Breaking Walls (21 page)

He said he needed time to think, to process, to decide what was next. Next for him? Next for me? Next for us? I didn’t know. He never said. He only pressed a long kiss to my forehead, wished me a goodnight, turned away, and disappeared into the darkness.

“Hey, what are you doing up?” Dad glanced over at the oven clock as he stumbled into the kitchen. It was three a.m., and I’d taken Bailey’s usual spot on the counter, knocking back my second glass of water in ten minutes. Dad, covered in a thick, red robe, looked a lot like I felt—sleepless, restless, tired.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I finally answered, and he nodded.

“Same.” He opened the cupboard and grabbed a glass, carrying it over to the sink to fill it. He leaned against the opposite counter as he turned back to look at me, finally taking a drink. “Since we’re both up, do you think maybe we should
. . . ”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s long overdue.”

He nudged himself up, offered me a hand, and I jumped to the floor. We carried our glasses into the living room and sat down—Dad on one end of the couch and me on the other.

“I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time, and Dad’s eyes half-filled with tears as I smiled at the simultaneous apology.

“I’ll go first,” I said, sensing that Dad needed to hear my apology a lot more than I needed to hear his. “I’m still hurt that you lied to me, but I’m mostly angry with myself. I’ve handled these last couple of weeks very poorly, and if I could go back and change everything, I would. You didn’t deserve to be treated that way.” His lip twitched, a smile or a frown, I couldn’t tell. “I don’t know if I have a right to ask, especially after the way I’ve treated you, but I would still like to know why we’re here. Will you just look at me, one time, look into my eyes and tell me the truth? Please?”

“The truth?” he swallowed hard.

“Dad, I’m never going to trust you,” I said, honestly. “I’m never going to trust you until you give me a reason to.”

He stared at the floor. This was his moment. He had all weekend to muster the courage, to find the right words. If the wrinkles around his eyes were any kind of
indication, he’d spent one too many night mulling it over. Getting the truth off his chest, finally telling me what was wrong, it was going to be a breath of fresh air for both of us. I just hoped he would finally tell me.

“I need you to tell me that you really want to hear this,” he said, looking to me again. “Because once I tell you, I can’t take it back.”

“I want to know.” And I’d never meant anything as much as I meant those four words.

He nodded, and a single tear slid down his face. He quickly swiped it away before he turned to me, looking
at me straight-on.

“Mandy…”

“Dad?”

“Okay,” he ran his sweaty palms down the front of his robe.

His knee rattled as he bounced one foot on the floor, nervously collecting his thoughts. Knowing Dad and his history of speeches—both as an actor and as mayor—I imagined he’d rehearsed exactly what he would say if this moment ever presented itself. And now that it was here, it was time, and he had to find his opening line and hit it hard.

“I’ve spent the past four years taking bullets and daggers, letting you and your
sister hate me for the decision I made to pull you away from your home.” The words came out slowly at first, each one seeming a little more jagged than the one before it. “I was okay being the bad guy because it meant protecting your mother. I didn’t want you to hate her for what happened.”

It didn’t matter. We hated her anyway. Even though we knew the only reason she and Dad weren’t together was because he’d broken a promise, I still dreamed of a day when someone would scream at her, berate her, make her feel as unloved as she made us feel when she turned her back on us.

“It didn’t matter if you tried to protect us, Dad,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “Bailey and I heard the fight. We were standing right there. We know you made her choose, and we know that she chose the show. Even if you wanted to protect her, it didn’t matter. We hated both of you.”

It was harsh, and I could see that it hurt him. That was the first time I’d ever used such a strong word to describe the way I felt toward my parents, but in the beginning—right after the divorce, that was the only suitable word. I hated both of them.

“Mandy, I know I promised you and your sister that I would do everything I could to save our family, and I really did. I tried,” he said. “Marriage counseling twice a month turned into sessions twice a week. I did everything I could, but I ran out of options, kid.”

Doubtful.
It seemed to me that marriages only ended when people got lazy, quit caring, and quit trying. They should’ve both tried harder, end of story.

“You’ve never been married, Mandy,” he said. “You’ve never had to feel that sense of desperation. You’ve never come so close to losing the love of your life that you…that you weren’t thinking
clearly, and you didn’t know what to do. I was so scared of losing your mother that I feared the very worst. I thought she loved me— ”

“She did, Dad,” I said. “I feel like I’m constantly on repeat nowadays.
You
gave the ultimatum.
You’re
the one who left. You made the mistake of giving her a choice, so now you have to accept the fact that she didn’t choose you and get over it.”

“Mandy, she was having an affair,” he said, and my heart stopped. A sharp pain wrenched in my chest, swelling into my throat. “And even then, after finally learning what everyone else around me had already known for months, I still woke up every morning, put on the best smile I could manage, and I tried to save our marriage. I still went to the sessions; I fought with everything I had. I—fought—for—you! But she had no fight left in her, Mandy. She didn’t care. She didn’t.”

Up until that moment, I managed to keep my emotions in check, but then the tears broke and fell down my cheeks, dripping from my jaw and landing on my shirt. And even sitting there, broken and hurt and confused, he still didn’t relent. He just kept talking, adding more pain and confusion to the mix.

“Mandy, I know I broke that promise, and I have never forgiven myself for hurting you. I hate myself every day because I know there’s nothing I can do to earn your trust again. But what choice did I have? What was I supposed to do? When I go home and find my wife tangled up in
my
sheets with my best friend— ”

“Uncle Ronnie?” I asked, spewing the words. “Mom was sleeping with Uncle Ronnie?”

Ronald Terrence-Green was Dad’s oldest friend, a buddy he’d met in acting school long before either of them landed their first gig. Bailey and I grew up playing in his backyard, spending hours after school watching him and Dad run lines. Dad loved the guy. They landed their jobs in LA at the same time, playing fraternal twin brothers on the same daytime TV show. They were a team; they were James and Ronald, Jim and Ronnie, Deacon and Louis. They’d worked side by side on the soap for years, sharing the camera, a fan base, and . . . apparently my mom.

“I tried to protect you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I never wanted you or Bailey to know.
Your sister still doesn’t know, and I’d appreciate it if we could keep it that way.”

I sat staring at the floor, waiting for the splitting tension in my head to break. I couldn’t believe it. All this time, all of the years I’d sat hating my dad, I’d been mad about something I knew nothing about.

“This last week has been one of the worst weeks of my life. I knew, when you came to me on Friday, I had to tell you the truth. I just didn’t know how to begin to do it.”

I tried to absorb my tears with the backside of my sleeve, but they were falling faster than I could dry them.

“I got a call from Ripken last month with the job offer back home,” he said. “Going back to LA meant finally having the chance to live my dream again, Mandy. And that’s all I ever wanted.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“But there were circumstances I wasn’t aware of,” he said. “There were questions that went unanswered for a while, and after I finally learned the answers, there was nothing else I needed to know. I wasn’t going to go.”

“What do you mean? What kind
s of questions?”

“Oh, you know,” he shrugged
, “who I’d have to work with—co-stars, producers, writers.”

“Right, because Mom’s still writing for the show.”

“No,” he shook his head. “She left the show right after we left California.”

“Oh, that’s
. . . that’s lovely,” I said, turning my head. She wanted the job more than she wanted us, and apparently the job didn’t even mean that much.

“She didn’t quit,” he said. “She was forced out. Last I heard she and Ronnie are getting married, and while he’s still on the show, she’s working for another network.”

I wondered how Dad knew those things. Mom hadn’t stayed in touch. For the first month or so, Bailey would call and leave messages. A few calls were returned in that first year, but little by little, Mom became as much a distant memory as our lives in California. It never made any sense to me. She was our mother. Didn’t that mean anything?

Apparently not.

“So
. . . ” I looked back to Dad, hoping he’d continue his story.

“The role was originally proposed to replace Ronnie’s screen time,” he said. “They were going to bring Deacon back after writing Louis off.”

“Okay?”

“But once they’d hooked me, they decided to keep Ronnie on and continue with the family storyline of Deacon and Louis. They weren’t going to write him off after all.”

“Oh.”

“And that just…wasn’t an option for me. I couldn’t go back to that.”

“Understandably so,” I blinked heavily.

I remembered the way I’d last hugged Ronnie before we left LA. Dad had made us drop by the studio to tell our mother goodbye,
and we couldn’t face her. But Uncle Ronnie was there, and he held us, comforted us, promised us that time and distance were exactly what we needed. Why hadn’t Dad just told us then? Why did he let us stand there and hug that man, the man who’d robbed us everything we’d ever known?

Because he wanted to protect us.

We sat in silence. I don’t even remember thinking about anything, just sitting there. The minutes passed so slowly, the room seeming darker the longer we waited to speak.

I couldn’t believe how horribly I’d treated him. For four years…I’d said horrible things. I’d given him the cold shoulder. I’d written him off. And all along it had always been about protecting me…Bailey…our childhood and our family.

I finally found the strength to peel myself off the couch. I stood up, took a few steps over, and sat back down right next to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist as we settled against the couch, and I cried into his chest.

It was a lot to absorb. He’d suffered in silence for so long, and no one had been there for him. No one understood. No one
could
understand because Dad hadn’t told a soul.

“I’m so sorry, Dad,” I said, sobbing into his robe, and he stroked my hair as he held me closer.

“Me too, baby,” he whispered, kissing the top of my head. “Me too.”

Chapter
Seventeen

I woke up on the couch the next morning, Dad’s chest no longer cushioning my head.

The sunlight blazed through the open curtains in the living room, and in a matter of seconds I realized that it was far too bright and sunny to still be early in the morning. I checked the clock above the TV. I was already three hours late for school.

But I couldn’t skip. I couldn’t spend the rest of the day wallowing. As much as I wanted to stay there and comfort Dad, or maybe even continue the conversation we’d started in the dark of morning, I knew I had to get up. I had to get to the school.
I had to be there
. After the way things had unfolded over the weekend, then yesterday at the mandatory RI meeting, I knew that today was the day. Today I would march myself right into Mr. Davies’s classroom, lift my chin with confidence, and say—

“I’m quitting the program.”

After Dad drove me into school, I stared at the clock for the rest of the day. I kept my head low, my eyes down, and my thoughts focused on those four little words I’d been rehearsing—in the mirror, at the diner, in my head. And when I finally said it, when I finally unraveled my next, big plan, I got the exact reaction I’d expected.

The room fell silent,
but it was going to take a lot more than Mr. Davies’s wide eyes and a dropped jaw to change my mind. Heck, nothing could change my mind. I’d decided on Friday night, and I knew it was the only possible move I had left with the Raddick Initiative. Of course, I’d known all along that it was going to take a lot of convincing for them to just let me walk away, but that’s why I had my notebook in hand. I had all the points laid out, ready to use.

Who: Mandy Parker

What: Quits the program

When: Today

Where: At school

Why:
Why not
? There were more reasons to support my leaving than my staying.

How will it impact the school?
The team? The community? Why should Lashell, Gabe, and Mr. Davies agree that this is the best possible course of action?