt is soaked at my wrists from wiping my cheeks. Mascara is smeared around my eyes.
I splash some water on my face and then collect it in my palms and bury my face in it.
It’s cool and refreshing, pulling some of the heat away from my skin.
Wishing I could submerge my whole body in it, I turn on the faucet in the bathtub.
The rush of the water startles me for a second. I feel the temperature and then turn the knob to get it a bit warmer.
When the tub is filled almost to the top, I take off my clothes and climb in.
More tears come.
Instead of wiping them, I just tilt my head back and push myself under.
The water wraps itself around me. I want to stay here forever.
When I run out of breath, I bring my head up to the surface, just so that my nose and mouth are exposed.
I inhale deeply and disappear below again.
I do this over and over again until finally I start to feel better.
The pain in my chest subsides a bit and my heart doesn’t feel like it’s squeezed by some powerful force over and over again.
Sometime later, I get enough strength to climb out of the tub.
I dry myself with a towel, wrap my hair with another, and put on the bathrobe hanging on the back of the door.
It’s thick and fluffy and it does its best to make me feel like maybe my life isn’t a total wreck if only for a moment.
When my thoughts return to Nicholas and his betrayal, tears start to well up again but I stop them in their tracks.
No, I’m not going to think about this.
I need some time. In the meantime, I need to distract myself with something else. I pick up my phone and try to focus on a novel that I’ve been reading, but the words don’t make any sense and I have trouble following the story.
I read the same page three times before I give up.
I need something stronger, something more distracting.
Turning on the television, I flip through the channels until I get to HGTV. A couple is buying a house in Costa Rica.
They seem to exist in a whole different world, if not on another dimension.
I turn it off when they start arguing about the size of the closets and the type of pool they want.
Sometimes, it’s good to lose yourself in someone else’s banal problems, but sometimes it just makes everything even more shitty.
I lie down on the bed and feel the coarseness of the bedspread under my fingertips.
The weave is thick and luxurious and I let my fingers follow one knot down to another and another. When I touch the folder, my fingers recoil but then immediately reach for it again.
I’m angry with him.
The exact intensity of it is difficult to describe.
Every cell within my body feels like it’s about to explode. I trusted him and he betrayed me.
Maybe I’m a fool for thinking he wouldn’t lie to me.
Maybe this whole thing was a con from the beginning.
Maybe nothing he ever told me was true.
Memories of everything we have been through run through my mind in circles.
Nothing is in order, and every memory sparks in a flash and then fades just as fast.
Was everything that happened a lie or was it mostly the truth with just a peppering of the untrue?
Or was it another way around altogether?
Mostly a lie with just a few kernels of truth?
I thought I knew that he loved me.
A part of me thought he didn’t tell me because of the same reason I couldn't say it to him.
But now, I’m wondering whether he didn’t bother saying it because it would be yet another lie.
I touch the folder again.
It’s smooth and soft, the exact opposite of the jaggedness that is my life.
Nicholas said he was waiting for the right time to give it to me.
I have no idea what’s in it and I am tempted to just throw it in the trash.
I don’t want anything from him, not anymore.
Not after what he has done to me.
Still, I can’t bring myself to toss it.
Whatever is in here, it has to be somewhat important or he wouldn’t have bothered giving it to me.
Do I dare to open it?
The folder is a creamy manila type with worn edges and signs of wear.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed and tapping my foot on the floor, I slowly open the first page.
On top, I find a handwritten note addressed to Nicholas.
This is everything I managed to find about Olive Kernes’ real mother.
My heart jumps into my throat and my hands begin to shake.
The next page contains the DNA results, showing that there is a 99.9% chance that a woman named Josephine Rose Reyes is her.
My hands begin to shake so hard I worry that I’m going to drop the folder onto the floor.
I lay it carefully on the bed and wait for my heart rate to slow down before looking at the rest of the documents.
“When did you do this?” I ask Nicholas as if he were in the room.
A part of me wishes he were here so that he could hold me in his arms as I look through this.
“And why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why…why did you have to lie?” I whimper and reach for the next page.
Leaving Home
February 1994
32
Josephine, who told everyone to call her Joey, opened the road atlas that she bought at a gas station and tried to figure out how to read it.
She’d just gotten her driver’s license but she had never opened a map before.
How were you supposed to know where you were in order to figure out which road to take to go where you were going?
She had no definite idea where she planned on going except that she needed to get away from her parents’ house as soon as possible.
She had been to a great many places, ocean beach houses, the ski slopes, rambling mansions in the middle of nowhere, and sprawling penthouses overlooking major cities.
But it was always her parents or the driver who had taken her there. This time, she was going alone and no one could know where she was headed.
Joey bought her used 1985 Datsun with her own money under an assumed name.
The guy who advertised it in the Pennysaver was a father of four who was reluctant to sell it to a seventeen-year-old girl with the look of a deer in the headlights.
But when she offered him two hundred dollars over asking price and he thought about his kids who were currently living in an apartment with no heat, he couldn’t resist.
Buying this car depleted most of her savings, leaving her with about two thousand dollars in cash.
She had a credit card that she could use, of course, but her parents would trace that immediately so if she wanted to stay hidden that was off limits. Two grand would have to be enough to start a new life for her and her baby. But how that was all going to happen, she wasn’t sure yet.