My mother had told me only a few stories about David Soliday, but the ones she did were worn and weathered, like old pages of a book thumbed through countless times before. She’d been a waitress at a little diner on a street corner, with a messy ponytail of dark hair before she started dyeing it, barely twenty-one years old. He came in late one night, alone, and ordered a slice of apple pie. He was her last table, so she had to wait for him to finish before she could leave. Eventually, after my mom approached his booth for the fifth or sixth time, asking if he needed anything else, he caught on.

  He asked her if she wanted him to leave, and I assumed my mom’s customer service skills needed some refinement because she replied hastily, “Yeah, I do.”

  But he wasn’t offended; instead, he laughed. I suppose she found this charming, because a few minutes later, she grabbed her tips and he grabbed her coat, and they left together. He sat at the same booth every night after that, ordering cups of coffee and apple pie slices until her shift ended. Sometimes they drove around town, listening to music in his car. One night, she brought him back to her apartment, before she lived in a trailer park. They put on a movie, and sometime between that and the end credits, he told her he was married. He said they weren’t happy anymore, had two children, made my mother promises that he would end it. A few months later, when my mom told him she was pregnant, he told her he was staying with his wife. My mom must have been scared but she never told me that part.

  He never paid child support, even though he came from money and made a lot more at his job as a lawyer. He never called, never asked to see me. I used to wait for birthday cards in the mail, sitting in front of the mailbox for days before and after in case it had gotten lost somewhere. I knew he had other kids, which was more confusing than if he had none at all. Then I would’ve known he didn’t want any, but to know he did and that I just didn’t make the cut—it stung more that way.

  I met him only once, when I was six years old. It was near the end of summer and close to my birthday. We had a little apartment then, a bunch of narrow houses crammed together into one building. I was sitting at the table in the kitchen while my mom dyed her hair over the sink, the scent filling the room despite the opened window, when I noticed something on the counter beside my mom’s purse. She was busy, struggling to rub the dye into her roots, so I got up and walked over, nudging her cracked pleather purse away from a bright pink envelope. Inside was an invitation to a birthday party. For a moment, I thought it might have been for mine until I read the name: Andi. Andi’s eighth birthday. Andi Soliday.

  My half sister.

  My flip-flops thwacked against the tiling as I walked over to my mom, holding up the invitation in my hands, waving it around.

  “My dad wants me to come to a party!” I exclaimed. Her expression went from vaguely frustrated and disinterested to almost alarmed. She took her gloved hands out of her hair and snatched the invitation from me, getting the dye on the glossy paper. “Mom, you’re messing it up!”

  She ignored this, reading the front and back, twice, before tossing it on the counter. “You’re not going,” she said, resuming her dye job.

  “But he wants me to.” I grabbed the invitation, becoming tearful now. “You could drop me off? I don’t have to stay long. You won’t have to see him, Mom, I promise.”

  “Bronwyn, baby . . . those people aren’t your family. I’m your family. Aren’t you happy here with me?” She sounded tired.

  “Maybe I could have two families?”

  She squirted the bottle of dye again. The chemicals burned my eyes. “You don’t need two families, baby. And definitely not with the Solidays. Those are snaky people.”

  Eventually, after days of endless pleading, her resolve gave in and she agreed to take me to the party, and to the dollar store to pick out a present. I went up and down each aisle twice, even when my mom shouted for me to just pick something. I decided on a surprise bag because I thought the best treasures had to be inside. After all, it was a mystery. She was a mystery, too, at least to me. That Friday night, I picked out my outfit three times and wanted my mom to do my hair special. I even asked if I could wear her lip gloss. Her face was set into a frown as she let out an exasperated grunt. “For goodness’s sake, Bronwyn.”

  The Solidays’ home was a couple of hours away from ours, and when we finally pulled into their driveway, I was starstruck. It was bigger than any of the houses I had lived in with my mom, with a double front door made of a deep-colored wood, flowers with vibrant petals planted in identical clay pots on either side. The house was white and seemed to go on forever. I was scrambling to unbuckle my seat belt before she’d even turned off the engine.

  We went around the house to the backyard. Bright balloons were everywhere, tethered to tree branches or weighted down on table corners, and they had a pool. It was inground, the shape of a large jelly bean, with a diving board and slide. The blue water glistened in the sun. I felt the first twinge of self-consciousness as I stared at the piles of presents on the table—not only were there more than I had ever seen at a birthday party before, but they were pretty, with perfectly tight wrapping and uncrushed bows. My present didn’t have a bow but I set it down on the table anyway, smoothing out the piece of wrapping paper where I had written my name in thick, shaky marker, next to the misspelled word form. I didn’t like the way it looked in comparison to the other tags, but I tried to shake it off, before turning around and realizing there was a bouncy castle.

  There was a cotton candy machine under the shade of one of the trees in the corner of their massive backyard. When I went to find my mom to ask if I could have one, she was talking to a couple, her face pinched like she was upset. The man she was speaking to was tall, with broad shoulders; he wore a peach-colored button-down tucked into a pair of khakis, his hair dark and neatly combed. Next to him was a woman with a pair of sunglasses perched on her blond hair, adorned in a sundress with a noticeable bump under the fabric. As I walked up to them, now suddenly hesitant, their attention turned to me.

  The man stared at me with familiar, round blue eyes, and after a moment, I realized I had seen those eyes before—every time I’d looked in a mirror. I’d also seen the same lips and thick eyebrows.

  “Is this Bronwyn?” the woman asked, already crouching down in front of me, holding out a hand. My mom made a noise in her throat, turned away. “Hi there. It’s nice to meet you, I’m Amy. Jason, Andi, and Natalie’s mom.”

  Jason, Andi, and Natalie, I thought. Those must have been the names of my brother and sisters, the ones my mom kept referring to as his other kids, never really giving them names.

  I shook her hand slowly as the man kneeled down too. “Hey, I’m—”

  “David,” my mom finished, her tone annoyed. She was still standing, towering over all of us, before she curled her fingers around my shoulders and pulled me back against her legs. I stumbled in my sandals as she started to lead me away. “Come on, honey. Let’s go test out that bouncy castle.”

  I spent the rest of the birthday party with my hand firmly clutched in my mom’s, hot and clammy, and she wouldn’t let go even when we ate our cotton candy or went into the bouncy castle. We stuck our feet in the pool, my eyes squinting into the sunlight as kids ran around the yard, trying to pick out faces I’d never seen before. My half siblings.

  “We could go to my friend Bob’s house more often,” my mom said, even though I didn’t remember anyone named Bob or visiting his house. “He’s got a pool. We could swim there.”

  Something in me deflated. I knew what that meant. We were never coming back to this pool, or this house, or this family. We stayed there, sitting on the edge of the pool until it was time for Andi to open presents. That was when I first saw her, or at least the first time I realized she was my sister. Her hair, blond like mine, was damp against her blue swimsuit. Her skin was more tanned but we had the same blue eyes and lips, maybe nose too. She had her mother’s facial structure with pieces of our dad’s face in it. She looked like another version of me, one born to a married couple in a nice home with a brother and sister, and a jelly bean–shaped pool in the backyard.

  When my mother finally let go of my hand as we stood up, I bolted for the table with the neatly wrapped presents. Beside Andi stood an older boy with blond hair and the same chin and eyebrows, a sunburn stretching down his chest and shoulders, masculine features mixing with a boyish face. Jason. Andi unwrapped two of her presents without really looking up at the friends around her, but I could wait. I was trying to figure out what to say to her when it was my present’s turn when I heard a familiar sound that always brought my heart to a screeching halt. That was when Andi and Jason looked up and right past me. To my mother, who was shouting at Amy and my dad.

  She was gripping her sandals by the thongs as she yelled at them, red-faced. Everything else went quiet, the laughter and conversation breaking like my heart, and I wanted to cry even though I didn’t know what was happening.

  She stomped across the lawn, grabbing me by the elbow and yelling as she pulled me toward the side of the house, “. . . you don’t know!”

  My mother threw me into the passenger seat of the car, slamming the door with a loud bang. She got into the driver’s seat a moment later, fumbling with her keys, before letting out a frustrated shriek and threw them at the steering wheel. My breath caught in my throat as she brought her hands to her face, crying loudly. My eyes were watering as I stared at her.

  “Mom,” I whispered.

  She cried for another moment, but eventually her chest sunk into a deep exhale. “Bob has a nice pool,” she said, her voice thick. “It’s a nice pool. It has a deck that you could do cannonballs off. You’ll like it, baby.”

  “Why were you yelling at my dad?”

  “He is not your dad,” she said. “Or, at least, that’s what he thinks, anyway. He says you don’t look anything like him and that you’re not his.”

  “But I do! Didn’t you tell him he’s my dad?”

  “He’s in politics, baby. He needs to protect his marriage and his real family. He’s trying to pretend you’re not his kid, so there won’t be a scandal stopping him from becoming president or something.”

  “He’s going to be president?”

  “No, Bronwyn. But he can’t have an extra kid with another woman because that looks bad for him. It means he cheated on his wife.” She turned to me, pointing a finger at the house through the windshield. “You see that house, that family? That’s his real family. Those are his real kids. He’s pretending you’re not his because he doesn’t want you. You, me, we wreck his perfect little life.”

  I looked away, curling my knees closer to my chest. “I won’t wreck anything,” I mumbled weakly. “They invited us, Mom. Why would they do that if he thinks he’s not my dad?”

  “To look at you, Bronwyn,” she snapped, sighing when I flinched. “I’m too stressed out for this right now. He saw you and thinks you look nothing like him. That I slept with someone else and now I’m just trying to get money out of him.”

  I frowned. “What does that mean?”

  She shook her head, before grabbing the keys from the dashboard and aggressively shoving them into the ignition, starting it without putting on her seat belt. “I can’t talk about this right now. I’m done. I’m so done with this crap. I don’t deserve it.”

  I blinked as she sped out of the driveway, sinking into the seat because I was what she thought she didn’t deserve.

  That was the last time I heard from any of the Solidays or saw them, at least in person. But one afternoon when I was thirteen, I was in line at the drugstore with an armful of tampons and discounted laundry detergent while my mom was in the car outside and I noticed him on the glossy cover of one of the magazines. I got out of line to read it, skimming through the quotes on his campaign for senator, then about his family. He talked about his older children, then his younger ones. They had their fourth child a few months after the birthday party, a boy named Danny. I wasn’t mentioned.

  A couple of years later, I heard Andi Soliday had started a YouTube channel for makeup tutorials after a couple cheerleaders in my geometry class mentioned her product reviews one morning. I snuck out to the bathroom and pulled out my earbuds to watch one of them, listening as she reviewed the newest high-end makeup products and compared them with cheaper, drugstore alternatives. At first, I watched her videos because I wanted to know more about her, that sense of curiosity lingering from when I was six, but within a couple of videos, I noticed just how different we both were. Her hair was always curled in beach waves, gold necklaces shining brightly against her tanned complexion, and she linked items in her description that cost hundreds of dollars. In one video, she mentioned a pair of comfy, casual sweatpants for every day, around the house, and when I clicked on the link, they retailed for nearly three hundred dollars.

  That was when I understood how my mom felt about them. Their lives were wrapped up in politics and wealth, reputation and image, and I had been wedged out because I shattered those things. Ignored, forgotten, tossed aside like one of the makeup products Andi said on her channel just weren’t right for her. And if that was how they’d wanted to live their lives, then fine, so be it.

  Eventually, I stopped caring. Stopped watching the YouTube videos, stopped reading the magazines that mentioned him in the grocery lines. Stopped watching his interviews when they came on the television when I was flipping through channels. Stopped wondering what they were like, or why they didn’t want to know me.

  I ignored them like they ignored me, even if forgetting about them proved to be a little harder for me.

  And now, after all these years, he was standing right in front of me.

  I didn’t speak to him at all. The McKnights directed David Soliday toward the receptionist’s desk to finish filling out the paperwork so I could get my forehead stitched. After that, I pulled out my phone and pretended to be busy texting while he awkwardly stood around until a nurse called me back, asking if I wanted my dad to come with me and I just shook my head in response. My mind was still spinning at the fact he was here, barely two hours after I’d told the receptionist about him. After radio silence from him and the rest of his family for the past ten years, he was out there in the waiting room with the McKnights. And what surprised me even further was that he was still there after getting my head stitched, sitting in one of the chairs.

  I paused, letting myself take him in for the first time since he’d arrived. His hair was still thick, although it was shorter now, with salt and pepper hair. He wasn’t as slender as he used to be, though he still looked fit, and creases around his mouth and his eyes had formed. But seeing him older wasn’t a total shock to me; after all, he had been in the news for years.

  Then he looked up, his phone screen darkening as he seemed to take me in. Something was shifting in his gaze, and his shoulders rose with a small inhale. But I walked away before I could see anything else—like that piece of him still wondering if I was his—and walked over to the McKnights.

  “Can I come home with you?”

  Mrs. McKnight smiled softly, then looked over at David Soliday. “Honey, I’m afraid you have to stay with your dad until they find your mom.”

  I shook my head. “No—”

  “It’s just until they find your mom—”

  “I don’t even know him,” I murmured to her as he approached us, crossing my arms tightly around my chest. My eyes pleaded with Mrs. McKnight.

  She let out a small sigh and turned to him, hitching her purse up her shoulder. “You know, there is just . . . so much going on right now. How about you and Bronwyn come over to our house tonight? It’s so late and it might make things easier when they find Donna.”

  I didn’t look over or up. Kept my eyes down at my arms wrapped around me.

  “That’s very generous of you. Thank you,” he said, in that voice. It was the one from the television whenever he addressed reporters or spoke with other politicians. It was authoritative, practiced, articulate. It was the first time I’d heard it in person since I was six. And then he paused beside me, taking in a breath.

  He was about to use it to talk to me. So, I grabbed Indie by the hand and pulled her out of the waiting room, listening to her footsteps stumble for a second as she called out, “Uh, I guess we’ll meet you at the car!”

  There were a few branches down on the McKnights’ yard, but the trees on their property still had their leaves and bark for the most part, and according to them on the car ride over—where I was wedged in the backseat between Indie and her little brother—their power was out. The windows in the neighboring homes were dark too—no porch lights turned on as we got out of the car. David’s Mercedes pulled up behind us. When we got inside, Mrs. McKnight lit candles around the living room. The smells of various fragrances—ranging from apple cinnamon to tropical coconut—filled the room.

  No one said much as Mr. McKnight grabbed flashlights from their coat closet and handed them to us. I was staring down at my phone screen, dimmed to preserve the battery, which was down to just 7 percent, while Mrs. McKnight offered him TJ’s bedroom for the night, asking if he needed anything else. He shook his head, his head turned in her direction but his eyes were glancing toward me.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he remarked, and I wondered if he just always sounded like there were fifteen cameras pointed at him. I brought my phone to my ear before he said anything else, deciding to call Jude this time since he had to be with her. My mom wasn’t someone who could just be on her own. She needed direction, and someone to give it to her. I told her when bills needed to be paid, when her meetings were when she tried to get sober, made most of her meals so she didn’t spend her unemployment on takeout. My mom couldn’t handle normal life on her own, never mind what was happening now.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33