Forever Now (Forever - Book 1) (22 page)

“Cruz! Cruz!” I shouted.

I prayed that his car would break down so I could catch up. His tailpipe belched black smoke, and I thought there was a pretty good chance it wouldn’t make it to the end of the block, but his free car had a certain stubborn streak, and it kept clack, clack, clacking out of sight.

I stormed into the house to see if Cruz left me any message, any clue. I threw the front door open and bolted inside only to run head on into my mother.

She was wearing white short shorts and a push up bikini top. She was holding a drink in her hand, which spilled when I ran into her.

“What the hell!” she shouted.

“He was here? What did he say? Did he leave me a note?”

“Who?” she asked and then there was a look of realization on her face. “Oh…”

“Did he leave a phone number? An address?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she sneered.

I pushed her aside and ran into the living room. I searched for a note from him, rummaging through the papers and magazines on the coffee table and on the kitchen counter.

“What do you think he left for you?” my mother asked, sauntering into the kitchen. She poured herself another drink and took a long sip. “A love letter? You think you opened your legs for him and now he loves you?”

I saw red. “I didn’t open my legs for him. That’s your specialty,” I said, my voice low and cold.

The room got deathly quiet. I could see the words come out of my mouth and travel through the air on tiny molecules, the speed of sound turned ominously slow. When they finally reached my mother, they hit with surprising force. Her usual smug face turned to shock, the victim of the worst kind of hurt: truth.

But her shock only lasted the briefest of moments. She moved on to anger in a heartbeat. Her face became more animal than human. Predator.

She put her drink down and slowly walked toward me. I was frozen in place, unable to move. Without saying a word, she pulled her hand back and let it go, landing on my face with a terrible crack that made my teeth rattle. I stumbled backward. My own hand flew to my cheek to subdue the stinging pain.

“Don’t ever speak to me that way. You have respect for me, do you hear?” Mom shouted.

“Never,” I said between clenched teeth. “I’ll never have respect for you. Respect is earned. You’re nowhere close.”

I sidestepped her and headed for the staircase. She followed on my heels, and I could smell her liquor breath wafting from behind me.

“You think it’s been so easy being your mother?”

“Is that what you’ve been?” I asked without turning around.

I took the steps two at a time. I couldn’t shake the belief that Cruz had left me a note, some way to contact him. There was a chance he left it somewhere in my room, and I was determined to find it.

“That’s right. Blame the mother,” she said, marching up the stairs behind me. “Never mind the moody, ungrateful daughter. Always with your head in books or those stupid, worthless notebooks of yours. Scribble. Scribble. Worthless!”

I tried to tune her out, focusing instead on my room. While she threw insults at me, I rifled through the papers on my desk.

“I’ve done it all on my own. I never had help from anybody,” she continued. “Alone. Making a living and giving everything to my creepy, loner daughter. You never lifted a finger to help me. You never once said, thank you.”

She grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me to face her. “You’re an ungrateful bitch, you know that?” she said.

“Nothing you say can hurt me,” I said, cool as a cucumber. “I don’t care about you. I’ve moved on.” I pulled away from her and continued looking for a note.

“You moved on, huh?” she said and left the room.

My breath hitched, and I plopped onto my bed. I started to shake. It was the first time that I had stood up to my mother. I wasn’t sure where my courage had come from, but I suspected it came from the total sense of loss that I felt. I mean, what more could I lose?

Just when I thought our confrontation was over, she walked back into my bedroom holding some papers. At first, I thought they were the note from Cruz that I had been searching for, but I recognized them almost immediately as something else.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, even though I knew she got them out of my backpack.

“Is this what you mean by moved on?” She smiled from ear to ear, like the conquering hero. Triumphant.

“Those aren’t yours.”

“I have news for you. This house is mine. Everything in this house is mine. Did you think you were going to hide this from me? Did you think you were actually going to make this happen?”

Did I actually think I was going to make it happen? I didn’t know. But I hoped I would make it happen. I wished for it harder than I had wished for anything else…until Cruz entered my life.

“Let’s see here,” she continued, reading through the papers. “Application for student visa to France. France? You thought you were going to France?”

She cackled like a witch. “This is hysterical. Thanks for the laughs.”

A seething anger built up inside me, ready to explode. “I got accepted to the Sorbonne. So, no. It’s not funny.”

“Who cares?” she said. “You might as well say you got accepted to a college on Mars. I’m not paying to send you halfway around the world to some hot shit school. Do you know how much that would cost?”

I knew exactly how much that would cost, of course. I had been running the numbers down to the last penny. It was doable now. And I was so close. With the scholarship, the Bergers’ apartment, and my babysitting, it could happen.

“You’re done with me?” she said. “You
need
me, kid. You’re nothing and nowhere without me.”

I bit my lower lip. I was tempted to tell her about the apartment, about just how much I didn’t need her. But it was important not to give her too many details. Knowledge was dangerous in her hands. She would use it against me and sabotage my efforts.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to pay for anything. I just need you to go with me to the consulate in L.A. and sign the papers.”

“Yeah, right.” She left the room, and I heard her walk down the stairs. I took a couple deep breaths sitting on my bed before gathering the courage to catch up with her in the kitchen. I found her polishing off her drink at the counter.

“I promise,” I said. “You don’t need to do anything after the consulate. I’ll do the rest. You’ll never hear from me again.”

She poured herself another drink. “Little Tess is all grown up, huh?  You think you can go and have some fabulous, glamorous life? You think you’re so special? You think you can go to Paris just because you want to? Do you know how many times I’ve been to Paris? I’ll tell you. Big fat zero times. That’s how many.”

She took a big gulp of her drink and pulled a bag of chips out of the cabinet. “I’ve never been to Paris or anywhere in Europe,” she said. “I’ve been nowhere. And you know why? Because I had to take care of
you
.”

She pointed a chip at me and took a bite. “I never had designer clothes, never could keep a man. All because of you. You know what that’s called? Sacrifice. Seventeen years of sacrifice and suffering all to make your life better. Well, now it’s your turn. You’re going to work some crap job and be miserable just like your mommy. Welcome to reality, little girl. And there ain’t no Paris in reality, believe you me.”

I held back the urge to jump across the counter and scratch out her eyes. It was hard to tell if she was only trying to make me suffer in order to win the fight or if she really meant to block any happiness in my life. My suspicions were leaning toward the second option.

“I’m going anyway,” I muttered. “So I won’t go to the Sorbonne. I’ll still get to Paris and stay as long as I can.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

She picked up the papers and ripped them in half and then into quarters. I gasped, and I choked up with tears.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said more to myself than to her. “I don’t need you. I managed just fine without you for four months.”

“You mean with your boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend?”

“That’s who you think he is, right? Your boyfriend? You think you got a dose of puppy love? You got to play house for a while and now you think the world is all sweetness and light?”

I didn’t think the world was sweetness and light. I didn’t think Cruz was my boyfriend. But the love part, well, the love part I believed down to my soul.

“Like mother like daughter,” she said, taking a seat on the couch. “You have good taste, I’ll give you that. I can see the attraction. I’ve gotten very close to Cruz, too. Intimately close.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?”

I grew cold and rubbed my arms to keep away the chill. I didn’t want to be there, anymore. I wished my mother never came back from Mexico. I wished I didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

“You’re a liar,” I said.

“Did you really think he came here to visit
you?”
she asked. She turned on the TV and changed it to
Real Housewives
. “Don’t you think it’s odd that your boyfriend hasn’t come to visit you and then visits you when you’re not here?”

“I was late.”

“He stayed a little longer than usual,” she said.

“You’re a liar.”

“Am I? Well, if I am, I’m a liar without cellulite. I take care of myself. Men want me. Why would he pick you when he could have me? Don’t kid yourself, Tess. Cruz is mine, now. I traded his father in for a younger version.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s true. Cruz and me are like this,” she said, crossing her fingers.

Santa isn’t real. Ditto the tooth fairy. Good things don’t come to those who wait. Pretty isn’t as pretty does. And one more thing: Perfect, beautiful boys don’t love Mess Parker. As my mother would say, “welcome to reality.”

I hated her. I never wanted to talk to her, again. Never wanted to see her. Never wanted to hear her voice.

“I hope you die,” I said. It was the worst thing I could think of. She wouldn’t care if I hated her. She wouldn’t believe me if I told her what a horrible person she was. But she wouldn’t want to die. At least not while she still looked good in a bikini. “I hope you go to sleep and never wake up.”

My mother raised her glass to me in a toast and took a swig. I turned on my heel and went to my room.

It was only four in the afternoon, but I went right to bed. Any energy and joy that remained in my body had been sucked out by my mother. I was beyond sad. I sank into a black hole and didn’t wake up for seven hours.

***

My eyes flew open. I had been sleeping a dreamless sleep, like death itself. I hadn’t even moved in my bed, was still in the same position I was in when I first fell asleep.

Then, something woke me. The house was quiet and dark, but I could feel a presence, as if I was being watched. I turned on the light. My room was empty, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I got up and walked to the window. Pulling the curtain to the side, I peered outside. There, across the street leaning against his crappy, free car was Cruz. I rubbed my eyes. I had wished to see him for so long that I wasn’t sure if he was real or not or if I was hallucinating or still asleep. But he looked just like I remembered: Beautiful. Sad. He was real, all right. I exhaled slowly, as if I had been holding my breath for hours, and maybe I had.

He noticed me at the window and straightened his posture, standing at attention. He crooked his hand, waving me over to him. I nodded and stepped back from the window, letting the curtain fall into place. I turned off the light and tiptoed down the hallway to close my mom’s bedroom door. I could hear her snoring lightly, which meant she was sleeping soundly and wouldn’t be up for hours.

I walked downstairs and opened the front door as quietly as I possibly could. I clicked it closed behind me, making sure not to make a sound.

Then I was running across the street, and I didn’t stop until I was wrapped in Cruz’s arms. He hugged me like he thought I would try to escape. Body against body, my head nestled against his chest, arms around his waist, my hands slipping under his shirt to touch the flesh of his back. He smelled of apples and sunlight, and I couldn’t get enough.

We stayed like that for a long time, locked in an embrace, as if we had merged, becoming one person. If it was cold outside, there late at night standing in the street in my nightgown and bare feet, I didn’t notice. It was a moment of such relief. In an instant, Cruz had filled the black void in my heart with happiness.

“I waited so long,” I said.

“I know.”

“You didn’t come.”

He was wearing gloves against the cold, and he took one off to put two fingers under my chin and tilted my head up. We locked eyes, and I shivered. “I did. I was here the day after your mother returned. She said she sent you off to your uncle in Montana for the rest of the school year. No phone number. No forwarding address.”

“I don’t have an uncle.”

He smiled. “I wish I’d known that.”

“I’ve been here the whole time.”

“I figured that out today.”

“I looked for you.”

“That’s how I figured it out. Someone from Neiman Marcus called me. That’s how I knew you were still in San Diego.”

“They wouldn’t tell me where you were,” I said. “I didn’t have a phone number or an address.”

Cruz tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I know.”

“I was alone, and I couldn’t find you, and my mother said—“ My voice broke, and I began to cry. He was crying, too. His eyes filled with tears, which spilled out and ran down his face.

“What did she say?”

“She said that you…” I couldn’t say the words. I didn’t want to know the truth, even if it was only half true.

“Tess, tell me what she said.”

“Tell me she lied,” I said. “I need you tell me it’s all a lie.”

He clutched my shoulders. “What’s a lie? Tell me.”

“That you and her…That you—“

“Me and her what?”

I couldn’t look him in the eye any longer. I hugged him, shutting my eyes and leaning my head against his chest. “She said you came to visit her because, you know, you like her. And you did things with her.”