What Really Happened (24 page)

From there on out, that is how we rolled. She was glued to me unless she didn’t want to be. Her choice. I am from the school of thought that insecurity is a deep-seated feeling that can set in as a baby if you didn’t experience the security you needed the moment you needed it. During the first two years of Quinn’s life, she was never away from me for more than two hours. She went everywhere with me. That’s just what she wanted and needed. And believe me, from the get-go, she let me know what she needed.

The second or third night in the hospital, Bob stayed with me as I spoke to Johnny throughout the night. I got no sleep because I needed to nurse Quinn every hour. They told me she had to gain weight or they were going to start her on formula. And it worked. My milk fully came in and she gained the weight she needed and then some.

I left the hospital in a wheelchair. The Youngs took it upon themselves to videotape this moment and later either give it or sell it to ABC to help them sell their book. They also used photographs of me leaving the hospital for their book. I have no memory of being videotaped or photographed. I was so discombobulated and in pain, feeling very vulnerable as I carried my sweet little girl—her first time outside into the world. I can’t begin to convey how invaded and horrible it makes me feel to have that moment used on TV without my permission. There just aren’t words to describe the awfulness of it.

When we got back to the big beige house, something different came over me. The part of me that sensed—that knew—something was not right with the Youngs came to the forefront of my awareness, probably connected to my need to protect Quinn.

I believe Cheri viewed herself as a stellar baby nurse and sincerely thought that she would be helpful to me once I was home with Quinn. At least that was the sales pitch they gave Fred and me for why we all needed to be together. I believe it was the
National Enquirer
or Fred—or both—who raised questions about the validity of a family that goes traveling around with a pregnant home wrecker.

Anyway, the argument from the Youngs was always that I needed them because I needed to have Andrew helping with logistics and Cheri to help with the baby. Yeah, well, they needed me as their meal ticket.

I actually needed help, but it wasn’t the help that Cheri wanted to give, and she was
not happy
about that. Cheri had no interest in helping me get food or coffee or doing baby laundry, or any kind of help that would really assist me. She wanted only to have her hands on Quinn. And the more anger Cheri indirectly expressed, the more I distanced my daughter from her and all the Youngs.

Early one evening, they came to me and said, “Bye, we are leaving, driving up the coast for a few days. See you later.” They were all packed, kids already in the car.

“
What?
What do you mean you’re going away for a few days? I don’t even have a car! What if there is an emergency? Could you please wait until I get someone to come here and stay with me, in case there is an emergency?”

They were
pissed!
How
dare
I ruin their plains? They were working so hard to keep their marriage together, and I was ruining it for them.

I called Bob, who dropped everything and arranged to come and stay with me. And then, in typical passive-aggressive fashion, Andrew and Cheri said forget it, they weren’t going, and it was all my fault. If you want the definition of a complete nightmare, try a single mom recovering from a C-section, breast-feeding a newborn baby, no help in sight, in hiding, and living with the Youngs.

Johnny was headed to LA to be on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
. He would also be meeting Quinn for the first time—on my birthday. Naturally, I was excited about my two loves meeting for the first time.

Bob, Quinn, and I stayed at the Beverly Hilton. We had two adjoining rooms. Johnny was at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Century City. Bob went to fetch Johnny and, much later, drove him back to his hotel.

Johnny was so sweet with our daughter. I took pictures of him holding Quinn for the first time. She looked right at him with a look of love that she still gives him. I have never seen her look at anyone the way she looks at her dad.

The Beverly Hilton, June 2008. No matter what was going on publicly, Quinn has always known her father loves her.

We hung out for a while, and then Bob took Quinn into the other room while Johnny and I had dinner alone.

The next day, my birthday, Johnny joined us right before our room service dinner was delivered. He told me that he needed to answer his cell if it rang, because Elizabeth was in a screaming-at-everyone meltdown mode because Johnny was in LA and there was a young girl who used to work for the campaign who lived in LA. Elizabeth had her fired because she was pretty. Johnny couldn’t remember her name, which made Elizabeth even crazier. She thought he was lying, and not being able to remember her name was his cover. But he really couldn’t remember her name.

By this point I knew that Elizabeth was not remotely interested in the truth. She was always so far from reality and never asked the right questions, so she constantly fought the wrong battles. Sure enough, his cell rang and he picked up.

But it wasn’t Elizabeth; it was our future president Barack Obama. What I gleaned from the conversation was that the future president was “phone banking” him. This was one of many calls that Johnny received under the umbrella of Obama looking for Johnny’s endorsement. After all the small talk (basketball mostly), Johnny said something like, “Today is no different from the last time we talked. I haven’t decided.” He hung up and apologized for picking up. He didn’t know it was going to be Obama.

Johnny never wanted to be Obama’s vice president. However, he operates by watching how the world unfolds, and even though he didn’t want that job, he did want to see if it was actually a job he was supposed to have. Unlike a lot of politicians, he was in this for service, and service to him actually means serving the world where you are needed. And more often than not, that job isn’t the job your ego wants. Even though VP would have been an incredibley stupid and reckless path to embark on at that time, I actually don’t think it was so delusional of him to wonder which way his life was headed. After all, there have been plenty of politicians who kept a love child or their double lives under wraps for years.

After I watched Johnny on
The Tonight Show
, I took pictures of father and daughter sleeping side by side for Quinn’s baby book.

Johnny’s feelings about me had changed a bit since I became the mother of his child. His appreciation for me grew. His respect for my strength and fortitude, for all I had been through alone, deepened his love for me. I could feel all of it the second he walked in the room, and it bowled me over as he was holding Quinn.

The Beverly Hilton, June 20
^th
, 2008. Johnny and Quinn have always had a lot to say to each other.

Quinn and I drove back to Santa Barbara and into a shitstorm. Cheri’s sister and her kids were visiting, and Cheri and her sister ganged up on Andrew, telling him what an awful human being he was for putting poor Cheri through all of this stress. Andrew’s birthday was March 23
^rd
, and Cheri purposely did not acknowledge it to punish him. After all, he’d forgotten her birthday back in December when they were in San Diego. They were also really freaked out about money and not getting reimbursed for the money they had spent on me.

Andrew was having his car shipped out from North Carolina and asked me if I wanted to ship out mine as well. (The BMW was mine if they were in a good mood and theirs if they were in a bad mood.) I asked how much it would be, and he said under a thousand dollars. That seemed like a good deal to me, and boy, did I need some freedom from the screaming and yelling that was coming from their end of the house. I felt bad for Andrew. We were such good friends, and it was difficult for me to listen as Cheri was so mean to him. He would go outside by himself at night, sit by the outdoor fireplace, listen to music, and drink. It was easy to see why he had fallen in love with Johnny. He had the same abusive wife stuff in his own life.

Andrew and Cheri were pissed about how much money I had spent to go see Johnny at the Beverly Hilton. How dare I spend money like that? They had gone from being supposedly flush with cash to being insanely frantic about money. And Johnny wasn’t remotely interested in talking to Andrew. Andrew used what little time they did spend speaking to complain about how hard his life was. Cheri blamed me and she rode Andrew hard about how awful I was. To attempt to take the heat off himself, he joined the bandwagon and blamed me as well.

Cheri used to say to me, “I feel like you are judging me for my decision to do this.” And believe me, I tried hard not to, but she was right: I could never get past what a stupid decision it was to agree to this whole situation and then play the victim.

So imagine how I felt, having lived through this insanity, when I discovered in January 2010 that Andrew and Cheri had actually received nearly a million dollars from Bunny and claimed that they had used that money solely to pay my expenses! In reality, the money that they spent on me was closer to seventy thousand dollars than seven hundred thousand dollars.

Mimi came out to LA for the weekend. She picked up my car that had been shipped to LA and drove it to Santa Barbara. Mimi was trying to help make some peace in our household. She played with the kids, cooked dinner, and tried talking to the Youngs without me. Then she came into my room and said, “Yeah, I don’t know what you do with that. They are unconscious victims, unable to take responsibility or see their part in this.”

I replied, “You do the only thing you can. You wish them well and walk away.”

During her visit, Mimi took my camera and downloaded my pictures onto my computer. Cheri was in the kitchen and came in to my part of the house. I made the big mistake of showing her a couple of pictures of Johnny and Quinn, which, along with my very personal pregnancy photos that I didn’t show her were uploaded to their computer without my knowledge or consent.

I was talking to Johnny regularly, telling him how “off” and “crazy” the Youngs were, and that I really need to get away from them. Andrew would tell me, “Please tell the senator to call me.” I said okay and I would relay the message. When Johnny wouldn’t call, Andrew and Cheri blamed me. In their eyes, I wasn’t asking Johnny to call Andrew; his not calling had nothing to do with Johnny not wanting to talk to Andrew. Johnny and I became one and the same person in their eyes. Cheri was big on telling Andrew, “I told you so; John Edwards is an evil man. I’ve been telling you this forever. And now look what you’ve done to our family over and over again.”

The month of April was a living hell in the big beige house. I stayed away from the Youngs in my side of the house with the door closed as much as possible, shielding my sweet girl from their miseries. If that weren’t bad enough, I got frozen shoulder during this time, which is not uncommon after surgery but it made lifting a baby carrier—which you need to do to get out of the house—very difficult.

The Youngs’ children were very busy with their home schooling, and Andrew was spending a lot of time getting dental work, which I gathered was cosmetic (it looked like veneers). When all of that wasn’t happening, he and Cheri continued spending time in their office working on plans for their North Carolina home.