Because it could happen to your daughter. It could happen to your son. Your kid could be a sex addict. Your kid could be a prostitute.
You can just smell the movie rights, can’t you? Miranda could. So she kept them all for herself. Because Miranda is the only one who knows who “Anonymous” is. Miranda found the story. Miranda brought the story to the publishing house she runs. Miranda alone is “Anonymous’” editor. And Miranda alone will cut the checks — or claim to — for “Anonymous” when the book finally lands on shelves in a few months. After all, she’s done editing it. Anonymous won’t see a dime of the profits. Anonymous doesn’t want money from this story.
Anonymous wants to be free.
But I will never be free. I know that now. Because the secret only grows bigger. The wall only rises higher, more mortar slathered between each brick, superglue that’ll hold forever.
Until it topples. Because it will.
Because somewhere, some enterprising person, maybe another journalist, maybe some dogged detective, will want to know who Anonymous really is. And someone will recognize himself somewhere in the story, though names of course have all been changed. And enough someones will put enough somethings together that this enterprising reporter-detective-dog catcher will figure out that Anonymous is me.
Page one of New York Post! “Layla’s true identity revealed — the daughter of The Cleaner.”
Page 212…
I don’t know a thing about Nathan. I never met him, never saw him, never heard him. But I heard her. And hearing your mom have sex with men is bad enough. But hearing your mom have phone sex is worse, especially when you are only thirteen. There’s nothing grosser I can think of in my whole life than hearing my mom masturbate every night for two weeks to Nathan on the phone.
“Oh Nathan, Oh Nathan, Oh Nathan.”
I wanted to die.
Chapter Nineteen
Harley
My past will never stop chasing me. It’s like a demon, a dark phantom, hunting me down across the streets of New York, always ready to trip me, topple me, wrestle me to the ground. I wonder how long I will spend trying to outpace my past, trying to stay one — no, many — steps ahead of what I have done. It’s exhausting, this race I’m running and I’m crawling now, my knees scraping against the rough asphalt. I’m nowhere near the finish line.
I stare at the door to my home. The cage I was raised in. It’s a big cage, but it’s a cage still, and my mom and I have been like two tigers in a pen at the zoo. Or maybe she’s the tiger and I’m the meal. That’s how I feel as I answer my summons.
Blackmail is the gift that keeps on giving. Because it means you have something to hide. And as long as that something is hidden, you will always owe.
I owe. I owe so much. I owe her everything.
The real debt was never to Miranda. The real debt was to my mother.
I open the door to my house. My mom is in the kitchen, stirring a large saucepan. Something hardens inside me – she’s still cooking for her lover, even while she’s planning on reaming me.
“I’m making risotto,” she says in a warm voice when she sees me. But it’s not the tone that worries me. It’s what she’s not saying. Her usual greeting–you look so pretty.
I walk to the kitchen, my legs feeling as if they have ankle weights.
She’s wearing black pressed pants, a royal blue blouse and black pumps with shiny piping around the chunky heel. Her hair is blow dried like she just stepped out of a salon. Her makeup has been applied with the perfection of a Hollywood stylist, long mascared lashes, smooth powdered skin and lips outlined precisely in plum lipliner.
“I bet it’s delish,” I say, and I’m not sure how I’m forming words, but somehow they’re coming out of my mouth as I take step after dreaded step into her kitchen, sun spilling in through the windows, the counters bright and white. But it’s as if I’m being marched into the darkened, shadowy back office of a mob boss who I’ve crossed. He’ll play with the mouse, bat it around, toy with his dinner.
Before he bites.
“Do you want some?” She waves me into the kitchen, the sleeves of her blue blouse billowing as she gestures.
“No thanks. I ate.”
“Good. Then we can get down to business. Because my heart tells me I’m mistaken, but my reporter’s instincts tell me I’m not. And my reporter’s instincts have never failed me before.”
So we’re done with the niceties. The food has been offered, the greetings dispensed, and now we get down to business.
I gulp, vaguely aware that I’m shaking. I try to collect myself, to draw on the same strength I felt with Joanne, the same courage I found when I told Kristen my truths, and the same well I tapped into this morning with Trey.
She places the spoon in a silver holder, turns down the heat on the stove, and then clasps her hands, steepling her fingers together. This is Barb Coleman The Cleaner. This is the woman who confronts seedy politicians. This is the lady who will tear a lying scumbag to pieces with her pen that has the teeth of a shark.
I am in her crosshairs for the first time.
“I have sources everywhere, Harley Coleman.” Her voice is cold and cruel. “And that includes at my publishing house. And an assistant editor told me about a certain anonymously penned Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict,” she says bitterly as if the title is vinegar on her tongue. “She thought I would find them particularly interesting given my credentials in investigating call girls and sex trafficking.”
I say nothing, but I don’t need to speak because Barb Coleman is on her high and mighty soapbox.
“So the assistant showed me some of the pages she’d received for production. Naturally names had been changed, and she didn’t know who the author was. Who this poor young teenage girl was. She thought I might be interested in looking into who’d written them, and if there was any sort of foul play involved.”
I dig my nails into my fists, relying on my old tricks when I felt tempted. Now I need them to stay grounded. To make it through the inquisition alive.
“I didn’t know who the girl was either at first. I didn’t know who the girl could be who told tawdry tales to clients of masturbating in lingerie. Or who informed a poorly-endowed man that he had a big penis. And I wasn’t sure at all who this girl was who led one of her clients around on a leash,” she says in her perfectly enunciated speech, sounding like a lawyer cross-examining a reluctant witness she’s about to corner in the lie. “But then I saw other parts. Sections about how her mother had tied a red ribbon in her hair. Stories about running into her mother’s lover in the hallway. And then came the piece de resistance. The story of the carnival.”
I try to shrink into the wall, willing myself to become dust and vapor.
My mother narrows her eyes, breathes through her nostrils. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know that was you?”
My jaw drops. This is what she has to say? I stumble through an answer, saying the first thing that comes to mind. “It never occurred to me you’d see it.”
“So it was you? You’re Layla.”
I could lie. I could try to spin a new tall tale. But what’s the point? I’m at the end of the rope, and it’s time she saw that I’m not beautiful. That I am ugly too. “Yes. I am Layla. I was a teenage call girl.”