Epic (Fierce) Page 4

  Maya Palermo was hunched over just a bit, but she made the effort to straighten as she opened the screen. “Jordana!” she said in a breathless whisper as she opened her arms for me to walk into. I managed to suppress my shock at her disheveled state to give her the hug she wanted. She held on tight and long, though the frailty in her body was impossible to ignore. She felt soft and spongy and brittle in my arms, and she smelled of coffee and cigarettes, with a hint of cheap whiskey thrown in just for good measure.

  “Jordana?” I asked as I gently disentangled myself from her embrace.

  She grinned, and I was even further dismayed that several of her teeth were missing. “Your name,” she answered. “Come in,” she said as she pulled me into the house by one hand.

  A generic daytime talk show blared just a little too loud from the ancient TV on the outer wall. What I could only hope to be secondhand furniture filled the tiny room. There was an ugly brown sofa that was missing one of its three cushions. It had been replaced with a red cushion. Two old recliners faced the TV, and the remnants of what one could only presume was lunch still littered the coffee table.

  “I’m sorry for the mess,” she said as she glanced around her own meager surroundings. “I haven’t been well.” She indicated that Jace and I sit on the sofa, while she eased herself into one of the recliners. She used the remote to put the TV on mute before she turned back to us.

  Though terribly poor and obviously in ill health, she smiled warmly at us. I could see the echo of the woman she used to be, someone who looked very similar to me in her youth, and my heart softened immediately. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my manners,” she said, chagrinned. “Would you like something to drink?”

  Both Jace and I shook our heads, not wanting to put out this woman who struggled with simple tasks like crossing the room or opening the door. I motioned to Jace. “This is Jace Riga. My boyfriend.”

  She bobbed her head happily. “I know who you are. I never missed an episode of Fierce,” she admitted. “Once I knew that you were a contestant, I was glued to the set. It was like a miracle to see the woman you had grown into.”

  My brow furrowed. “You knew who I was?”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Why didn’t you get in touch with me before?”

  She lowered her head. “What could I offer you, Jordana? You were on the verge of making every single dream you ever had come true. My presence was a complication you didn’t need. Joe and I decided that long ago, before I moved from Iowa and made my way west. We tried for a while to handle it another way,” she clarified. “Joey would bring you to the park and I was able to hold you and to play with you. But his wife felt that would confuse you as you got older, and I couldn’t disagree. My life was not fit for a baby.”

  “Why not?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  She laughed as she reached for a coffee mug. “I honestly never thought I’d be a mother. When Joey and I met, it was in a group home in Jersey. We became friends. Closer than friends. We were soul mates.”

  I tried not to let my mouth gape open. “You… loved him?”

  Years melted from her face as she thought back to my father. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Very much.”

  “Why did he marry my moth- … someone else?”

  She set her cup back down. “Life was hard for us in Jersey,” she confided. We ended up running away from the home by the time we were sixteen. We spent the next two years trying to figure things out. What did we know? We were just kids. We made a lot of mistakes. We fought a lot. We loved a lot. Mostly we just tried to hang onto the one thing in our world that was constant: one another. By the time we were eighteen we ended up in Iowa, when we tracked down some of his relatives. That’s where he met Marianne. She was so far different than the life we knew. She was beautiful,” she said, as if it made Marianne more valuable. “And she’d been turned out by her folks when she was only seventeen. But she wasn’t like me. She was delicate… fragile. And Joey wanted to be her hero. Before long he had fallen head over heels in love. Apparently she was a happily ever after I just couldn’t provide. I was drinking by then,” she offered as she hid her eyes in shame. “And Marianne was so active in the church and in her school. I wouldn’t have chosen me, either.”

  I gulped a knot down my throat. Little did she know how duped Joe had been.

  Maya pulled herself with difficulty into a standing position. “We stayed friends because that’s what you do. You hold onto the people you belong to, sometimes even after the relationship has ended. We were home to each other, or at least he had been home to me. And he never turned his back on me, even after they married. I tried to stay out of their business as much as possible, especially when they started having trouble conceiving. It was such a strain on Joey, who would come to my house and lean on my shoulder. He was too afraid to show her how disappointed he was. He never wanted her to feel guilty just because nature was working against them. So I offered to carry a baby for them. Well,” she added, “for him.”

  I shook my head. “How could… how did…?”

  “Well, obviously we didn’t have the money to do it the scientific way. But Marianne wanted to see him as happy as I did. And I got the impression she was relieved that she wouldn’t have to go through the pregnancy in any aspect. I was pregnant within six months.” Her eyes grew dreamy again. “It was the most magical time of my life,” she admitted. “He was so gentle. So loving. So patient. So unlike anyone I had ever known, before or since.”

  She lit up when she talked about my Dad, and it made me sad for her, sadder still that Marianne had manipulated him into a marriage and ruined their one and only chance to be together.

  “The pregnancy was uneventful. I gave up drinking and cigarettes and Joey always made sure I had the right diet and medical care.” She gave me a gentle smile. “He was taking care of you before you were even born. He loved you so much. He wanted you so much. And when you were born he wept true tears of joy. So even though it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, I signed away my parental rights and handed you to your new mother.”

  Little did she know… little had any of us known.

  “I thought it would be easy,” she said as she pulled a photo album from the built-in bookshelf. “I never wanted to be a mother because I didn’t know the first thing about it. More than anything I never wanted one of my kids to end up in a home because I was completely incapable of being a parent.” She eased back into her recliner and opened the book, pointing to a photo of a woman who looked like the two of us, holding a tiny baby. The date on the faded photo read 1971. “This was my mother,” she said. “Gloria Palermo. She got pregnant out of wedlock, forcing her deeply religious family to shun her.”

  “Because she got pregnant?” I asked, shocked.

  Maya was sad as she shook her head. “She had many demons, Jordana. She had been a problem student and had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Her parents wanted to show her that life has certain consequences.”

  I was heartbroken as I looked in the face of my maternal grandmother. Her dark eyes were so sad, so defeated.

  “She tried to take care of me on her own, but she was so young and unprepared. She accidentally scalded me in a hot bath and the authorities stepped in. No one could ever prove it wasn’t intentional, and according to court records she didn’t try that hard. As soon as she wasn’t taking care of a screaming baby full time, her party friends came back in force. Before the case was closed, she died of a drug overdose. I grew up in that Jersey orphanage.”

  She flipped a page to show a picture of her and my dad, presumably as they were on the road after leaving New Jersey. Maya was considerably thinner, but still wore about thirty pounds of extra weight.

  She was crazy in love with my dad. It was obvious in the way she stared up at him like he hung the moon.

  “Joey told me about the summers he would spend with his aunt in Iowa,” she continued.

  “Aunt Verna,” I su
pplied. I remembered spending a few summers with her before my dad died. She had an old tire hanging from the big oak tree in her back yard, which overlooked a creek nearby. Daddy loved to go to that two-story house just twenty miles south of Oswen almost more than anything. He claimed he could smell her home-cooking from ten miles away. He’d help her in her vegetable garden and pluck apples and plums and nuts from the trees growing on her vast property. Aunt Verna was famous for her plum jam and her Dutch apple pie.

  I had eaten way more than my share as a kid.

  I also chased her chickens around the yard and made friends with the lanky dog who would lounge under the porch of that hundred-year-old farmhouse. It was a picture right out of the Saturday Evening Post. Apparently Daddy thought so too.

  “He told me all about this place with wide open spaces and a clear blue sky, full of honest, hardworking people. Real salt of the earth. It sounded like a fairy tale. We headed west the first chance we got, working our way from place to place, until we saved up enough to buy a car and finish our journey.”

  She flipped another page. There were several photos of both Joey and Maya on Aunt Verna’s farm. But Daddy never looked happier than when Marianne was in the photo with him. Aunt Verna had taken Marianne under her wing at the church, which was how they met. That much I knew from my mother, who had conveniently forgotten to tell me she’d been disowned for having an abortion.

  It seemed like far too many members of my family tree were willing to cut off their own limbs whenever it suited them.

  No wonder I was a huge mess.

  But no doubt Marianne would have left out that part of her history when she was cozying up to Aunt Verna, just like she hid it from my dad.

  Yet with all of her faults, she managed to pull herself back onto her feet and carve out a new life for herself. I had newfound respect for that, especially after hearing what happened to my grandmother, Gloria… or seeing what became of my biological mother.

  Marianne Hemphill may have been a cold-hearted, lying shrew, but I never wanted for anything she was able to provide. It was just my misfortune “security” and “affection” could not be found in her particular wheelhouse.

  The next set of pictures Maya showed me included her pregnancy. Daddy virtually glowed through each and every picture, as her already ample frame filled out with his child. Maya, too, looked happier than all her other photos. If nothing else, I had been conceived and carried in love. That had to count for something, right?

  I felt Jace’s hand on my back as he offered his silent support. I spared him a small smile before turning back to Maya so she could continue her story.

  She stopped momentarily for another sip of coffee, before hacking coughs seized her, nearly doubling her over. “Are you OK?” I asked.

  She nodded as she reached for the nearby oxygen tank. She breathed in deep before she turned back to us. “You don’t smoke, do you?” she asked and we both shook our heads. “Don’t. It gets its claws into you and won’t let up until it kills you.”

  She punctuated the sentiment by sucking deep from an inhaler, before affixing nose tubes for the tank around her neck and into her nostrils. “Where was I?”

  I swallowed hard. “When you gave me to Daddy and Marianne.”

  She nodded with a haunted expression. It was clear the pain lingered. “The first few months were the hardest,” she confided. “And of course I was all alone because Joey was spending time with his new family. I started smoking again… and drinking again. Joey thought that if he could sneak you over to see me, it would give me incentive to take care of myself. It worked for a while, but Marianne quickly put a stop to it. After she forbade him from seeing me, there was nothing left in Iowa for me. I bid him farewell before my heartache killed me.”

  “How did you end up in Nevada?” I asked.

  She offered a wry smile. “How does anyone end up anywhere?” she pondered. “I ended up going east originally, and wound up on a gambling boat on the Mississippi River. That’s where I learned to deal blackjack. Everyone told me that I should head to Vegas to make better money. Since going back east or staying near Iowa only reminded me of what I couldn’t have, I thought it was the best idea. I’ve been here ever since.”

  She closed the book and leaned back in the chair to suck down more oxygen.

  I took a deep breath. She seemed reluctant to offer more information, so I knew I’d have to dig… but dig delicately. “Did you ever marry?”

  She shook her head. “By the time I came to Vegas, I had gained a considerable amount of weight. I never lost my pregnancy weight, and it was holding me back from getting jobs at the upper scale hotels. Finally a manager at one of the smaller casinos took a chance on me, and took me under his wing so that I would lose the weight I needed to lose. He was older, like the father I never knew. After I lost the weight, his son, Ronald, started to court me. This went into overdrive once I became a dealer for a corporate hotel on the strip. The tips were incredible. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life. Men no longer looked through me like I was invisible. Instead they flirted and tipped me even more to win me over. I don’t think Ronald liked the idea of sharing me. So he wined and dined me, showing me a life I never thought possible. Within months I was pregnant, and that was when the relationship started to change. I didn’t want to abort the pregnancy, not after losing you. Ronald stuck around, mostly to punish me for not being more careful. As the weight came back on, he got more and more aggressive. I think he wanted me to miscarry.”

  My stomach sank. Had I really wanted to know my family history? Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

  “By the time Diego was born, I had ballooned back up to my original weight. Ronald didn’t want anything to do with me or the baby. Instead he convinced his father that I had used the pregnancy to trap them. Since I was let go from my position due to my weight gain, it was an easy enough story to sell.” She paused. “He was out of control by then. He was abusive, both verbally and physically. And he threatened that if I ever told anyone what he was doing, he’d kill me and my son.”

  I glanced around at the photos on the wall, taking note for the first time of the dark-haired boy who starred in almost all of the photos. There were photos from every year of his life, leading up to the sullen, long-haired teenager I saw staring back at me from a photo on the bookcase.

  “Ronald’s dad died when Diego was a year and a half, which put him out of a job. The stress got the better of him. He was drinking all the time, so he was very volatile, against me and against Diego. He got us thrown out of more than one apartment until we were living out of a motel. The only money we had was what I was earning as a housekeeper, but it was gone almost as soon as I brought it into the house. He ended up knocking over a liquor store, and while he was in jail I took Diego and moved out. I filed for a restraining order.”

  She braced herself against the chair. It was clear she was struggling to breathe and it was painful for her. “So as you can see, I had nothing to offer you, Jordana. I never would have contacted you on my own. When your investigator contacted me, I almost couldn’t believe it. When he asked if I wanted to meet with you, I nearly declined. I’m a sick old woman with no money and a past littered with scandal you can’t afford.” Her eyes traveled to Jace. “Especially now.”

  Finally Jace spoke. “So why did you agree to meet with Jordi?”

  She smiled as graciously as she could. “How could I not?” Her eyes met mine. “Look at what you’ve become. You’re stronger than all your ancestors combined. You got that from your father.”

  I fought back tears of my own. It was something I had always suspected, or at least hoped had been true. “He would have wanted us to find each other,” I told her.

  She didn’t look convinced. “I hope that you have the answers you needed, Jordana. But if you don’t want to see me again, I’ll certainly understand. Maybe it would be best, considering.”

  “There’s plenty of time to t
hink about that,” I said.

  Her face shadowed. “We always think there’s time,” she said. “I thought there would be time to tell Joey all the things I wanted to say before one of us left the planet. My biggest regret is that I never did.” She turned to Jace. “That is why I agreed to meet now.”

  She sipped once again from her cup. “I can’t say I’m sorry for giving you up, Jordana. Clearly the life you had with the Hemphills was much safer and kinder than anything I could have offered you.” She glanced over at the photos of Diego. “Diego is living proof of that.”

  “Will I get to meet him?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “He is a typical sixteen-year-old. I don’t see him much. He’s got music in his soul, like you. He plays in a band and he’s either practicing or performing. I’ve tried to talk to him about our situation, but he’s so angry at the world. Life hasn’t been easy on him. He would never say as much to me, but I think he’d rather I had given him up as well. Then he could be more like his successful sister.”

  She smiled but I could barely mirror it. I didn’t feel successful at that moment. I felt extraordinarily guilty. He was living the life I very well could have been living. I would have resented the hell out of me, too.

  It wasn’t much longer before Maya fatigued and was unable to provide any more missing pieces to my puzzle. Clearly the emotional strain of meeting me and confronting her past was overwhelming. It was a lot for me to swallow, and I didn’t have half of the health problems she apparently did. So Jace and I left before the missing Diego could appear. It was probably for the best. I felt so bad about their predicament that I was willing to write a check as big as I could spare.

  That guilt got worse after we checked into our luxury suite at a five-star hotel on the strip. It was unreal driving from Maya’s sad little house to the neon spectacle of Las Vegas Boulevard, as if these two extremes could fit on the same planet… much less the same city.