Scandalized: The Beginning Read online

  Prelude

  Grady

  If I’d known it would end like this, I never would have loved her.

  I laugh bitterly.

  Like I had a fucking choice.

  I would have loved Helene if I got to choose any woman who had ever lived.

  Helene stirs in her sleep and my arm tightens around her naked back, stroking her tattoo lightly with my fingers. I can’t see it in the darkness, but I know it’s there, a purple tulip that means more to her than I ever could.

  I press my face to the top of her head, inhaling her scent. I listen to the steady rhythm of her breathing, trying to commit the sound to memory, convinced my future happiness depends on being able to recall this noise exactly.

  My eyes slip to the clock glowing red.

  Not enough time.

  How much time would be enough to cram in the love of a lifetime?

  I want to wake her up, to stroke her body to life beneath me and hear her breath catch in her throat. I need it. I need to be inside her one last time, to feel the cosmic click of one soul fitted so perfectly into another, the gentle touch of love along the base of my spine as she holds me tightly to her core.

  There could never be enough of that, either.

  I force myself out of bed, careful not to wake her, my mouth turned down harshly at the corners. I want to scream, to cry out in violence, to fight for this woman, but I know it’s too late.

  The only way to save her is to let her go.

  Helene

  Mitzi Benson.

  I wonder if that’s her real name. I stare at her bent head, gray roots clearly visible beneath the inky black of her hair. She sure as fuck doesn’t look like a Mitzi. A Louise, maybe. Or an Ursula.

  She raises her head and I jerk back.

  “Is this the first time your mother’s left you unsupervised?”

  Her voice is hoarse and I peg her as a smoker. I imagine she goes home from this shit job every night, nukes a frozen dinner and drinks a fifth of whiskey until she passes out in that ugly-ass man-blazer, watching reruns of The Golden Girls.

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  She pulls her glasses down and stares at me with eery blue eyes. “You don’t know?”

  I squint at the shadow over her upper lip. She may have been pretty once, before the Department of Social Services became more important to her than eyeliner or her desire to shave her legs. She raises an eyebrow and I roll my eyes. “She went to Vegas once.”

  “For how long?”

  I exhale a loud breath. “What difference does it make?”

  Marilyn had been gone more than a month that time, but I know better than to share that little tidbit with Miss Child Protective. People like her, these government people, don’t know jack shit about my life. She doesn’t know what I live with, that my world is ten fucking times better with my mother passed out half-naked in an alley than with her standing in the middle of our kitchen.

  I have an idea, Helene-baby.

  I shiver despite the warm, dead air in Mitzi’s cubicle. No, this woman doesn’t understand. Life without my mother is a good thing, and I was lying when I said I didn’t know how long she’d been gone. Thirty-two and a half days. Thirty-two and a half days of perfect fucking awesomeness. I showered. I wore clothes that I washed in the sink and hung to dry. I bought groceries with her EBT card from the corner store where they pretended not to notice I wasn’t the forty year-old crack whore in the picture. I cooked myself pasta, and grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches.

  Then one day I came home from school to an awful smell, cereal spilled all over the kitchen floor, and I knew she was back. I followed a trail of vomit to find her curled up on top of my covers, loudly snoring.

  My shit-storm of a mother had returned.

  Life got even worse when she started dating Jerry. He made her usual boyfriends look accomplished and good-natured. The guy was a complete dickhead. He stared at my chest and grabbed my ass when she wasn’t looking. There’d been guys like that before, who taught me how to stand up for myself and demand they back off, now. But Jerry wasn’t taking no for an answer, and I was starting to get a little freaked out.

  The morning I woke up and found him standing over my bed stroking his red, crooked dick and talking about my perfect little titties, I told Marilyn he had to go.

  She said I was jealous.

  I said she was a pole-dancing, street-walking piece of trash who wouldn’t know a real man if he came in her mouth in the back of his wife’s minivan. She hit me full on the face, which she hadn’t done since my sixth grade teacher filed a suspected child abuse complaint with Social Services.

  I stared at Marilyn, rage bubbling inside me like water in a kettle. I hated her for the spineless waif she was and for the parent she was not. I hated her for the things I had done that made me like her, for every time I wanted something better and knew I couldn’t have it. I gritted my teeth, my fingers curling into a tight fist. Fuck you, I said, and punched her in the jaw.

  It was the first time I hit her. Apparently, she’d take a rainbow of physical abuse from a man, but she had a zero-tolerance policy for that kind of shit from her daughter. She was gone when I woke up the next day.

  She took her purse, a red suitcase, and the goddamn mother-fucking EBT card, the welfare equivalent of hitting the auto-destruct button on her way out the door. I screamed and cleared the kitchen table full of clutter and garbage and dirty dishes with one great sweep onto the floor.

  I went to Marilyn’s room and began rifling through her belongings, searching for the EBT card and finding the usual piles of crap, clothes with sequins and rhinestones and necklines that would make a better woman cringe.

  Who the hell takes a suitcase but none of their shit?

  I figured she did it just to scare me, thinking I would notice the suitcase was gone but overlook her utter lack of packing. And maybe I would have, if I weren’t constantly rifling through her room looking for the drugs she was forever promising to stop using. In my sixteen years as Marilyn Sorenson’s only child, I’d played Let’s Find the Syringe more times than Hide and Go Seek.

  I lick my lip and bite it as I watch Mitzi the man-woman type into her computer. I think of Jasmine, a foster kid in my first grade class with black, shifty eyes who used to get bloody noses during gym class. I swear I’d get a chill up my spine whenever we made eye contact.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” I ask Mitzi.

  For a minute I think she doesn’t hear. She keeps typing and I get a sick feeling in my gut, like I’m on a city bus driving by our apartment and the driver wouldn’t stop no matter how many times I pull the cord. My eyes begin to burn. Please God, don’t let me start crying in the middle of this bitch’s cubicle.

  A voice inside me screams for my attention.

  Run!

  Just get up and walk away. Tell her you have to go to the bathroom, then disappear. I’m sure you won’t be the first person who decided to take her destiny into her own hands.

  I think of the vodka box full of college brochures in the bottom of my closet. Can you apply to college if you don’t have a freaking mailing address? If you are living on the streets, decorated in your own filth?

  No one knows those brochures are there, not my friends and certainly not my mother. I pick them up one by one from the guidance office, slipping them between my textbooks like contraband. I read them over and over again, so that they fall open to my favorite pages, beautiful co-eds walking in the sunshine, dripping money and privilege onto the sidewalks.

  Damn you, Marilyn, for leaving me like this. For taking away my one goddamn chance at happiness.

  Mitzi clears her throat. “Do you have any family?”
>
  “No.”

  “Aunts, uncles, grandparents…”

  “No.”

  “Father?”

  A memory raises its hand defiantly. He has hazel eyes, the hint of a smile on his lips as he bends down to greet me. These are for you. Purple roses tied with a bright green ribbon, beautiful and fine, and my little-girl heart leaps in my chest.

  I raise one eyebrow at Mitzi. “Nope.”

  She turns back to her computer with a huff that makes me feel like my crappy-ass family is entirely my fault. “Then you’ll be placed in a group home until your mother returns, or we find another suitable option.”

  She begins to type again and I imagine I can read the screen. Another slug of society to burden us hardworking taxpayers. No idea who her own father is. Mom probably slept with half of Brooklyn.

  I try to picture what a group home would be like, but all I can come up with is a mental image of Port Authority after midnight. They would chew on me like a dog on a bone, until I was all marrow hanging out all over the place. I am afraid for myself if I have to go there. Really scared.

  “Wait,” I say.

  Mitzi’s hands freeze over her keys.

  I don’t know what I’m more afraid of. Saying something or keeping my mouth shut. I reach inside my belly and withdraw the diamond hidden there, as if I’d swallowed it whole with all its pointed edges years ago. It’s my secret, my special thing that matters, the one hope I’ve ever dared hold on to. “My father is Ward Stevens.” I curl my toes into my worn leather sandals. “The senator.”

  For a minute I think she might laugh. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  She leans back in her chair, which squeaks loudly. “Senator Stevens is your father.”

  “Yes.” Sure. Why not? Absolutely. Don’t you see the family resemblance? I’m thinking about majoring in Poly-Sci next year at Columbia. “Call his office.”

  She smiles, and I see I was right. She is quite pretty when she isn’t completely fucking miserable, her saggy face pulled into a smile like a cheerful window curtain. She’s enjoying this. And why not? A break from her shitty little job in this godforsaken, cordoned-off square of humanity. “Do you have a number?” she asks.

  “It’s on his website.”

  Okay, so I looked. Often enough to know his travel schedule, see the overly-bright pictures where he smiles like a prophet. He never married, supports green energy options and has been physically present for more votes than any other senator.

  I watch as Mitzi looks up the phone number, listen as she talks to someone about an urgent matter that requires his immediate attention, and would he please call back at his earliest convenience. My palms are a sweaty mess and I finger their dampness. I’ve really done it this time.

  She tells me to get some lunch downstairs, and passes me some kind of card to pay for it. Minutes later, I stand in the cafeteria, my hands shaking as I empty a creamer into my cup of coffee, trying to imagine Ward’s reaction to Mitzi’s phone call.

  Would he even remember me?

  More than likely, he’ll be mortified. He’s a fucking senator, for christ’s sake, and I’m the daughter of a whore he paid for sex. I’m looking for familial bliss in a situation that’s more likely to be featured on Inside Edition.

  I should have kept my damn mouth shut.

  But it’s too late now, nothing to do but ride this wave until it throws me on the beach with a mouthful of sand. I lift the coffee to my lips and drink.

  A shrill voice calls out, “You have to pay for that.”

  My eyes level on the cashier, a round woman with round black glasses. She bobs her head at me. “You can’t just go drinkin’ stuff that don’t belong to you.”

  I hold her eyes a beat too long, then another. I take a leisurely sip, aware of the eyes of the other customers on me, hoping to witness a fight. I lower my chin and wipe my lips with the back of my hand.

  Bitch picked the wrong person to fuck with today.

  She purses her lips and crosses her arms across her ample chest, but says nothing as I cross the room and hold out the card. I’m making my way back upstairs with the coffee when I hear Mitzi’s voice carrying into the corridor.

  “Are you her father?”

  I freeze. Even in that instant, I know this is a moment in time that will divide my life into “before” and “after”, a decisive sword I am responsible for wielding, even as I tremble to see the curve of the slice.

  “I realize you’re not listed on her birth certificate, but I need to follow up.”

  My heart beats like a rabbit’s, blood swooshing in my ears.

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she says.

  Those words soak into me like some poison through the skin.

  It’s funny, when the thing you’ve dreaded more than anything in the world finally happens, it’s more like an I-told-you-so than a new and vividly awful sort of pain. See, I told you that airplane was going to crash into that mountain. See, I told you that trolley car was going to careen off the tracks and into that fast food restaurant. See, I told you he would deny he even knew me, no less had sex with my mother in 1997 without a condom.

  I take a step forward, the emotions hitting me in a wave and stilling my feet beneath me. I begin to cry. Not a gentle tear I can dab away with the back of a finger, but a torrent of tears that fall down my face like somebody’s died. And if you think about it, somebody has. Maybe I don’t know Ward Stevens for shit, maybe I know the creepy elevator man in the hotel down the street better than I know him, but I had dreamed of this man.

  Pretended he was mine, that he loved me.

  My little imaginary family.

  An old man in dirty clothes shuffles toward me down the hallway, forcing me into Mitzi’s cubicle. She’s still on the phone.

  “Her mother abandoned her more than two months ago. She was living on her own, without money or food outside of school lunches, until we were alerted by a concerned neighbor.”

  Just get off the damned phone. You already told him nobody loves me. A great gasping sob breaks free from my chest and I cover my mouth. This is worse than Marilyn leaving. Worse than anything Marilyn has ever done. Only one person on earth has the power to hurt me this badly, and I’d just opened the door wide enough to let him do it.

  You stupid girl. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Would you be willing to step forward and assert your parental rights?”

  My head snaps up with a shot. Mitzi is smiling again, that beautiful face shining into mine like love or something miraculous. “Yes, that should be fine, Senator. Nine o’clock. We’ll see you in the morning.” She hangs up the phone and throws me a box of tissues. “Everything’s going to be fine, Helene. Your father’s on his way.”

  ~~~

  Ward is taking me to some lake in upstate New York, and I think I just might throw up all over his ridiculously clean car. I’d be doing a hell of a lot better if he was taking me to prison, or a survival camp in the mountains of Oregon.

  But, fuck me. A lake?

  That’s like a pool, only worse because you can’t see the bottom. No one will even notice I’m under the water until my lifeless body floats to the surface like a dead fish. I know what it feels like to breathe in water instead of air, fighting against the liquid even as your lungs expand to take it in, and my shoulders shake in an involuntary shudder against the plush passenger seat of Ward’s car.

  Maybe I was too quick to judge Mitzi Benson and her group home. Poor, sweet Mitzi. My mental image of the home now includes a leather sectional and a big screen TV, but that offer is off the table, my campaign to avoid its clutches ironically successful.

  Great job, Sorenson. You go, girl.

  Now it’s just me, a stranger who may or may not be my biological father, a beige BMW and a goddamned deathtrap of a lake gleaming on the horizon. I stare out the window and exhale with a whoosh.

  “It shouldn’t be long now, I know it’s a bit of a hike.” Ward says.
“I’ve made this trip so many times I think I could drive it in my sleep.”

  I make a little laugh noise in my throat. God, I want to get out of this car. I want to be back in my apartment, back in my school, back to my friends, my life. I spent last night alone in a cinderblock, prison-like room that was meant to hold two girls, with a thin wool blanket and a flat pillow that smelled like dirty socks.

  I stared into the darkness and remembered the first and last time I’d met Ward Stevens.

  I was eight. We were in a park. It was summertime, the place full of people.

  Marilyn was yelling.

  We don’t need this shit. Get up, Helene. We’re going home.

  I looked from the pretty purple flowers to my mother’s flushed face, her makeup and golden hair garish in the sun. I turned to the man and saw his fist clenched at his side, wondering if he would hit her.

  Let me have her tested, Marilyn, please.

  You shut the fuck up! You had your chance, you lousy bastard.

  I pressed my nose into a tulip.

  If she’s mine, I’ll take care of her.

  And what about me, huh? Who’s going to fucking take care of me?

  My mother grabbed the flowers out of my hand. I cried out and reached for them as she yanked me harshly to a stand, my arm pinching beneath her punishing fingers. The tulips went sailing through the air, landing in a fountain.

  I started to cry.

  I looked at the man. Please.

  His hand twitched as the moment stretched out between us. For a minute I thought he might help me, but he didn’t move, and Marilyn hauled me away like a puppy on a leash.

  Now Ward had come to my rescue some nine years later, and it made me a little bit squirrelly. Not that I had a shit-can of choices, but this one wouldn’t be real high on the list if I did. I think it’s interesting he told Mitzi he was my dad, then as soon as we got in his car he pulled out a drug store paternity test like a rich bastard who didn’t want to get saddled with somebody else’s problem.

  “I’d just like to be sure. I’m guessing you would, too.”

  Oh, abso-fucking-lutely, Ward. I shrugged. “Okay.”