Shifting in his seat, Bodhi looked away. “I never had a mom.”
Pain shrouded his features. And longing. This was the wound he carried, the one I’d sensed earlier and had wanted to heal. Had she died or was she merely out the picture, like my father? In the end, I guess it didn’t matter. Gone was gone.
My heartbeat quickened at the thought of helping this guy through his hurt. This right here… this was what I was born for.
Before I got the courage to form a follow-up question his frown deepened.
“And my dad… he wasn’t really into giving me a traditional childhood.”
“That’s…” I was about to throw him some pity but he must’ve sensed it, because he was out of his chair, digging in my fridge before I could speak the words. Clearly he was as uninterested in my sympathy as I had been in his.
11
Bodhi: A Matching Pair
Shit. What had I been thinking sharing my family dynamics with Breeze? For as long as I could remember, the subject of my mother was off the table, in both my private and public life. Not only had I never been allowed to question my father about her, but the topic was also off limits to interviewers. I suppose if I were someone more important than a boy band member, reporters might try digging into my past. To be perfectly honest, I’d welcome the intrusion. As a child, any mention of my mother was met with resistance and the same regurgitated story was spewed out for me to chew on. The underlying message had always been that she’d died giving me life, basically strapping me to a burden of guilt I’d carried with me until the day that letter arrived, exonerating me from all blame.
But the twenty-four years before she’d made contact had been fraught with questions. Because my father had made mention of her such a taboo subject, her loss hit me hard. Growing up, I’d not only felt singled out, but also crippled by her absence – which was pointless seeing as plenty of kids grew up without a parent and functioned just fine. Hell, I functioned just fine… until the abandonment of my past crept its way into the present day and I did something stupid like sharing my issues with a person I’d nearly reduced to road kill.
Like my father had drilled into my head a hundred times over, our business was no one else’s business. I’d never really understood the significance of his insistence on discretion until just recently. All these years, Tucker Beckett wasn’t muzzling me to protect my privacy; he was hiding me… from my mother. No doubt it had to be tricky to lie about something as huge as a dead parent when your kid was a goddamn celebrity. Keeping me from talking ensured she’d never figure out who her son really was. Only somehow she had found me, and now here we were.
Sometimes I wondered how different my life would have been had I not been forced to operate behind a veil of secrecy. Would I have been a more loving person? It didn’t take a therapist to point out the survival mechanisms I had in place to hold people at bay. My reluctance to share my life with women in general wasn’t just a reaction to my upbringing, but also a form of self-protection. Bad things happened to women I loved. My mother had made the ultimate sacrifice, or so I’d been told. And then there was Beth.
Retrieving her face from my memory bank, I forced myself to remember. She was my live-in nanny, hired by my father to take some of the burden off his shoulders of raising a kid on his own. I was five when she first appeared in my life and nine when she was gone for good. Although my memory of her had faded some over the years, the impact she’d had on me was still felt far and wide. Losing her decimated my young life and left me bleeding in her wake.
Beth had been widowed at twenty-five. Her high school sweetheart and soldier husband died in combat the same year she’d come to live with us. I could still remember the sadness in her eyes and the way she tried to hide it from me by only crying behind closed doors. But I’d always been an intuitive little kid, probably because of the responsibilities placed on my shoulders so young, and I worked hard every day to bring smiles to her face. I like to think I healed her, but maybe that was just the wishful thinking of a child.
Over the years we became as close as any mother and child could be. When my father insisted on work and more work, she fought for fun. When my father turned his back on a comforting hug, Beth was always there with open arms, and when I went in search of answers to the mystery of my dead mother, Beth was the one who came through.
But the closer Beth and I got, the more fractured her relationship with my father became. He routinely accused her of trying to undermine his authority and threatened to fire her. I just never thought he’d actually do it - until suddenly she was gone.
While watching her pack for the ‘vacation’ she never came back from, Beth presented me with two gifts. They would both become my most prized possessions. The first was a photograph she slipped into my hand of a woman she claimed was my mother. She’d made me promise to keep it safe and never let my father know of its existence. The second gift she gave me was the guitar I’d learned to play on, a memento belonging to her late husband - the same one I’d carried on my back to safety a few hours earlier when the world was crumbling around me.
Glancing over at Breeze from the protection of the refrigerator, the Halloween lantern creating a halo effect around her, I studied the look on her face. Yes, there was pity, but what struck me was she didn’t seem surprised by my drama. And how could I blame her? I had, after all, just played right into the stereotype of the broken child star. Breeze was probably calculating in her head how long it would take me to implode. I hated to break it to her, but she’d be waiting a long time. I might be emotionally stunted, but I’d been dealing with this my whole life and I was no shitshow.
Standing with the refrigerator door opened wide, I groaned in displeasure at Breeze’s measly offerings.
“What the hell, woman? Were you raided by a raccoon?”
“No, but I was planning on spending the next two weeks at the house in the hills and didn’t see any reason to stock the shelves. In hindsight, I should have kept better track of Nostradamus’ Doomsday Calendar. Forgive me. Anyway, you’re welcome to the condiments.”
She wasn’t kidding. Ketchup, a tub of butter, and a jar of hamburger pickles were the only edible things in there.
“Shut the fridge to keep the cold in,” she complained.
“For what? You have nothing to keep cool.”
Still, I did as she asked before heading over to the cupboard in search of even the slightest morsel, yet aside from a few cans and a box of crackers, it was as bare as the refrigerator had been before it.
At this point I wasn’t picky, shoving a cracker in my mouth only to rush to the sink to spit it out.
“Good god, Breeze. How old are these things?”
“Not that old. Maybe a couple of months.”
“Well, in cracker years, that’s like twelve.”
Her giggle was nearly irresistible, and I had a sudden urge to smother her neck in kisses just to hear more of it. But I was much too controlled for such a chick flick moment.
