Tameless (15 page)

Dad started to say something, but I cut him off. “You know what? There’s nothing to discuss. We aren’t going to have a conversation about anything.” I paused, looking at my father, then at my mother, the expressions of shock on their faces. “I know what you did.” I faced my father. “I know what you did to try to save your business. I know you took money that was meant for Wes.” I turned my eyes to my mother. “And you knew. You knew all along.”

Tears streamed down her face. She stepped toward my father, her fists balled tightly, and she started to hit him on the chest, yelling, “I told you! I told you this would happen if you did it!”

Dad managed to restrain her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close to him. I saw her body relax. Her physically violent outburst was over, but her crying persisted.

My father looked at me. “We didn’t know what else to do. We did this all for you.”

“Don’t say that. It’s not true and you know it. Don’t try to put this guilt on me.”

“Dawn,” my father said, “we’re in trouble. Big trouble. We’re going to lose the house. All those trips we were taking…we were house-hunting out of town.”

I suppose I should have felt sorry for them. This was, after all, their dream home, built long ago, the place they brought home their one and only child when I was born, the site of many parties and celebrations. Now it was just walls and a roof and…stuff. Expensive shit they’d bought over the years, all funded, at least in part, with the money Wes was supposed to get.

“And,” my father said, “this
was
all for you. We wouldn’t have been able to afford your tuition without that money.”

I felt like I could have fainted at that point. I had unwittingly benefited from my parents taking Wes’s money.

“Do you know what you did to him?” I said. “Do you have any idea how that money could have changed his life for the better?”

My father closed his eyes.

“You stole his future,” I went on. “Or at least some of it. Just so you know, you can condemn him all you want for who he used to be, but you should know that he’s different now and he’s doing really well. All the bullshit you planted in my head about him…all of it was wrong. He wasn’t the bad guy.” I paused, working up my nerve for this next line. “You were.”

I walked past them, removed the house key from my key ring, placed it on the table near the front door. I opened the door.

Mom said, “Dawn, wait.”

I had one foot outside. I didn’t turn around. I stepped onto the porch, pulled the door closed, and left forever.

Chapter 28 – Wes

Dawn was slipping. I could see it every day. She’d started to call in sick to work. Twice the first week, three times during her second week.

Each day before I left for work, I’d ask her what she was doing that day. Sometimes she’d shrug, other times she’d tell me she hadn’t decided yet. I didn’t want to press her. It wasn’t my place to force her to do anything. I didn’t want to do that anyway. But I saw something in her that I’d seen before in myself and in others.

The stress of all that had happened in the last two weeks since she’d been living here was taking its toll on her. I tried to prevent it. Tried to turn it around, reverse the trend, move her (and me) closer to the happiness we both deserved, the happiness that I know we both believed was possible as long as we were together.

But she had unresolved issues with her parents. Understandable. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to find out that your parents were lying thieves, so I didn’t try. But one thing I did know very well was what it was like to lose your parents.

All of my anger toward them for what they’d done was trumped by the rational side of me knowing all too well that Dawn needed to reconcile with them. Maybe not that very day, maybe not even in a matter of weeks or a few months. She was never going to get to that point if she didn’t find a way to be the Dawn she was without her parents’ wrongdoing casting a shadow over her entire existence.

Did I want to go to her father and kick his ass? Yeah, I did. But that would only lead to legal trouble for me and it would make things even worse for Dawn, and she was all I cared about.

So instead I focused on making things right with her. Or trying anyway. I tried gently, not in a pushy way, because that’s the only way it would have worked.

I made it a point for us to get to the beach at least once a day. That’s where we’d spent so much time as kids. Things weren’t perfect then. We weren’t together at the time. But the sand and surf was the backdrop of our lives for so many years.

Some evenings we sat on the beach until the sun dipped below the horizon line of the Pacific. Sometimes we talked, laughed, told stories; other times we just sat there, me holding her close, the only sound coming from the wind and the water.

One early morning we went out with some stale bread and fed the seagulls. One afternoon, when a production meeting was cancelled, I left work early and Dawn and I spent the day on the beach—me surfing, her standing on the beach smiling and clapping and laughing when I exaggerated a wipe-out in shallow water. She ran over to me as I feigned injury, and she jokingly called me a pussy and told me to get out there and grab the next wave and keep doing it until I got it right. She yelled all of it, and as my eyes scanned around us, I saw a few people looking at us, probably wondering why I would put up with such an abusive surfing coach.

She hadn’t lost her sense of humor. She was often the playful Dawn I knew and loved.

One evening as I arrived home, she told me she’d been invited out by her girlfriends. We had a laugh about the last time they’d all gone out. Dawn insisted no strip clubs were involved in these plans.

But she said she wasn’t going. All she offered was a shrug when I asked why. I encouraged her to go. She needed it. Being with her friends would get her out of the apartment, give her a few hours of doing something without me.

Look, I was no expert on this kind of situation, but I’d been there myself and I’d seen others in the same predicament. I couldn’t provide talk therapy. I couldn’t prescribe medication. But one thing I knew was that getting out and living life was one small punch in the face to depression. It was one way to get a foothold on your life again.

I never told Dawn I thought she was depressed. I feared her reaction, like she might think I was judging her. I knew how that felt, too. But she was clearly on the verge.

Having promised myself that I wouldn’t pry too much, I didn’t ask. And it turned out I didn’t have to. One night after we ate dinner and started our walk to the beach, she revealed the reason behind the funk she’d been in for about two weeks.

We were holding hands as we walked, the wind strong in our faces and her words were almost muffled but I made them out: “You could decide it’s too weird to be with me and you could leave me.”

I stopped and turned her toward me. “What are you talking about?”

She tried to look away from me, but I touched her chin with my fingertips and she looked right back. “Aren’t you going to think of what my parents did every time you look at me?”

I felt like I’d been stabbed by her words. Not that I took offense in any way, but because I had no idea that she was thinking any such thing. It was crazy. I never once looked at her and thought about what had happened. “No,” I said firmly. “No fucking way. You are you, and that’s what you are to me.”

Her eyes drifted away again.

I moved my head into her line of vision. “Dawn? I’m serious. You can’t think that. It’s never crossed my mind. Not once.”

“I guess I just feel…guilty.”

The look on her face was one I hadn’t seen before. I can only describe it as pure distress. Before I could ask what she was thinking that made her look like that, she blurted out: “They used some of that money to put me through school.”

I closed my eyes. That’s what this had been about. Her slow slide toward depression was all about what she thought she had deprived me. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”

“But—”

“Hey, don’t you trust me? After all we went through back then, and all we’ve gone through now? Don’t you trust me?”

She let out a heavy sigh, her head tilting to the side, her eyelids dropping a little. “Of course I do. You’re the only person on this planet I trust.”

“Then believe me. It’s really that simple. Believe me. That’s all you have to do.”

. . . . .

By the end of our third week living together, she had come around. She’d hung out with her friends twice now, and she was no longer calling in sick to the store.

I was at work one day, at OLIVIMAX Studios, going over some old footage that Max had shot for a previous movie. This was all stuff that had been discarded during the editing process. I’d just watched the final cut of the movie and I was getting a feel for what was left out and why. All part of the learning process of filmmaking, but more specifically, I wanted to get a feel for exactly the type of shots he liked and didn’t like.

The door opened behind me. I turned and saw Max looking into the room. “What are you working on?”

I told him what I was looking at.

“Smart,” he said, and walked over to where I was sitting and took a seat next to me. “I thought you left.” He looked at his phone. “It’s after six. Dawn working late?”

“Yeah.”

“That didn’t sound good.”

I looked at him.

He just looked back at me, expressionless at first, then raising an eyebrow.

I leaned back in my chair, putting my hands behind my head and interlocking my fingers. “Just a little stress at home.” I didn’t want to go into the story too much—actually not at all—and luckily Max didn’t press me on it. But I added, “My girlfriend—”

“Dawn,” he interrupted.

“Right.” He’d never met her, but I’d mentioned her once or twice. This guy really paid attention to you when you talked. “Just some problems with her parents she needs to resolve, but it’s taken a little bit of a toll on both of us.”

Max sat silently.

I turned off the computer monitors I’d been watching. “But it’ll work itself out.”

“Or it won’t.”

I turned my head toward him quickly, wondering why he’d put a negative spin on it.

“I’ve heard you talk about her twice now,” he said. “And I’ve seen how you’re different after a long stretch of work during the day, then you make a phone call—I’m assuming it’s to her—and you come back re-engergized.”

He was right. I did that every day.

Max stood. “I’m no expert on this kind of thing, but I’ve been there. Olivia and I had to deal with all kinds of shit from the outside that could have kept us apart. Anyway, you want my one piece of advice and then I’ll say no more?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“This town is full of frauds, fake people everywhere, all trying to get something, and they don’t care who they run over in the process. If you’ve found a girl with any authenticity at all, don’t let her go. So when you say ‘it will work itself out’ remember: it might not. You have to make it work.”

The door opened. It was Max’s wife, Olivia. She looked at me and smiled. “Sorry to interrupt.” She looked at Max. “Are you going to be much longer?”

“I’m ready.”

Olivia closed the door.

Max said, “Gotta run. It’s our one date night of the week. Not easy to come by with three kids, but we make it happen.” He took a few steps toward the door and, with his back to me, he said, “You always have to make it work.”

. . . . .

I knew part of making it work didn’t include going to Dawn’s parents’ house, but that’s where I found myself that same evening, after making one stop.

I had left the studio early that day, telling Max that I had an important personal meeting to go to. That meeting lasted less than twenty minutes, cost me a hundred and fifty bucks, but it put part of this whole saga to rest. The only thing left to do was confront her father.

I showed up unannounced, rang the doorbell, and her father answered.

All the muscles in his face fell as his mouth dropped open, then closed, a flash of anger on his face. “Why are you here?”

“I talked to a lawyer today.”

He stepped out on the porch.

I heard Dawn’s mother calling out from another room. “Stephen, who’s there?”

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said, closing the door behind him, then turning toward me. “What are you going to do, sue me?”

“No.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “You’re not…”

“I can’t. My parents made a mistake trusting you. I know there’s nothing on paper. There’s no proof of any kind of agreement. And relying on you to tell the truth…well, I guess we both know how that would go, right?”

“Where’s Dawn?”

I laughed. “Now that I’m telling you you’re off the hook legally, you won’t answer my question. We couldn’t count on you to tell the truth, could we?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I nodded. “Thought so. Dawn’s fine. In fact, she’s more than fine.”

“Whatever you’re saying to her to keep her from talking to us about this—”

I stepped closer to him. He backed up. “I’m not doing shit to keep her from talking to you. You should be thanking me.”

He didn’t say anything.

I backed up, away from him, and leaned against one of the giant white columns on the porch. “Say thank you.”

His face scrunched up in confusion. “For what?”

“For not trying to turn your daughter away from you. More than she already is, I mean. You fucked me over, but the worst thing you did was hurt your daughter.” I stepped down the porch steps and turned to face him again. “She’ll come around. She’s a good person, despite being raised by a selfish, lying asshole. And I’m not going to do anything to prevent her from talking to you and your wife again someday.” I walked to my jeep, opened the door and put one foot inside. “You can thank me later.”