Little Pieces of Me, page 22
“A few hours,” Maks tells me.
“So, Hawaii is out,” I tease. “And I didn’t need to bring a passport . . .”
“Boo, please.” Maks doesn’t even bother looking back. “You’ll know soon enough.”
I smile and lean back into the seat, feeling grateful for my two best friends. I look down at my phone, wondering if it’s too soon to text Jeff. He leaves tomorrow for the bachelor weekend Ross planned with a few of their old college buddies. A three-night rager in Vegas, which, knowing Ross, was more about an excuse to party rather than having a send-off to Jeff’s single life.
When I found out about their plans, I told Maks we should just have our bachelorette weekend there, too. Then Jeff and I could go ahead and turn it into a surprise wedding right then and there. Elvis could marry us, and I could avoid the headache that planning a wedding with my mother has turned into.
She’s been more distant than usual since our failed late-night bonding session two weeks ago, but she has not wavered in her desire to plan the wedding of her dreams. I thought she’d be happy if I let her make all the decisions, but apparently the fun comes from deciding together what shade of red we want the napkins to be.
I tried telling her that these details didn’t matter at the end of the day. Her wedding didn’t have any napkins at all, yet she and my dad had one of the strongest and most solid marriages I’ve known.
I’ve seen only one picture from my parents’ wedding day. It’s the first picture of all three of us—although Mom is holding an oversize bouquet to try to block her growing bump. Her smile is polite and measured, unlike Dad’s. He’s grinning from ear to ear, his white teeth standing out against his dark beard. Standing with his arm draped around Mom’s shoulders, he looks like he’s just been given everything he ever wanted.
If he only knew then what I know now.
I used to think I was the reason for Mom’s subdued smile in the photo. I assumed she was embarrassed that I was inconveniently there, forcing her to abandon the carefree fun of college. Now, I wonder if a small part of her was grateful that Dad had agreed to marry her. Although I’m sure it didn’t take much convincing based on the way Dad told it.
In his version of the story, Mom knocked on the door to his apartment close to midnight. Dad said it was a school night, and he was happily surprised to see her until he noticed her tear-streaked face.
He brought her inside and offered her a drink, which made her cry even harder. Eventually, she told him the news that he said made him the happiest man in the world. He said it didn’t matter that they were doing things a little out of order.
He asked Mom to marry him that night, and she, of course, said yes. A few weeks later, they moved her stuff out of the sorority house, and his things out of the apartment he shared with two guys from Hillel, and into a small one-bedroom apartment even farther off-campus.
I wonder how the story would have changed if he’d known what she’d done while they were apart for that month. If he would have married her just the same. Knowing his big heart, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he would have.
“What airline?” the Uber driver asks as we approach Midway.
“Southwest,” Maks tells him.
He turns and gives me a look, as if daring me to try to figure out our destination from the airline. Two can play this game, so I give him a knowing nod as if my suspicions are confirmed.
“You wait here,” he says, once we’re out of the Uber. “Margaux can check your bag as one of her two.”
I start to protest, but he and Margaux have already wheeled our bags over to the skycap.
Miss me yet? I type in a text to Jeff, adding a kissy-face emoji before sending.
New phone, who’s dis? he texts back.
I send back the laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying emoji.
Your kidnappers are doing it wrong, letting you have your phone.
I’ll text you when I land wherever I’m going, I text. And don’t go marrying anyone else while you’re in Vegas.
Never, he texts back. Unless she’s really cute and employed. xx
Very funny, I reply before slipping my phone back into my purse.
Maks and Margaux are next in line, and as I watch them whispering with their heads bent together, I’m overcome with gratitude. There’s a reason people say that friends are the family you choose, and I would choose these two over and over again.
“Next stop, Nay—” Margaux stops short when Maks elbows her sharply in the side. “Ow.”
“Zip your mouth,” he says, shaking a finger at Margaux. “I should have kept you in the dark, too.”
“Sorry,” Margaux says, following Maks as he leads the way through the automatic doors and down the escalator toward security. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
Maks scoffs at her excuse. “The only thing on your mind should be sun, sand, and piña coladas.”
“I’m more of a Miami Vice girl,” I tell him.
“You would be,” he says.
I laugh, not sure whether I should be offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that you can’t ever make up your mind on one thing.”
I nod because he’s got a point. Part of the reason I agreed to their little plan was that it took the decision-making off my plate. I would have been fine having dinner and drinks somewhere in Chicago—but the idea of choosing a restaurant and deciding who to invite had given me hives.
Thanks to my two best friends, who accept this about me, the only decisions I’ll have to make over the next four heavenly days involve which bathing suit to wear and what fruity drink to order.
The regular security line isn’t long, but I’m still surprised when Maks follows Margaux and me to the regular lane instead of going to the one for TSA PreCheck. He must not trust Margaux to be unsupervised with me.
I don’t see what the big deal is—the surprise has been fun, but I’m going to find out in a few minutes anyway.
“Aren’t you PreCheck?” Margaux asks, a little slow on the uptake.
“I am,” Maks says, giving her a sideways glance.
“Oh, please,” Margaux sighs. “I’m not going to tell her we’re going to Naples.”
She clasps her hands over her mouth, but she can’t take the words back, and I can’t unhear them.
“You better be talking about Italy,” I tell her. My insides twist at the thought of being tricked into spending the weekend in the same Florida town where Andrew Abrams lives.
Maks shoots Margaux a look that could, and might, kill. We’re next in line for security, but I don’t care. I look behind me toward the escalator.
“Ma’am,” the TSA agent says, and Margaux steps up to show her license and boarding pass.
I take one more look at the escalator, but Maks grabs my hand. “You are going, and you are going to like it,” he says in a harsh whisper.
“Next,” the TSA agent says, and Maks practically pushes me forward before handing the woman my documents.
After the TSA agent circles and initials my boarding pass, I get in line behind Margaux. I know she was just going along with Maks’s stupid plan, but she should have known better. She should have tried to stop him, or at least warn me. She should have known that I wouldn’t want something this big sprung on me, masqueraded as a bachelorette party. Whether I tried to see or talk to my DNA Dad again had to be my decision, done my way. Not like this.
“Paige,” Margaux says, her voice full of apology.
I shake my head, not ready to talk to either of them. According to my boarding pass, I still have a good forty-five minutes to decide whether I’m going to get on the plane.
“DON’T BE MAD,” Margaux says as she slides into the middle seat between Maks and me. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun for you, maybe. Fun for him, definitely,” I say, looking around her to where Maks is pouting in the aisle seat. Somehow, he turned this around and is mad at us both.
I left them after the security gate and went straight to the nearest bar—they were smart and didn’t follow me. I needed my space, and I needed to think this through.
Going on a trip to Naples wasn’t the worst idea in the world—and maybe I would have agreed to it someday under different circumstances. When I felt brave enough to try again. But this wasn’t just a casual acquaintance they wanted me to drop in on. This was the man who impregnated my mother. The man who left my email sitting unanswered in his inbox for two months now, who looked me straight in the eye and didn’t know who I was.
After the first beer, I was calm enough to log into the NPE group on Facebook. I’ve started commenting on other people’s posts recently and am slowly becoming more comfortable with the group. It’s easier to be honest around people who get it, who are living through the same experience—whether theirs have turned out to be a dream or a nightmare.
I posted my dilemma—to get on the plane or not—and the responses were mostly in the you should go camp. One woman, Maisie from Nashville, had a good point, that just because I was in the same city as he was didn’t mean I had to meet him. Robert from Oregon told me not to read into the lack of email response from my DNA Dad. Old people, he reminded me, aren’t the best at technology. Only one person said that I shouldn’t go, but I recognized the name as someone who had posted an awful story of a parental reunion gone wrong.
After a second beer, I decided to take Maisie from Nashville’s advice and take things one step at a time. I would get on the plane, and I would focus on having fun with my friends on the beach as long as they agreed and understood that I would be the one to decide if, how, and when we did anything that even hinted at the idea of my DNA Dad. They would have to promise not to even mention his name or the idea of him if I didn’t bring it up first.
“I’m glad you decided to come,” Margaux says, buckling her seat belt. “We don’t have to see him.”
“Whether we do or we don’t, it has to be my call,” I tell her.
She nods, and I look over to make sure Maks agrees, too. He mumbles something under his breath, which I choose to take as an apology and a promise to keep his nose out of my business.
He doesn’t have to understand my decision, but he has to respect it, whatever it ends up being.
I sigh and lean back into my seat, looking out the window as Chicago gets smaller in the distance. For Maks’s sake, I hope he understands the only thing I plan to come back home with is a tan. Not a new daddy-daughter relationship.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Now
THE RESORT MAKS BOOKED IS BEAUTIFUL. AS ITS NAME WOULD suggest, the Edgewater Beach Hotel is on the edge of the water, right on the beach. We have a view of it from our room, and it’s gorgeous. I know we have the lake in Chicago, but there’s just something about the ocean.
I felt the tension leave my shoulders as soon as I inhaled the salty air, and decided to park my frustration and deal with Maks and his lack of boundaries once we got back to Chicago.
As rough as the start of yesterday had been, it ended pretty perfectly. The hotel is giving us first-class treatment. We were greeted at check-in with complimentary glasses of champagne and were told there would be warm, freshly baked cookies set out every afternoon, which pleased my sweet tooth.
The concierge recommended a wonderful place for dinner, and after two martinis, I was finally able to let go of the worry that Andrew Abrams and his wife and children might happen to walk into the same restaurant.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel bar for a nightcap, which, of course, turned into one too many drinks.
Today, Maks and I are committed to curing our hangovers with a little hair of the dog by the pool, while Margaux, healthy human that she is, goes for a run.
The pool, it turns out, is actually two identical pools with a tiki bar and café between them. We find three chairs by the shallow end closest to the beach and settle in for a day of nothing but vitamin D and whatever vitamins are in piña coladas and strawberry daquiris.
This is the vacation I’d been hoping for. As long as I keep pushing away the niggling thought that somewhere nearby, Andrew Abrams is breathing in the same ocean air I am.
As we settle into our chairs, Maks is quick to wave down a handsome young waiter.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” he asks.
“Penis Colada for me,” Maks says. He has more fun messing with straight men than should be legal. “And a Miami Vice for the bride-to-be.”
“Do you need anything else?” the waiter asks.
“Only if you do backs,” Maks says, nodding toward the sunscreen on the table between us.
“We’re fine,” I tell the poor kid, who looks tongue-tied.
I give Maks a look once the waiter has gone back to the bar. We haven’t even been at the hotel for twenty-four hours, and I’m already worried he’s going to get us blacklisted and we won’t be able to come back.
“I’m never going home,” Maks says. “Men love me here.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” I laugh.
TWO DRINKS LATER, Maks and I are attempting to lounge in the pool amid an intense game of Marco Polo. The second pool is kid-free at the moment, but neither of us has the energy to move.
One round of the game is ending and another is beginning when I realize Maks is being uncharacteristically quiet. He hasn’t said a word since he told me about Marco Polo being the one to introduce Europe to the concept of paper money. He didn’t even have a snippy comment when I brought up the twins’ big birthday party next weekend.
“You okay?” I ask him.
“Hmm?” he says, clearly somewhere else. I wonder what, or who, he’s lost in thought over. Hopefully not John.
“Just thinking,” he says, before holding his nose and dunking under the water to cool off. The first time I saw him do that, I laughed because he looked so much like a child. Then I remembered how hard his childhood had been compared to mine. I don’t think he even stepped foot in a pool until he moved to the States as a teenager.
“Remember when we went on that roller-coaster thing in LA? The free-fall one?” Maks asks when he comes back up for air.
I groan at the memory. We were on a work trip together in LA and had an off day, so the production company got us free tickets to Magic Mountain. Traditional roller coasters, I was fine with. But the one Maks wanted me to go on was anything but.
The ride featured a podlike contraption that took you all the way to the top of a tower, where a mechanical-arm-like object took you out over the edge and dropped you. Dropped you as in nothing between you and the ground, free-falling all the way to the bottom.
I was terrified, but Maks was insistent. He begged me to go with him, and when I tried to turn back right before we got on, he literally blocked me from leaving. I thought I was going to throw up before the ride even started, but he held my hand from the moment the seat-belt-protector bar came down, until we landed safely at the bottom.
I loved it as much as I hated it—that time, and the other four times I made Maks go with me.
“How could I forget?” I ask, my stomach feeling queasy from the memory.
“You did not want to go on that ride,” he says. “You begged me to let you go back down.”
“But you wouldn’t let me.”
He smiles, clearly still proud of himself. “And you ended up loving it—you just needed a little push.”
I nod, knowing where he’s going with this. But while going on a roller coaster and meeting your biological father are both terrifying, they are two very different things.
“I know it’s not the same,” he says, before I can use the words on him. “I just wanted you to know where I was coming from. I thought you needed a little push.”
“It’s different,” I tell him.
“I know,” Maks says.
His favorite waiter to flirt with walks by, and Maks doesn’t avert his eyes for even a second. He’s focused on me, on our conversation, in a way I haven’t seen since we had a heart-to-heart about why Love Actually is the best romantic comedy of all time.
“And I know I’m not supposed to bring it up unless you do,” he says, “but time keeps moving forward even if you don’t.”
“Deep,” I tell him.
He smiles in appreciation, but I can tell he’s not ready to end the conversation. “We’re here. What do you have to lose?”
“My self-respect?” I say. “You forget, I’m the one who reached out to him. Twice now. The day I got the email—which he replied to with a blow-off one-liner, and a second email that he never responded to.”
“But you went to the art gallery,” Maks says. “Clearly you wanted to meet him.”
“I did,” I admit. “It seemed fated, him being there. But I went, and he looked me in the eye and didn’t know who I was.”
“You were wearing the wrong name tag,” Maks reminds me.
I frown, knowing he’s right. There was a part of me that hoped Andrew would know it was me—either because he could sense it or, more likely, because he had Googled my photo the same way I had his.
“Anyway, you’re here now, in the same city,” Maks says. “Couldn’t it be fated this time?”
I have to laugh at his earnest attempt to bend logic to fit the story he wants to tell. “This trip is less a coincidence of fate and more the butting in of a dear, but pushy, friend.”
“I just—”
“Maks,” I say, trying to stop him. “I love you, but I really don’t want to talk about this anymore. He clearly doesn’t want to meet me.”
“But what if he does?”
“What if he doesn’t?”
Maks purses his lips, and I know him well enough to know that he’s thinking of what he wants to say in Ukrainian before attempting to find the words in English.
“You really don’t think Elizabeth called him the second she knew that you knew and told him to leave you alone?”
I laugh. “You give my mom a lot of credit. According to my aunt Sissy, she barely even spoke to him after that one night. And I doubt she could find him that fast even if she wanted to. He could have a happy family, a life he doesn’t need interrupted by the forty-three-year-old bio-daughter he never knew he had.”
