AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The gate swung open, and before Gemma even made it halfway up the driveway, the two dogs barking came barreling out the wide front door.
Duke, her father’s Great Dane, who was nearly the same size as Gemma, led the charge, with Cash, a French bulldog comically tiny in comparison, close behind. Duke greeted her with deep, resounding barks while Cash scampered around yipping. They pranced and slobbered, giving her the customary warm welcome that some people might expect from their human relatives. Duke landed a full-tongue streak from her jaw to her temple before she managed to wrangle him with a pet on the head. Cash spun donuts around her feet like a wind-up toy.
“Forgive me, Gemma!” Elena called as she ran out the front door, arms waving with a leash in each hand. “You know they love it when you visit!” She approached and snapped her fingers. Her voice took on a tone as formidable as Duke’s bark. “Boys,sit!”
Both dogs instantly stopped and sat back on their haunches. Gemma kept stroking Duke’s ears. He leaned his massive head into her hand with a loving whimper. As much as she disliked visiting, seeing her canine siblings always warmed her heart.
“It’s time for their walk anyway,” Elena said as she clipped a leash to Duke’s collar.
A feeling of dread sank Gemma’s warm heart like a stone. She almost considered begging Elena not to take away the only remaining barrier between her and herfather. Without Patrick, the best she could hope for was distraction from two slobbering show dogs.
“Oh, you don’t have to take them out on account of me,” she said, trying to keep the plea in her voice from being too obvious.
“Don’t worry, dear. They are about to tear the house down demanding their afternoon walk anyway,” Elena said with a laugh as she clipped on Cash’s leash. “And besides, it will give you some peace and quiet with your father. I know it’s been a while for you two. He’s in his office in a meeting, but make yourself at home while you wait!” She lurched off when Duke pulled her toward the gate. Gemma wondered if she had any chance of controlling him at all, given his size, or if the leash was only for show. “We’ll be back!” she called over her shoulder.
And just like that, Gemma was alone.
Her father was busy in a meeting. Shocking. Whatever part of her thought her surprise arrival would prompt him to drop everything to come greet her shriveled up inside the permanent ache in her chest.
At Elena’s instruction, she decided to make herself at home while she waited. After all, the sprawling mansion had been her home once upon a time.
Gemma walked up the shallow steps onto the stone porch. Elena had left the front doors wide open, and she passed into a gaping foyer that could easily fit her apartment inside it. She closed the doors behind her and the sound reverberated up the sweeping staircase like a tomb sealing shut. She trained her eyes on the yawning glass wall at the back of the house where an infinity pool disappearedoff the hillside into the L.A. Basin below. In another life she would sunbathe in one of the lounge chairs on the deck instead of battling for poolside real estate with neighbors at her apartment complex. Although frequenting her father’s backyard oasis would mean losing opportunities to see Hot Guy in 202 in his finest swimwear.
A blast of breeze ruffled her hair as she realized one of the giant glass panels was open to the day. The room ached with memory. A grand piano she used to play, furniture arranged to allow the people who sat in it to have close and meaningful conversations, custom art pieces she never appreciated as a child for their strange, shapeless patterns. A sculpture Patrick dubbedWillyonce she confessed to him that it had always reminded her of a whale. The corner that held an obscenely large Douglas fir tree each Christmas when her father’s house bustled with inebriated industry titans currently held a giant palm in a pot large enough to sit in.
Holidays put a special kind of ache in Gemma’s heart, for it had been that time of year when her family fell apart. She had sensed it brewing long before, in her parents’ harshly hushed conversations and the fact that she saw her father’s closed office door more than she saw him, but the Summer Hart implosion had happened on Christmas Eve. There had been shouting and crying and her mother’s voice repeatingthat girlas if she couldn’t bring herself to say her name. Gemma hadn’t learned the truth until she found all her Summer Hart CDs in the trash one day at their new house. That night, they had abandoned their holiday dinner on the table like they were going to return to eat it. Gemma held a crying Patrick, trying not to cry herself,while their mother stuffed clothes into suitcases and gifts into the trunk. They drove half the night to her mother’s sister’s house in Phoenix, and Gemma opened gifts the next morning with cousins she hardly knew. Her father hadn’t come after them. There had been no waving out windows or sad snow softly falling. Only leaving the dry gray of winter in L.A. for the desert heat.
Gemma pulled her eyes from the empty living room and wandered toward a hallway. Platinum and gold records from some of the biggest artists of the past few decades lined the walls with the importance and prominence with which some might display family photos. Where there might have been smiling faces and cherished memories, instead there were cold, round discs and sales numbers. A source of pride, sure, but also a reminder of her father’s priorities.
She kept walking past a guest bathroom and came to the door of the room that was once her and Patrick’s playroom. Mostly hers while they’d lived there, since Patrick had hardly been big enough to walk when their parents split, but their father had kept it for them when they visited as they grew up.
Gemma had dreaded those visits. Every summer, their mother would pack her and Patrick up and drive them to L.A. for a week. In her younger years she had thrown full-blown tantrums in protest, but they had simmered down to angsty silence in her teen years, and as soon as she turned eighteen, she stopped going altogether. The mandate of shared custody with visitation ran out when she became an adult, and she stopped visiting until Patrick was old enough to guilt-trip her into starting again. By that point, her father was little more than a stranger who shared her last name.
She pushed open the playroom door, wondering for abrief but hopeful moment if she was going to find it untouched from her youth like a nineties time capsule. The glow-in-the-dark stars would still be stuck to the ceiling and the fuzzy mats with city maps she and Patrick used to push toy cars around would still line the floor. The little easel where they used to pretend to paint the backyard view like landscape artists would still stand in the corner, and the old upright piano they would bang away at with sticky fingers would sit beneath the window.
Part of her liked to think that this pocket of her childhood remained safely preserved in time and space. When she visited with Patrick now, if they met their father at this house instead of on neutral territory like at a restaurant or an event, she rarely ventured beyond the living and dining rooms. What tempted her to walk into her old playroom, she wasn’t sure, but when she found a neatly appointed guest room void of childhood, memory, and toys, her heart ached with a specific kind of loss.
At least the old upright piano was still there. It had been moved from its window seat to the wall opposite the bed, where it sat with a collection of framed photos on top of it. Gemma recognized her own face from across the room. She stepped over the fancy rug that had replaced the map mats and felt a lump rise in her throat at the sight she found.
Above the ivory keys aged to yellow where she used to place Patrick’s pudgy hands sat framed photos of the both of them. She smiled out from her high school graduation photo, mortarboard hat with tassel dangling. Patrick’s sat right beside it, looking sharper and more advanced with some eight more years of digital photography technology behind it. Then came a slew of old snapshots from theirsummer visits. Dodgers games, Disneyland, that trip to the San Diego Zoo when Patrick saw an elephant for the first time. Gemma remembered being particularly surly on that trip until she saw the wonder on Patrick’s face. A friendly stranger had snapped a photo for them outside the elephant habitat, and it captured gangly Gemma with braces and a baggy tee shirt over pink shorts standing beside her father with four-year-old Patrick on his shoulders. Patrick was twisted sideways, beaming, and pointing at the elephants behind them. Their father held his legs and smiled with his eyes upward and forehead crinkled as if he was trying to see his son. Gemma had all her braces on display and a look of joy on her face simply from the look of joy on Patrick’s. She could almost hear his excited shriek just looking at the picture.
Beside it sat a more recent photo of Patrick, all grown up and standing with an elephant at the wildlife institute sanctuary in Nigeria. He had one hand on the enormous animal’s leathery leg and the same wonder on his face as in the photo from the zoo. Gemma couldn’t help smiling at it.
She scanned the rest of the pictures and realized all the recent ones were only of Patrick: more from the institute, one with an icy white background and him in a parka from his days in Greenland, a selfie with an ink-and-gold nighttime skyline Gemma didn’t recognize, one with their father on a golf course somewhere. Her most recent photo was from high school. It was as if she had stopped aging. Or maybe even disappeared.
When she came to the end of the collection, she saw two things that surprised her. The first, a newspaper clipping a few years old that she knew had been buried deep enough intheL.A. Timesthat someone had to have been looking for it to find it.Industry Mogul Roger Peters’s Daughter to Produce Radio Show, the headline read. The brief article was short enough to fit printed into a picture frame. Gemma remembered when it came out and how ambivalent she’d been about the announcement. The article centered her identity on her father, and it was hardly a blip buried deep in the Arts & Entertainment section. Not that she’d wanted a big, flashy headline about herself—and she should have been grateful she was getting mentioned in theL.A. Timesat all—but the whole situation felt symbolic of her struggle to carve out her own space in an industry that already knew her name.
Her personal conflicted feelings aside, the fact that her father had cut out the article and framed it gave her a timid feeling of pride. And hope.
The other item on the piano that surprised her was a framed photo of her whole family—her and Patrick, their father, and their mother.
Gemma picked it up and felt the ache inside her soar like it had wings. She and Patrick had gotten their dark eyes from their mother, but while their mother’s hair flowed a rich chestnut, their father’s coloring had diluted them with a beachy shade of blond. Lynn smiled in the photo, but Gemma could see the strain in it. Perhaps she was imagining it because she knew the outcome of the happy family posing in front of sunny palm trees. Anyone else looking on would only have seen proud parents, a grinning seven-year-old with a missing front tooth, and a baby with chubby cheeks. Little did they know what was coming; what Gemmaknew had already taken root and begun to spread based on her age in the photo. She couldn’t remember it being taken, but she knew it had to have been only months before everything fell apart. Perhaps it was their last happy moment together.
The thought filled her with immeasurable sadness that was offset only by the thought that they had once been whole. That an element of stability, of reliability, had existed at the start of her life.
The fact that her father had the photo in his collection of all the others gave her hope that perhaps a piece of that stability still existed.
“Gemma?” She heard him call her name from somewhere in the cavernous house.
