Page 47 of Total Exposure

The property walls in the front of the house continue into the back, the thick, evergreen holly hedges high enough to make it feel cozy and confined. It’s a place all my own, I realize. Outside. Nothing like the terrace at my apartment. That’s not really private. At least it doesn’t feel private. This… this feels a million worlds away from that.

I begin picturing this yard in the summer when the trees are filled with leaves and the garden beds are blooming with flowers.

Someone loves this place.

Who?

Is it Lucinda’s house? It’s got a lot of bedrooms. And they’re all set up for a family. Two girls and a boy, I realize, picturing the children’s rooms on the second floor. And they must have a lot of friends or relatives to feel the need for so many guest rooms.

What would that be like?

The lives of other people fascinate me. Have always fascinated me, ever since I was a small child. I had my life. It was the only one I knew. But I saw the way others lived and it made me so curious. How they interacted and shared things. Stupid things like inside jokes. A shared history. Little—or big—experiences that bound them together into a unit.

Granted, the families I interacted with growing up weren’t typical in any way. They were celebrities. Royalty. High-powered political officials and blue-blood old money.

Their lives were nothing like mine.

So almost all of what I witnessed wasn’t anything close to a normal family. And it put a lot of ideas in my head.

My father’s words. Which was why I was not allowed to play with other children.

Maybe if I had played with children things would been different?

The first time I heard the word ‘vacation’ I was seven. Vacation. It baffled me that people didn’t get up and work every single day. I asked my mother about it and she grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me around, and marched me over to my father and said, “Your child wants to know what a vacation is.”

Whenever I did something that made my mother unhappy, she always called me Your Child. Your Child Rolaine. The first time I ever stepped into a school classroom I was ten. It was in the Philippines because we’d been living there for several months and the local authorities started coming around, asking questions. My father said they were looking for bribes, but I didn’t know what that meant back then and have no idea if it was true. But I went to school so my father didn’t have to pay hush money, as he called it, and when I was told to write my name on the top of a worksheet, I put Your Child Rolaine.

My father looked at me after my mother told him I wanted to know what vacation was. The same look he always gave me, one I assumed was fatherly well into my teens, but wasn’t. And he said, “A vacation is something we can’t afford.”

I remember being confused because I didn’t know what the word “afford” meant. So whenever people asked me things like, “Why don’t you have a home?” Or, “Why don’t you go to school?” I would reply, “Because we can’t afford one.” Even after I knew what “afford” meant, I still said that. It really pissed my mother off. Because of course we could afford one. Whatever “one” was, we could afford it. That’s why the word “vacation” didn’t exist in my family vocabulary.

I have no siblings. No cousins or aunts and uncles. I had grandparents once, on my mother’s side, but they both died when I was very young and I hardly remember them.

So it didn’t matter that the families I saw weren’t typical. They were more than what I had. They were something elusive and distant from my own life.

Something to wish for in a coveting way.

Wandering the garden on the intricately laid stone pathway, I look for cameras. The trees are all bare, which should make them easy to spot, but I find none and feel disappointed.

Can’t he see me out here?

A wave of panic washes over me. Irrational, I realize, since the panic I’m feeling is akin to that which overtakes me when strangers are watching, not when they’re not.

But he’s not just any stranger.

He’s my stranger.

I smile at that, hoping he can see my smile, wanting him to understand what it means. Just how long I’ve gone between smiles before this day.

How did this happen? Not seemingly overnight. But literally overnight.

Yesterday when I came here I was terrified of his incessant invisible gaze.

Today I’m craving it.

What does that say about me, I wonder?

Lucinda would analyze it. Overanalyze it, probably. It would be some clinical explanation about lack of true affection growing up. Feeling used and having no power to change that, so I crave attention, but punish myself at the same time, so my mind mentally breaks down with the paradox.