One Week (19 page)

“Bette—”

“My name is Bee,” I interrupt. “It has been for thirteen years. If you ever manage to figure that out, to accept it, then great. In the meantime, I’m finished with this conversation. If I worried you by running away, then I’m sorry. But I’m back now, and I’m going back to school on Monday, and I’ll graduate in June, and then I’ll be off to college. We just have to put up with each other for a few more months.”

Dad looks at me for a moment, and then unbuckles his seatbelt. He stands up and goes to pour himself a drink. The bottle clinks against the glass and I realize his hands are shaking. He’s crying.

I bite my lip. I didn’t mean that. That is, I meant some of it, but the truth is that I’ve missed my father this past week. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve missed him for years. And I was the one who pushed him away. I stand up and go to touch his shoulder. He turns around, knocking his drink over, and grabs me in a hug that’s nearly tighter than I can stand, but not quite.

“I was worried about you,” he says, kissing the top of my head. “I was terrified.”

“I know, Daddy,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

He lets me go and sits me back down in my seat. “Buckle your seatbelt,” he says, wiping his eyes. “There might be turbulence.”

He goes back to pour himself another drink, and manages not to spill it this time. When he turns around, his eyes are clear.  “You’re right, Bette.” He breaks off, and smiles. “Bee. I should have listened to you. I just…you’re my child. I was so used to telling you what you needed, to knowing what was right for you, that I figured all the publicity was just another thing I knew better than you.”

I look away for a moment. I think about how before I left, that would have set me off all over again. That I would have been pissed off that he would ever think he knew better than me, when it was so clearly wrong. But now I know firsthand that we don’t always see clearly. And so, while part of me still bristles, I understand what he means. And I find I can forgive it.

“You’re seventeen years old,” my father says ruefully. “Practically an adult.”

I laugh sadly, and turn back to him. “Practically,” I say. “But not quite.

So after all that, I’m back in LA. Cameras still follow me around wherever I go—worse now than ever before, actually, but at least now my father isn’t calling them with instructions. I go out anyway, though. Dad may have been wrong about what I should have been doing,
but in a way he was right—I needed to be doing
something.

 
I’m not sure that shopping with Julia counts as doing something, though. We don’t have much to say to each other, though of course we never did. Being back at school was weird at first. It’s not like I was gone for that long, but when your father has told every newspaper with a Star Tracks section about your departure, it tends to seem like a bigger deal than it really was. I thought that if I heard, “What the hell were you doing in Nebraska, Bee?” one more time, I’d go back to locking myself in my house. But it’s been a couple of weeks now and the talk has moved on to more interesting things, like Willow Smith’s new hair product line.

Julia and I went to Book Soup today because Kanye West was doing a reading and Julia wanted to see him. I think it was her first time in a bookstore. Ever. I tried not to look for Jess, but I couldn’t quite stop myself. It’s not that I really thought he’d be there—what would he be doing back in LA?—but I thought if he
was
in LA, then he would be there.

But he wasn’t there. After a while, I got better about not looking for him.

My father will be home in a few minutes. He’s taken to spending a lot more time here, which I feel sort of guilty about since I know he needs to be working and it’s not like we are doing anything special, or having more intense discussions about our feelings or anything like that. We just sit around in the evenings watching old movies like we used to.

I’m not going to lie—I love it.

I’m not feeling in a particularly Frank Capra-ish mood at the moment, though. It’s not like I
wanted
to see Jess. Why would I want to see the guy that lied to me and sold me out? But if I
did
see him, I wanted to see him first, so that I could hide. Or go yell at him. Something.

Because the horrible truth is that I miss him. I’ve been sitting here at the kitchen counter eating ice cream out of the carton and replaying everything he has done—the way I felt that morning in the trailer, the way he made up with me on the train knowing what was going to happen when we got to New York, and the way he didn’t call after me when I walked away. But I can’t seem to focus. Instead, I see him sitting on the sidewalk in Hastings, Nebraska having a meltdown because he doesn’t like
corn nuts. I see him hiding from Tessa, and refusing to get in the back of Sean’s truck. I see the way he looked at me that morning in the trailer, before everything went to hell.

And I can’t seem to stop crying.

I hear my father come in and wipe my eyes quickly. I get up to shove the ice cream back in the freezer, and shut the door as he walks into the kitchen.

“I brought sushi,” he says, holding up a bag. He looks at my red eyes and frowns. “I got it from that place you like.” Dad sets the bag on the counter and goes to grab a beer out of the refrigerator. I start to edge out of the kitchen, hoping he’s just going to let it go, when of course he asks, all fake casually,
“What’s going on today?”

I shrug. “Nothing. I hung out with Julia. How was your day?”

My father raises his eyebrows. Now his radar is really up. I don’t think I’ve asked about his day
in… never. I’ve never asked about his day. “It was all right.” He pauses for a moment, and then clears his throat. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, though—I had lunch with my friend Jay the other day. You remember him?”

I shake my head.

“He’s at the film studies department at UCLA, and he’s had me in to lecture a few times. Anyway, I asked
him about that guy you were traveling with. Jesse
Ryan, right?”

I nod like I knew Jess’s last name already. I wonder for a second how my dad knew, but of course he makes it his business to find out these things. I’m sure he demanded Jess’s Social Security number and birth certificate when Jess called him.

“Well, when he turned down the reward money—”

I blink, and catch my breath. “He did?”

“Well, yeah,” my father says, like that was obvious. “I asked around about him before leaving for New York, and after you and I got back home I contacted him and offered to help fix things for him at UCLA, but he refused that too. So I figured that was the end of that. But Jay says he’s back, that he called the school and apologized for his actions, and they’ve got him doing community service and he’s required to earn extra credits, but he’s back at school.”

My father takes a sip of his beer and leans against the counter. I bite my lip and look away. So he
is
here. And he’s spoken to my father, but didn’t want to talk to me.  I feel the tears starting to come back again, but I blink them away. I can’t believe I spent the entire
afternoon wallowing over Jess. Jesse Ryan. I’m not
going to do it again.

I lift my chin. “That’s nice of them,” I say tightly.

“Forgiveness is a nice thing,” my father says dryly. “And I hear it gets easier with practice.”

It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to scream at him. My father doesn’t know a thing about Jess, doesn’t have any idea what I did while I was gone. We didn’t talk about it at all, because oddly, I felt like it was none of his business. It was private. And so where does he get off thinking he has any right to judge my feelings about Jess. I turn to walk out of the room, but my father walks over and takes me by the arm and sits me down at the kitchen table.

“All right,” he says, taking a breath. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you about this since you came home, trying to let you have your privacy, to figure out what you wanted to tell me in your own time. But I’m done. You’re going to sit there and you’re going to talk to me, because that’s what we do now, Bee. We talk to each other. Okay?”

I shift in my seat mutinously, but I don’t get up. I know that I could if I wanted to—and part of me does want to just walk away—but I feel like I owe my father this much. He sits down across from me, the sushi forgotten on the counter. I cross my arms on the table and lean forward. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

My father pauses and takes a big swig of his beer. “Everything. Whatever you’re willing to tell me.”

I’m not willing to tell him
everything
, but I give him the general picture. “And then I found out that Jess had betrayed me, and we went home.” I shrugged. “That’s it. Not much happened, really.” Saying it all out loud like that, it’s clear that nothing much
did
happen. I missed the train. A lot. I met people, and they were all fairly nice. I came home. The end.

My father frowns. “Why would you call it a betrayal? That seems a little excessive. I mean, you told me on the plane that it was time for you to come home.”

 “Yes,” I say slowly. “I did. But I would like to have been respected enough to have been allowed to make that decision for myself.”

My father takes a sip of his beer. “What exactly was the nature of your relationship with Jess?” he asks carefully.

I give him a pained look. I am
not
talking about that.

“I see. Does it occur to you that perhaps he might have thought that your feelings for him were preventing you from coming to that decision? And that he had your best interests at heart?”

I shake my head. “No. He called you before—” I blush. “Before the feelings,” I finish awkwardly.

My father doesn’t press the issue, for which I will be eternally grateful to him. He nods and thanks me for telling him, then pushes back his chair and goes to the fridge to grab another beer. He pulls out a can of Diet Coke for me, retrieves the sushi, and leads the way into the den. I follow him apprehensively, unsure whether we’re really done with this conversation.

And of course, we’re not. We eat our sushi and watch our movie in relative silence, but halfway through my father hits the pause button. I wish my life had a pause button. “I think you need to consider the possibility that there may have been feelings before your... feelings. Because it seems to me that Jess did everything he could to protect you, and to protect himself from being hurt too badly when you inevitably went home. I don’t think you’re being fair,” my father says.

I close my eyes. “Can we stop, Dad? Please? Because even if you’re right, and Jess did call you out of some twisted concern for me, the fact remains that he’s here in LA, and he knows where I am, and he has made no effort whatsoever to see me.” I’m getting angrier by the second, with Jess, with my father for defending him, with myself for wanting so badly for my father to be right. “You wanted to know what happened? Fine. You had a right to that. But you don’t have any right to tell me how unfair I’m being.”

My father looks over at me and pushes himself up out of his chair. He comes and sits next to me, puts an arm around my shoulders and pulls me close. “Okay. It’s just—you’re so unhappy, Bee. You’ve been unhappy
ever since you came home, and I know you were
unhappy before, but this seems different. And from what I can tell about Jess, he’s not the kind of guy who will feel comfortable knocking on your door knowing how he’s hurt you. I think maybe you need to think about how you might have hurt him.”

I startle at that, but my dad stands back up and goes back to his chair and starts the movie again. I don’t watch it. I can’t even follow the story anymore—which is pretty telling since Frank Capra’s stories aren’t really all that complicated. It’s never occurred to me that I might have hurt Jess. Not by going home—I think my father is right, and Jess always expected that I would go home. But by
always thinking the worst of him, from the very
beginning. By believing he did it for the reward, and by walking away without even asking for an explanation.  

I find that I want more than anything for my father to be right, but I can’t quite believe it. But either way, I realize, Jess does owe me an explanation. And if he can’t bring himself to come tell me himself, then I’ll have to find him.

I get up and walk out of the room. My father doesn’t even bother pausing the movie. “Call if you won’t be home before morning,” he calls after me.

I resist giving him the finger. My dad is probably wrong anyway, but I have to know. I call a cab and while
I wait for it to show up I look up UCLA’s student
directory. And there he is—Jesse Ryan. He’s assigned to
the off-campus student housing in Westwood. I spend the cab ride mulling over every detail of the moment outside Penn Station. Didn’t he tell me to leave? Didn’t I give him every opportunity to talk to me before we arrived?

Just as I think that this is a terrible idea, and will only make me hurt worse than I already do, we pull up outside Jess’s apartment building. Before I can change my mind, I climb out of the car and pay the driver. I watch as he drives off, the red lights dwindling, and then I finally turn and walk into Gayley Towers. Great name. The elevator smells like stale beer and crackers, and everyone getting on and off seems to be having a grand old time, even though it’s only eight o’clock on a Thursday. It occurs to me that Jess might not be home. Or worse, might be home and having as good a time as the couple that just got off on the fourth floor.

At least Jess’s floor is relatively quiet. I’m not sure I could stand to have a dozen drunken college students
bear witness to what will probably be the most
humiliating moment of my life—and I’ve had a lot of humiliating moments to choose from recently.