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“My mom said they sent you away to school so no one would know what your dad did.”
“My mom said they quit doing tv so they could hide you.”
“My sister said Jack told her that your real mother is a home wrecker.”
I called them all liars, and ran in search of my mother.
When I couldn’t find her, I did what she said I should if I ever got lost somewhere - I went back to the car to wait.
It didn't take long for her to come looking for me, but by the time she'd found me my young mind had replayed their taunts and was I was frantic for answers.
She smiled in relief when she saw me, but I didn’t give her a chance to speak before the question that had been burning on my tongue, burst out of me. “Did Daddy steal me from my mother in heaven?”
Her smile disappeared, and her eyes searched mine with an intensity that made my stomach knot in dread. “Of course not. Why?”
I told her what the kids said, but then I wished I’d kept my mouth shut as her expression went front alarmed to angry.
She told me to wait in the car and, fists balled at her side she marched back into the school building. She emerged ten minutes later, wearing her sunglasses and said, “I’m sorry you heard that. There’s nothing bad about you or your father.”
I believed her.
But that night I went to sleep in their bed instead of mine and was awakened by loud voices coming from the back porch right below their bedroom window.
“You can’t run away from what you did. No matter where we live, y
ou’ll always be the man who cheated on your wife. I’ll always be the woman without a backbone who accepted her husband’s love child and pretended she was happy,” my mother yelled.
“I know, dammit. What the hell do you want me to do. He’s here. We can’t change that,” he shouted.
I crept out of the room and back to mine. I crawled into my bed, heart hammering painfully. I didn’t have the full picture, but I knew enough to know that somehow, I’d ruined this family. And because of the way I looked, everywhere we went, everyone else would know it, too.
We moved to the Brooklyn brownstone that summer and I wrote my very first song lyrics on our first night in that house. In the years to come, song writing would become the refuge to all the things I felt but couldn’t say to anyone. And even though mixed families weren’t a rare sight in our neighborhood, there was always someone who asked questions that reminded me that I was the fly in their ointment.
When I was twelve, I got into a conservatory in upstate New York that had a residential program. And Penn suggested my father be the one to drive me up so we could have a chance to bond.
It was during that ride that he told me about the reality show he was developing. He’d been an entertainment lawyer turned television producer who launched some of the most iconic reality shows of the last decade.
This new project was going to center on his family. With Jack becoming a star both on and off the soccer field, he wanted to seize that momentum and build what he called a brand driven empire. I could choose whether or not I wanted to be part of the cast. But because the show would be filming in our home, I might be on camera sometimes. And inevitably, the television audience would wonder about the silent Bosch.
The same discomfort I expressed to Beth about being in the public eye was compounded by my self-consciousness about the role I played in my family’s drama.
So, I declined. If my parents suspected my reasons, they didn’t say anything. They were delighted by my passion and dedication to my music.
I watched my father cross the school’s manicured courtyard to get back to the car from my dorm room’s window that day. There was a spring in his step I hadn’t seen before. I saw relief in the smile on his face and it was a kick in the heart I’ve never stopped feeling.
The front door of the cabin opens and light spills out of the house. My father’s silhouetted arm gestures for me to come in.
“Shit.” I should have known he would still be up. I jump out of the car and sprint through the rain. He hands me a towel as soon as I step through the door.
“Dry off and meet me in the study. We need to talk.” He turns and strides away, and I know he has every expectation I’ll do as he asked.
In the eyes of the law, I’m an adult. I’ve been nearly six inches taller than him since I was sixteen. Soon, I’ll be financially independent. If I decide to ignore him and go to bed, he couldn’t do more than be pissed off at me about it.
But my sense of obligation, borne of debts I’ll never be able to repay, run deeper than any resentment I might hold.
The older I get, the more I understand how different my life might have been if he hadn’t brought me to live with him and how lucky I am to have ended up as part of this extraordinary family.
Yes, my father had a weekend long fling with a woman he never expected to see again. He went back to his unsuspecting wife and kept on living his picture-perfect life. When she called to tell him she was dying, and that he had a son she wanted him to raise, he could have hung up or offered money instead of the help she was asking for. I’m not sure I would have blamed him. He had everything to lose. And he put my well-being above it all.
