Page 54 of The Apparent Trap

“I’m sorry,” I say again quickly. “I didn’t mean to bring that up. It’s not my business, whatever happened with you then.”

He’s looking up at the ceiling, and I wonder how much of a nerve this conversation is touching. I wonder if traveling with her like this, watching another father worry about his daughter, knowing he didn’t do that for so much of his life, is making his past as present as my dream felt last night.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he finally says, surprising me.

“Told anyone what happened when she was born?”

“No . . . I’ve never told anyone . . . that I didn’t know . . . at the time,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

He takes another deep breath. “I didn’t know Carmen existed until eleven years ago.”

“What?” He’s still not looking at me, and I have no idea how to read him. My head is spinning, and I don’t think it’s from my plunge.

But he doesn’t move. He just starts talking again. “Her mom . . . I wasn’t the most responsible kid. I had trouble with school, and reading. I found out later I was dyslexic, but nobody really paid attention enough to get me tested when I was young. I got by on charm, I guess.” He chuckles like it’s a joke, but I’m not laughing. Yes, he charms everyone, and yes, he’s got charisma for days. But holy hell, it never occurred to me it was the one weapon he had to wield to survive in the world. That he honed to survive. His eyes flick to mine for a second and then away again when he realizes I’m not going to let him brush it off that easily. “I don’t remember meeting Carmen’s mother,” he says with a grimace. “I was sixteen and a line cook and partying too much with people who were too old for me to be friends with. I never knew. She never told me.”

“She didn’t tell you that you had a child?”

He shakes his head, still not looking at me. “When Carmen was fifteen, she took one of those mail-order DNA tests. A buddy had given me one for Christmas a few years earlier, and so . . . we matched.”

“You just got an email one day that said you had a daughter?”

He nods slowly. “Yes, literally that. ‘You have a new DNA relative match. Based on the amount of DNA you share, this person may be your child.’”

“You remember the wording?”

“Wouldn’t you?” He looks back up at me, his eyes so sad I can barely stand it. I reach out to take his hand, then pause, not wanting to overstep. He just pours another cup of tea for me, like his hands need something else to do, so I take the hint and drink it again. “I was thirty-one. I’d busted my ass for fifteen years to make something of myself. I’d opened my first restaurant in New York at that point, and I was working seven days a week. I was already doing guest judging for that competition show that turned into my next actual TV gig. And then one day I got an email saying I’d failed at the only thing that mattered.”

I’m so thunderstruck that I grab his face and turn it toward me. He’s startled by the movement, but I don’t care. I’m simmering with anger, and I can’t hold it in. “You didn’t fail at anything,” I practically howl, shaken up by how much his admission is affecting me. “You didn’t fail. Her mother failed her. Her mother lied by omission to you and lied to Carmen by keeping you from her. There’s no world where that’s on you.”

“But it is what it is,” he says quietly. “She grew up without a father, and I can’t change that.”

It’s one truth that there’s no argument out of. And I don’t want to hurt him more by trying to argue it. So I just ask, “What happened after you found out?”

“Carmen and I emailed for a few months,” he says, his voice quieter than usual. “She was afraid to tell her mom, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought about going to a lawyer for custody or rights or something. But I waited to see what Carmen wanted. She finally told her mom, and they had a whole blowout. I couldn’t do anything; I didn’t want to make it worse. Eventually Carmen’s mom agreed to let me come out and visit, so I flew there for a weekend. But Carmen was a teenager, and the whole thing was so awkward and fraught that after that, we just sort of kept in touch sporadically. I’d visit when I was on the West Coast, but she didn’t really want to engage, and I didn’t want to push. She’s never been an open book, and I don’t blame her, growing up the way she did. So I did the only thing I was any good at—I convinced Luciana to let me pay for Carmen’s college, but we didn’t tell her so she wouldn’t assume I was only doing it to get in with her. Once she graduated, I just kept at the same work pace because I thought, generally, if I kept working harder and made more of myself, then at least I’d have something in the end to make her proud of. And the more I worked, the less I had to think about it. So it just sort of continued that way for years. Until this year, when she decided to move to New York.”

I’m silent for a moment, absorbing. “I didn’t know that,” I finally say, a statement so obvious and yet seemingly so important to reiterate. Because, my god, I misjudged him. At every turn I’ve taken the worst-possible scenario and made assumptions. And now all this new information is rearranging the deck chairs inside my head.

“No one does,” he says with a sigh. “When I say you’re the first person I’ve told . . . I really mean that. She’s been so private about it, and I don’t have family I really talk to, and I definitely don’t talk about stuff like this with work buddies.” He scratches at his chin, like it’s the first time he’s really considered the fact that he’s bottled up this giant secret for over a decade without any outlet. “Anyway . . . that’s the whole story. You said absence is a grief before, and so . . . well, I guess that’s mine.”

I stare at him, still rearranging. Still letting it sink in.

I try to imagine it all. It’s like the upside-down version of my grief. Mine is all about the specificity of the loss. My thought about Georgia from the other day flashes through my mind—that none of my current friends knew my mom. And it occurs to me that, in some ways, that means also that none of my friends can really ever fully know me—because I have no idea how someone could know me without knowing my mother. So much of who I am is her. And I don’t simply mean that I look like her or that our mannerisms are the same—I mean our honking laughs, our love of a puzzle, our desire to get under a story, our quiet confidence. She touched every piece of my formation, and now she’s simply gone. Knowing me is knowing her specifics, and there’s a gaping hole in understanding me with her absence.

But his grief is all about the absence of the specificity. He was robbed of the chance to fill in his daughter’s grooves and crevices with the parts of himself that fit her. His hole is the chasm that will always exist between being able to truly know Carmen and affect her life.

It makes me want to hang on to my grief. It makes me want to claw my dad back and say mine. We have these memories, these precious moments that are sadly no longer present, but they’re alive in me. In the two of us. They were alive in my dream, no matter how confusing. Lee’s is like the Nothing from The Neverending Story—a void where dreams couldn’t be tangible.

And I wonder how Lee trusts anyone at this point. There’s so much implicit trust in the world—we need it just to cross the street, to believe that a car will stop at the sign and everyone will survive because we all follow some basic set of rules that we’ve all agreed to. Lee’s trust in that system was shattered by Carmen’s mother’s unilateral choice to keep him out, by existing in a world where he could get something as mundane as an email that upended everything he knew.

And yet. He’s chosen to stay in this system. He’s worked and built himself up and hoped to have a relationship with the one person he was kept from. And he chose to trust me, today, with his story.

I can’t stop myself from what I do next. I take the tray off the bed, Lee’s eyes never leaving mine. I turn off the light, the night sky through the glass roof dark and cloudy, with no chance tonight of the northern lights I’m so desperate to see. And I take Lee’s hand from his lap, where it’s resting as he sits on the edge of my bed. I pull him to me and under the covers.

And I wrap my arms around him tightly. I hug him and hope he knows I’ll hold his trust and keep it safe.

He sighs, bone deep, and wraps his arms around me too. For all the sexual tension there’s been between us, this has none of that. It’s comfort and acceptance and understanding.