Epic (10 page)

From what I could piece together, Maya was born sometime around March in 1971, which meant she was only 21 when I was born.
It made everything seem sadder somehow. She wasn’t much older than me when her life was thrust into its current downward spiral.

They were so young. Just babies. Yet they had traveled half the country, working their way from place to place, from the time they were teenagers. I knew what they were running towards, but suddenly I was very curious what they were running from.

There were precious few photos of the group home where they met, so pinning down a name or location was futile. I sighed as I closed the album. I pulled out another album, but it contained later photos of Diego. There were shoeboxes tucked behind the albums, so I pulled that forward, hoping to find more photos. Instead, it was full of letters. They were addressed to Maya from my dad.

I sucked in a breath as I
opened the one on top. My first grade class photo slipped from the pages as I opened the letter.

“September, 1998.

Dearest Maya,

I hope this letter finds you well. I wanted to send you the newest photo of Jordi so you can see how she’s doing. She’s such an amazing little girl and the light of my life. She is the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.

But every time I see her face, I see you. I feel like the worst person alive that I’ve taken her away from you. I know that was the deal from the beginning, but I can’t imagine even one day without her now. I’m going to figure out a way for you to see her again. It’s only right. Especially after all you’ve lost.

Don’t give up on me, Maya. Talk to you soon.

Joey.”

Tears welled in my eyes as I realized this letter was written just before the fateful camping trip where Shane shot my dad. It made me wonder once again how different my life would have been had he not died. It scattered us all to the wind, and each of us took root in a sad and painful existence he could no longer touch with his love and his goodness.

And we had all suffered greatly as a result.

Other letters included more photos, going all the way back to spring of 1993. I could hear his voice in every carefully written word. He made sure she knew when I took my first step, said my first word. He told her all about my first day of school and the one play I did in
Sunday school, where I finally discovered people responded so positively to my voice.

“She’s got a gift, Maya. She’s going to be the best of all of us one day.”

Pain wrapped around my throat like a noose and I carefully put all the letters back in their secret hiding place. No doubt she had protected them all these years, her only tie to the man she had so truly loved… and the daughter she gave away.

The next shoebox I opened was full of bills, mostly medical. Most were past due or delinquent, dated at least four years before. She had mentioned being on social security, so one could assume she was on state medical aid by now. Still, it gave me a bunch of diagnosis codes so I could easily confirm her health issues.

There were also old paycheck stubs and household bills from around the same time frame. I dug a little deeper, figuring that these were the documents she must have used to prove her financial need for state services. At the bottom of the box I hit the jackpot. I found both Diego’s birth certificate as well as Maya’s. I took pictures with my phone before putting all the papers back where they were.

Within a few hours of returning to the hotel suite, I had unlocked a
remaining piece of the puzzle, narrowing down these faceless ancestors who somehow belonged to me. My grandmother’s name had not been Gloria Palermo, but Gloria Benavides. She was born in Newark, NJ in 1954. She listed the father as Tomas Palermo, whose birthplace was listed as Brooklyn, New York in 1951.

I couldn’t locate any marriage certificates that indicated Gloria and Tomas had officially
tied the knot, but from Maya had already confided I assumed that no such union was legally formalized.

I sent all the information to Mr. Vass, hoping that would expedite the process.

Meanwhile, I plugged in the diagnosis codes I found in Maya’s medical bills. It included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, and emphysema, both of which were irreversible. The diagnosis that hit the hardest, however, was “morbid obesity.”

I guess at least now I knew where it came from.

I was still digesting this upsetting little nugget when my cell phone rang. It was an L.A. number I didn’t recognize. My brow knit as I answered. “This is Jordi.”

“Don’t answer your emails, love?” a man asked with an amused Australian accent. It was Griffin.

“Sorry, I’ve had… a family emergency,” I said.

“In Vegas?” he prodded.

I sighed. PING struck again. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“It never is,” he agreed.

“So what can I do for you, Griffin?”

“If you read my email, you’d know,” he chided. I could hear his smirk over the phone. “I just wanted to let you know that I, too, was out of town for the rest of the week. Called to New York. I wanted to reschedule our studio time.”

I was confused. Why did he feel the need to personally call and give me this information when usually he went through all his flunkies first? “Thanks,” I offered. “I should be back in Los Angeles by next week.”

“Then it’s a date,” he agreed. “Monday work for you?”

“Afternoon would be best.”

He laughed. “Of course. See you then, Jordi.”

As I hung up I realized that was the first time he had ever called me by my first name.

Las Vegas, Nevada

June 4, 2012

By Monday, however, I
was still stuck in Vegas. Sonny’s days off unfortunately coincided when I tried to talk to Maya about my father that week, and she was sickly and unresponsive through the weekend. Fortunately, finding out Gloria’s real name verified much of what Maya had already told me. Mr. Vass confirmed almost everything within a day, particularly about her mother, Gloria. There had been an incident with a hot scalding bath, which resulted in Maya’s placement in one of many foster homes. Unfortunately the older she grew the harder she was to place. She was in the group home by the time she was twelve.

Gloria had died of a drug overdose in Manhattan by 1972, and no one had ever come forward to claim Maya. Not her father and not her grandparents. This left her a ward of the state. She was reported as a runaway by 1987, and no records surfaced for her again until she started working on a riverboat.

After that, her story checked out. Her time working for Ronald Diego’s father Salvatore, her custody battle with Ronald… it turned out that her sob story, as tragic as it was, was completely substantiated.

This put me in a delicate position. I knew I had to help her, but I still had misgivings about Sonny. If she was staying with him because he helped her make ends meet, then that was an easy fix. I could take care of the bills she couldn’t
and render his assistance unnecessary. But Sonny was more than just a roommate. They slept in the same bed. They lived together like husband and wife, though I was certain all romance between them had been waylaid by her health complications. Despite that, I knew that there was an emotional dependence there that my money could not buy. This was a woman whose one true love was my father. He was the one who had never hurt her, used or neglected her, but inevitably chose another.

The older and more sickly she got, the more limited her options were. She had become accustomed to accepting way less than she deserved because of this. She wa
s complacent to her lot in life because she didn’t see any way to make it any better. That meant no matter what I did or didn’t do, she had developed certain habits of accommodation that I wouldn’t be able to break, especially living away from her in Los Angeles.

If I didn’t expect a massive fight from Diego, who had ties in Vegas thanks to his band, I would have recommended a total relocation out of Nevada entirely.

I figured I’d start small. I’d get her an apartment away from that barren wasteland where she lived. I’d also hire someone to check in on her daily, prepare her meals and help her with dressing and showering. The housecoat I had purchased for her had already been stained and soiled because she refused to take it off. I ended up buying her six more just so she would change; a different color for every day.

This delayed my visit by yet another week.

Jace had wanted to come back out to Vegas, but he was booked to appear on the premiere of
Fierce
, Season 2. As the winner of Season 1, his appearance singing his #1 song proved that the new singing reality show was a force to be reckoned with. He could hardly skip it, no matter how much I may have wanted to have him by my side as I watched the season debut of a show that plucked us both out of obscurity and made us super stars.

Instead, I watched it with Maya… and by extension, Sonny. He was far more interested in what kind of apartments I had narrowed the list down to, saying he’d prefer a place closer to where he worked on the Strip. It was all I could do not to remind him I wasn’t getting him a new place, but my mother. In his head, however, that was a package deal.

Apparently, so was I. He did his level best to charm me, but it was all wasted. I found his interest creepy and unwelcome, much like Shane before him. Dr. Challis might have wanted to explore this connection in our next session, which ironically I missed thanks to my business in Vegas. Not so ironically, I was relieved to have an excuse to skip the session. I didn’t wish to be questioned or put on the spot about these new feelings. I had fifteen other things that were much higher priority.

Instead, I did whatever I could to stay out of
Sonny’s way, which was easy enough during the day while I was schlepping all around Las Vegas to find another apartment in a more suitable neighborhood. The only criteria I really needed to adhere to was staying the same school district. I figured I’d meet the least resistance from Diego if I didn’t disrupt his life too drastically.

Truth was I rarely interacted with Diego at all. He had been made aware of the changes that were forthcoming, but the only thing he said to me about it was, “Makes it easier to go home to some
mansion in the Hollywood Hills, I guess.”

He wasn’t far wrong.

There wasn’t any way I’d be OK with sleeping in a multi-million dollar home while knowing the woman who gave birth to me was living in abject poverty a mere five hour drive away. I couldn’t solve all her problems, but what I could solve I knew I should.

Otherwise I’d be every awful thing that PING had ever called me.

If I was waiting for them to change their tune, I was in for a long wait. Their snoops had unearthed my apartment hunt in Las Vegas, which made it to the headlines.

DIVA SEARCHES FOR VEGAS GETAWAY! IS THERE TROUBLE IN PARADISE?

FIERCE FINALIST MISSES NEW SEASON PREMIERE! HARD FEELINGS DIE HARD?

I sighed every time I turned on my computer.
I was never going to engender myself to the likes of PING. They had their teeth in my jugular and they weren’t about to let go.

It made me consider, briefly, one of the many offers I received from companies devoted to weight loss. They wanted me as the face of their product, but Maggie had always discouraged my participation. “Do it on your terms,” she said. “For your own reasons. Otherwise you’re destined to fail.”

Though I knew she was right, every now and then, at my weakest especially, I was tempted to take one of the offers just to feel I was finally addressing this problem once and for all. There was one main dieting rule I’d learned as an obese person: The more drastic the method of weight loss, the more sincere the effort. Plus, having a program hand-crafted for me was one less thing to worry about when my plate was already overflowing… no pun intended. I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about how much I ate or why. If I could take a pill or have a surgery that would take that choice out of my hands, maybe I could better serve all the other obligations I had.

I glanced around my hotel suite, where my room service orders had grown more and more shameful. On days I had to deal with Sonny in particular
, I found myself turning to the food I could order and eat in secret. These were my lifelong comforters, meant to salve all those residual wounds torn deep in my psyche by Shane.

Sitting in that big king-sized bed all by myself night after night
with only late-night TV to keep my company, it was easy to be seduced by the products that promised to solve at least one of my problems.

Are you
fat
? Have you had trouble losing pounds of unsightly
fat
, and diet and exercise alone have not helped you? Try our pill, product, book, or DVD… beat the
fat
once and for all!

For a three-letter word, “fat” could still pack quite the punch.
It was a harsh little word that could convey such contempt with the right inflection, which all these pitch people had down to a freaking science.