Marianne Hemphill may have been a cold-hearted, lying shrew, but I never wanted for anything she was able to provide. It was just my misfortune “security” and “affection” could not be found in her particular wheelhouse.
The next set of pictures Maya showed me included her pregnancy. Daddy virtually glowed through each and every picture, as her already ample frame filled out with his child. Maya, too, looked happier than all her other photos. If nothing else, I had been conceived and carried in love. That had to count for something, right?
I felt Jace’s hand on my back as he offered his silent support. I spared him a small smile before turning back to Maya so she could continue her story.
She stopped momentarily for another sip of coffee, before hacking coughs seized her, nearly doubling her over. “Are you OK?” I asked.
She nodded as she reached for the nearby oxygen tank. She breathed in deep before she turned back to us. “You don’t smoke, do you?” she asked and we both shook our heads. “Don’t. It gets its claws into you and won’t let up until it kills you.”
She punctuated the sentiment by sucking deep from an inhaler, before affixing nose tubes for the tank around her neck and into her nostrils. “Where was I?”
I swallowed hard. “When you gave me to Daddy and Marianne.”
She nodded with a haunted expression. It was clear the pain lingered. “The first few months were the hardest,” she confided. “And of course I was all alone because Joey was spending time with his new family. I started smoking again… and drinking again. Joey thought that if he could sneak you over to see me, it would give me incentive to take care of myself. It worked for a while, but Marianne quickly put a stop to it. After she forbade him from seeing me, there was nothing left in Iowa for me. I bid him farewell before my heartache killed me.”
“How did you end up in Nevada?” I asked.
She offered a wry smile. “How does anyone end up anywhere?” she pondered. “I ended up going east originally, and wound up on a gambling boat on the Mississippi River. That’s where I learned to deal blackjack. Everyone told me that I should head to Vegas to make better money. Since going back east or staying near Iowa only reminded me of what I couldn’t have, I thought it was the best idea. I’ve been here ever since.”
She closed the bo
ok and leaned back in the chair to suck down more oxygen.
I took a deep breath. She seemed reluctant to offer more information, so I knew I’d have to dig… but dig delicately. “Did you ever marry?”
She shook her head. “By the time I came to Vegas, I had gained a considerable amount of weight. I never lost my pregnancy weight, and it was holding me back from getting jobs at the upper scale hotels. Finally a manager at one of the smaller casinos took a chance on me, and took me under his wing so that I would lose the weight I needed to lose. He was older, like the father I never knew. After I lost the weight, his son, Ronald, started to court me. This went into overdrive once I became a dealer for a corporate hotel on the strip. The tips were incredible. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life. Men no longer looked through me like I was invisible. Instead they flirted and tipped me even more to win me over. I don’t think Ronald liked the idea of sharing me. So he wined and dined me, showing me a life I never thought possible. Within months I was pregnant, and that was when the relationship started to change. I didn’t want to abort the pregnancy, not after losing you. Ronald stuck around, mostly to punish me for not being more careful. As the weight came back on, he got more and more aggressive. I think he wanted me to miscarry.”
My stomach sank. Had I really wanted to know my family history? Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
“By the time Diego was born, I had ballooned back up to my original weight. Ronald didn’t want anything to do with me or the baby. Instead he convinced his father that I had used the pregnancy to trap them. Since I was let go from my position due to my weight gain, it was an easy enough story to sell.” She paused. “He was out of control by then. He was abusive, both verbally and physically. And he threatened that if I ever told anyone what he was doing, he’d kill me and my son.”
I glanced around at the photos on the wall, taking note for the first time of the dark-haired boy who starred in almost all of the photos. There were photos from every year of his life, leading up to the sullen, long-haired teenager I saw staring back at me from a photo on the bookcase.
“Ronald’s dad died when Diego was a year and a half, which put him out of a job. The stress got the better of him. He was drinking all the time, so he was very volatile, against me and against Diego. He got us thrown out of more than one apartment until we were living out of a motel. The only money we had was what I was earning as a housekeeper, but it was gone almost as soon as I brought it into the house. He ended up knocking over a liquor store, and while he was in jail I took Diego and moved out. I filed for a restraining order.”
She
braced herself against the chair. It was clear she was struggling to breathe and it was painful for her. “So as you can see, I had nothing to offer you, Jordana. I never would have contacted you on my own. When your investigator contacted me, I almost couldn’t believe it. When he asked if I wanted to meet with you, I nearly declined. I’m a sick old woman with no money and a past littered with scandal you can’t afford.” Her eyes traveled to Jace. “Especially now.”
Finally Jace spoke. “So why did you agree to meet with Jordi?”
She smiled as graciously as she could. “How could I not?” Her eyes met mine. “Look at what you’ve become. You’re stronger than all your ancestors combined. You got that from your father.”
I fought back tears of my own
. It was something I had always suspected, or at least hoped had been true. “He would have wanted us to find each other,” I told her.
She didn’t look convinced. “I hope that you have the answers you needed, Jordana. But if you don’t want to see me again, I’ll certainly understand. Maybe it would be best, considering.”
“There’s plenty of time to think about that,” I said.
Her face shadowed. “We always think there’s time,” she said. “I thought there would be time to tell Joey all the things I wanted to say before one of us left the planet. My biggest regret is that I never did.” She turned to Jace. “That is why I agreed to meet now.”
She sipped once again from her cup. “I can’t say I’m sorry for giving you up, Jordana. Clearly the life you had with the Hemphills was much safer and kinder than anything I could have offered you.” She glanced over at the photos of Diego. “Diego is living proof of that.”
“Will I get to meet him?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He is a typical sixteen-year-old. I don’t see him much. He’s got music in his soul, like you. He plays in a band and he’s either practicing or performing. I’ve tried to talk to him about our situation, but he’s so angry at the world. Life hasn’t been easy on him. He would never say as much to me, but I think he’d rather I had given him up as well. Then he could be more like his successful sister.”
She smiled but I could barely mirror it. I didn’t feel successful at that moment. I felt extraordinarily guilty. He was living the life I very well could have been living. I would have resented the hell out of me, too.
It wasn’t much longer before Maya fatigued and was unable to provide any more missing pieces to my puzzle. Clearly the emotional strain of meeting me and confronting her past was overwhelming. It was a lot for me to swallow, and I didn’t have half of the health problems she apparently did. So Jace and I left before the missing Diego could appear. It was probably for the best. I felt so bad about their predicament that I was willing to write a check as big as I could spare.
That guilt got worse after we checked into our luxury suite at a five-star hotel on the strip. It was unreal driving from Maya’s sad little house to the neon spectacle of Las Vegas Boulevard, as if these two extremes could fit on the same planet… much less the same city.
We ordered room service because neither of us felt up to going out. It wasn’t like we could go hang out at a fast food restaurant or peruse the buffets. Jace and I were still a hot item for the tabloids, and fans had already tweeted that Jace was in town and spotted at our particular hotel. It was only a matter of time before we were approached, and by “we” I mean Jace. I was still invisible when it came to his many fawning groupies. They didn’t even spare me a glance as they pulled him aside for pictures and autographs.
This limited our choices to those restaurants that catered to the rich and famous, which – for better or worse – we now were.
Neither Jace nor I could face anyone trained to treat us with special regard because of our celebrity, not after what we learned that afternoon.
Even gambling seemed like an enormous waste of resources. The laughter and boisterous cheering that took place at the tables seemed outrageously out of place in a world that could see such poverty and misfortune.
We needed four walls and a private room to process it all.
Of course, Jace understood the ills of the world far better than I ever could. I never enlisted in the military, or was shipped off to a foreign, war-torn land. I didn’t understand the horrors that he had experienced overseas, that culminated in his losing his leg to a bomb.
No. My disheartening discovery digging around in my family tree couldn’t hold a candle to what he had experienced. And it made me feel even guiltier that I needed to pout about it.
My eyes lingered on the dessert menu for room service a few seconds longer than it should have. I guzzled from my nearby six-dollar bottle of water to quell the cravings. “
I’m not hungry
,” I repeated to myself. “
I’m feeling. It’s OK to feel
.”
Jace placed our order and then walked over to where I sat in the living room of our suite. The cream-colored sofa faced the window, so I peered wordlessly out over the grid of lights illuminating the inky darkness. That was Las Vegas, I realized. It was a real town, where real people lived. They drove to boring 9-to-5 jobs, bitched about traffic, complained about the weather, waited in line at the market, or joined the PTA. They fell in love, got married, had babies, got sick, got rich, lost fortunes and breathed their last breath just beyond this opulent hotel suite.
It was life. It was uglier than a fairytale, more complicated than a TV show. It was all we had. And it was imperfect and messy and disappointing.
But it was also wonderful and unexpected and
flawlessly poetic. Each step built upon itself, so that each generation could evolve beyond the limitations of the one before it. I was living proof of that. Maya understood on some level she would never be able to give me the life she wanted for me. She made her sacrifices accordingly, inevitably putting me in the position that I could help her if I wanted to.
And God help me, I did.
Jace rubbed my shoulders. “You OK?” He bent down to kiss the top of my head.
I nodded, but I didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking. He had already cautioned me against trusting anyone new, given our current notoriety. Vanni had issued the same warning, using his own experience with a couple of grifters as an example of what can happen when someone like us buys into the sob stories of those who want what we have.
“Don’t give them any money upfront,” Vanni had cautioned. “Not until you know for sure what they want from you.”
Like any of us could ever be sure.
Jace rounded the sofa and sat next to me, taking me into his strong arms. “I know that wasn’t what you wanted to find,” he said as he cuddled me close. “I’m sorry, baby.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” I corrected. “I have everything I could possibly want or need.”
“You worked hard for that,” he asserted. “Don’t feel guilty just because you’re successful. You fought nearly everyone every step of the way. Your triumph is hard-won.”
I nodded. He was right. I had taken my lumps and paid my dues, just like anyone else in this business. Hell, I was still paying them, especially after the debacle of the tour. My career was seriously compromised by how badly I had been skewered in the press. As far as PING and Miles O’Rourke were concerned, I was this heartless, selfish man-eater, who had tread Shelby and Eddie underfoot to get what I wanted. I could just imagine what they would do if they found out about Maya and Diego.
“You know what it’s like to have nothing,” he continued as he brushed my hair from my eyes. “And you pulled yourself up
out of that with nothing more than your indomitable will and your amazing talent.”
“I was lucky,” I corrected. My voice had opened doors for me and I knew it. If I had been in Maya’s shoes, who could say how I would have ended up? I might have found my own Ronald on the downward spiral.
God knows I found an Eddie, and that had been bad enough.
Jace sighed. “It makes me crazy when you say that. It’s like you don’t feel you deserve your success.”
“Maybe I don’t,” I muttered.
He took my chin in his hand.
“You may have gotten a better hand than some in life, but it’s not just what you’re given. It’s about what you do with it. You work harder than anyone I know, Jordi. That’s the reason you made it.”
I wasn’t convinced. It all seemed a bit random to me after hearing Maya’s story.