Girl of Lies (22 page)

U
NFORTUNATELY, YOUR birth father is Senator Chuck Rainsley.

The sentence rolled around in her head, a wildfire destroying everything in its path, a flood of sludge and lies clogging her ears and thoughts. Thirty years of memories. She thought of holidays in San Francisco, of birthdays, of her father’s isolation in his work, of the gifts he gave her over the years. All of them lies.

Senator Chuck Rainsley.

She thought about what she knew about the man—the man Richard Thompson claimed was her actual father. Nothing really. Senator from Texas. She was under the impression he was married. He’d been the primary opposition on the Senate Foreign Relations committee to her father’s nomination as Ambassador to Russia. She vaguely remembered the news, hearings, and Rainsley banging his fist on a table on television. She remembered Julia’s suicidal depression, and learning years later that her parents blamed
Julia
for the stalled nomination.

Rage gripped her.
Was it true?
Had Rainsley blocked the nomination out of spite? Had he somehow used Julia to hit back at her… not her father.

“I don’t even know what to call you,” she said.

“I’m still your father, Carrie.”

“A father is the person who gave you life.
Or
it’s the person who gave you love. Or both. But you gave neither.”

He winced under the onslaught of words. “Carrie, darling, that’s not true.”

She slowly stood up. “But it is. You may have showered me with gifts and cash… but…” She shook her head. “What kind of man are you? What kind of woman is…”

“I did the best I could. I didn’t even know until…”

“You didn’t know until when?”

“You were five.”

“How did you find out?”

He gave a grim smile. “Your blood type is A positive. Your mother’s is O positive. Therefore, your biological father can’t be type B. I am. Simple really.”

He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hand across the bridge of his nose. “Your mother and I had a lot of trouble. A
lot.
But I was never unfaithful. Unfortunately, your mother was. But even so, I forgave her. She was young, and I’d spent so much of our married life away. Virtually all of it. She was a young mother alone with her daughter while I was off on assignments. I forgave her.”

He nodded at her as he spoke, his expression grave. “Truly that would have been the end of it. And you can’t tell me I treated you any differently than your sisters. I’m not the warmest parent in the world. But I’ve done my best.”

Carrie stared back. “You found out in, what… 1990? And you still had Alexandra that year.”

“I told you I forgave her.”

“What about Andrea?” she hissed.

“What about her?”

“What about her? How can you ask that, Dad? I was
twelve
when she was born! And we have the same father? How did that happen? How did the twins and Alexandra… I don’t
get
it.”

“I began to suspect while she was still pregnant with Andrea. And blood tests at birth confirmed it. Rainsley was briefly in China in 1996 on a political junket. I presume that’s what happened.”

Carrie shook her head. Trying to figure out the timeline. Julia was a freshman in high school in 1996. The year she’d struggled with an abusive, much older boyfriend. The year her mother had done nothing to help her. Carrie remembered when Julia had confronted her mother about it, years later. Winter of 2002? 2003?

“That was the year Julia…” she whispered. But she froze. Julia had accused her mother of having an affair with someone named
George Lansing.
Not Senator Rainsley. Why did she say that? It didn’t make any sense.
None of this
made any sense. She
almost
interrupted and asked her fath—

She didn’t know how to think of him.

Thompson leaned forward and said, “Carrie… I’m sorry. But… there’s something seriously wrong with your mother psychologically. She loves you in her own way. But I don’t believe she can help herself.”

“I don’t see how you stayed married to her,” Carrie said. “She betrayed you.
Twice.
”

He sighed and shook his head. “We don’t touch each other. Ever. But… you don’t blame someone who has cancer, do you? She’s sick. So I do what I can to take care of her.” He leaned his forehead on his hand. “In truth, it’s why I was so opposed to your marriage, and Alexandra’s. It’s not that I didn’t like Ray—he was a man to be proud of. But I’ve spent my life married to someone who was mentally ill. I was worried about the trauma from the war—”

“Stop.”

Carrie said the word before she consciously thought about it.

“I’m just trying to explain—”

“Just
stop
,” she said. “Don’t you dare compare Ray to… all of…
that.”

She couldn’t say the words. Not out loud. She couldn’t bear to have his name mentioned in the same breath as her mother. All her mother’s lies, and spitefulness and infidelity.

Rage swept over her when she realized she was starting to cry. She stood up. “I have to go.”

“Darling…”

“Stay away from me.”

“Carrie, it’s not my…”

“You lied to me. You lied to all of us. You’ve lied to me for thirty years.”

She reached in her purse for a tissue and blew her nose, loud. “Seriously. I have to go. I’ve got a daughter to take care of.”

She backed away from the table, and her father stood, taking a step around the table, closer to her. Involuntarily, she stepped away from him. His eyes narrowed, and he said, “Look, you need to calm down a little, Carrie.”

“You’ve just told me you aren’t actually my father, and you want me to calm down?”

“It appears to me that you came here expecting that answer.”

“And what am I supposed to do with this information?”

“Nothing, Carrie. You keep raising your daughter. You keep doing what you’ve always done. Nothing changes.”

She sighed. “Everything’s changing. Dad…
what
happened with Andrea?”

“I told you. Your mother knows the answer to that.”

“You didn’t send me away. Why did you send her?”

He shook his head, muttered, “Jesus,” and turned away from her. His back to her, he said, “Can you imagine what it’s like
knowing
you’ve been betrayed? Lied to? The only thing I ever asked of Adelina was loyalty. So when I knew at birth that Andrea belonged to another man I just…” His head bowed toward the floor.

Bile flooded Carrie’s throat.

“What about
me?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You were five before I knew. We’d already… bonded.”

Carrie swayed.
They’d already bonded?
In other words, if he’d known, he would have turned her away too? Sent her off to live in a foreign country with the in-laws he never saw? Abandoned her like he’d done to her sister.

“I hate you,” she whispered. “I’ve spent my life cleaning up your and mother’s messes. Loving your daughters because you couldn’t. As far as I’m concerned you and mother can both go to hell.”

She turned to march away from him.

He grabbed her arm. “Carrie.”

“Don’t
touch me.”
She jerked her arm away from him.

She backed away and he stared at her, his face red with chagrin. “Carrie, please don’t react this way. I’m your father.”

She shook her head. “No. No, you’re not.”

Back out of the office, and through the anteroom, and then into the wide, confusing hallway of the Pentagon. She made it about fifty feet before one of the young soldiers from her father’s office caught up with her.

“Mrs. Thompson-Sherman, let me escort you, please.”

“Just Sherman, please,” she replied. She’d use a name she could still be proud of.

“Yes, ma’am,” the soldier said, neither understanding nor caring.

As she walked, she thought back over a million interactions with her father. He’d always been free with cash. No problem paying for college. Buying her a car. Giving her a ridiculous trust fund, with an allowance in the tens of thousands a year while she was still in college.

But he didn’t touch. He didn’t embrace his children, or kiss them. Especially her and Andrea. He was a father only in name, preferring the isolation of his office, the intrigue of diplomacy, the draw of politics and power. Family life evaded her father as if it were an ancient foreign language with no Rosetta stone, the complicated rituals of a mystery religion to the uninitiated.

Which left Carrie and her sisters at the mercy of Adelina Thompson. Erratic. Anxious. Vicious sometimes. Her mother was
literally
crazy, and Carrie and Julia had absorbed the worst of that crazy over the years. And their father did nothing to protect them. Nothing to help. He just… went to work. And left them to fend for themselves when the most powerful person in their lives was a disaster.

She thought about the holidays last year. What it was like to walk into Thanksgiving dinner with Ray’s death still a raw, bleeding wound. The holiday dinner had been even more stilted and silent than usual, if that were even possible. Alexandra and Dylan were in Atlanta. Sarah only lasted half the meal before she had to be wheeled back to bed, her leg swollen and red from the effort of being upright for longer than thirty minutes. Carrie sat there, staring into space, mechanically going through the motions, barely noticing as her father mechanically presided over a catered meal.

He never asked her how she was doing. He flew into town from San Francisco with Jessica in tow—Jessica, grey skinned, eyes confused and lost. He should have been taking care of her, but Carrie guessed he’d not come out of his office in months except for basic functions like eating and sleeping. Jessica was on her own, and from the looks of it, she was suffering.

At the time, Carrie had no strength or bandwidth to think of it. And so she just—didn’t. She moved on, didn’t think about it, and didn’t give a second’s thought to how distant her father was.

Because that was
normal.

Because he wasn’t actually her father.

Christmas had been worse, if that was even possible. Her father had asked Jessica to say grace, because she was the youngest, by five minutes. Jessica hadn’t hesitated.

Lord, thank you for this food, given to us by minimum wage caterers,
Jessica had started. Mother had gasped, and Dylan started almost out of his chair.

Then she continued,
Lord, we thank you for giving us this cold family, with a psychotic mother and an icebox of a father.

The family Christmas meal came to an early end.

Of course he was an icebox. Of course. It all made sense now.

Carrie didn’t realize she was crying. Maybe that’s because she’d done so much crying in the last year. Maybe it was because the nerves in her face, the nerves that would normally feel the wet slide of a tear down her cheek—those nerves were dead. Numb. Too much sensation, too much grief, too much pain. But even though she couldn’t
feel
it, her body responded.

The Army Sergeant who escorted her back to the main Pentagon entrance and the vast surrounding parking lots tactfully ignored the tears that streamed down her face. Others in the hallway did much the same. The Pentagon, with its thirty thousand daily inhabitants, was a small city, complete with its own police force. Like many large cities, it turned a blind eye to the pain of transients. Carrie and her tears received little more than curious looks as she finally made her way to the exit.

There, her escort broke his professionalism. He spoke in hesitant tones. “I… I hope everything’s okay, ma’am.”

She gave him an ungainly smile. Fuck Richard Thompson. And fuck Chuck Rainsley, her birth father who had never done a damn thing for her or her sisters. Right now, she had one focus. Getting help for her daughter. And nobody was getting in the way of that.

“Thank you, Sergeant. It’s not okay now, but it will be.”

“And that was it. I got home as quickly as I could.”

As Carrie spoke, she sat back in her cushioned chair, the one that didn’t match any of the other furniture in the room, nursing Rachel. Andrea shook her head. The revelations had come hard and fast. They weren’t surprises. Not really. That Richard Thompson wasn’t her father. That he wasn’t even related to her.

But that just raised the question.

Where the fuck was her mother?

Andrea couldn’t bring herself to resent Carrie. Unlike Carrie, she’d never had any expectations that her parents loved her or cared about her. Or at least she hadn’t in a long time. This revelation might be a surprise, but it wasn’t devastating. It wasn’t a loss. You can’t lose what you never had in the first place. So on the one hand, Carrie had the love her father for a while. Whatever that was worth. But that also meant she was hurting now in a way Andrea had long since moved on from.

So she reached out, leaning toward Carrie, and put a hand on her knee.

“We need to know more,” she said.

Carrie shook her head. Her eyes were wide, confused. “What else is there to know? Our parents are liars. Our
parent.
The other one is just some guy.”

“For one thing, we need to know if Senator Rainsley… our father… is a donor match. Just in case I’m not.”

Carrie froze. Then she took a breath, and said, “You’re right. I’m going to call his office right now. Let me just put Rachel down.”

Sarah, who sat across the room from them, paperback novel open in front of her, said, “Are you sure—”

“Yes,” Carrie interrupted.

Rachel was asleep, latched on. Carrie shifted the baby’s position, very careful, never moving her eyes from Rachel. From her daughter. Andrea watched her… watched that fierce look of love she gave her daughter. Andrea swallowed. The emotion was too powerful.

A few moments later Carrie put the baby down in her room then slowly returned to the living room.

“Shall we?” she said, then picked up her phone and dialed directory information. “Hello? Yes. Washington, DC. United States Senate… um… I’m not sure… is there a main operator? Yes, that will work.”

A fifteen second wait, then Carrie spoke into the phone again. “Senator Rainsley’s office, please.”