The Thrill of It

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.”

It’s as if I slapped her. She raises her hands in the air, gesturing wildly as her tirade comes tumbling down.

“How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve gone through. After the way your father left me. After all I’ve done to expose this kind of horridness. There are girls all over the world who are forced, coerced, raped and brutalized to become prostitutes.” Her crispness falls away and her voice begins to break. But the tears that start flowing are tears of her own self-righteousness. Because I have made a hypocrite of the great Barb Coleman. “And I have fought and searched and investigated and done everything to expose that kind of crime. And to learn you willingly walked into it? You chose this life. You enjoyed it. You wanted it. You rolled around in it like a pig in shit.”

With that, she might as well have slammed a fist inside me, jamming hard on my guts.

The pain spills through every corner of my body. I am punched, beaten and torn into a million pieces with those awful words. I am shaking and sobbing as tears rain down my cheeks. I cover my face with my hands so she can’t see me. My whole body is wracked, and my heart, my lungs, my stomach, my spleen, every single part of me is quivering and twisting in on itself. Weeds are crawling up inside me, pulling, tugging, ripping, and turning my body into the dark shameful thing it is.

I feel her hand on me. Angrily peeling my fingers away from my face. She is so much stronger than me. She always has been.

“You have no right to cry,” she tells me, practically smearing the words on me through her own sanctimonious, superior tears. “What you did was disgusting.” She grips my chin, forces me to look at her. “And I don’t know how to ever forgive you.”

Another blow to the chest.

“Forgive me? You have to forgive me? I did it for you,” I shout.

“Oh! Don’t even go there. I’ve heard every backpedaling cover-up there ever was. There is nothing you can tell me that will make what you did okay. I’d be damn curious though how you were caught. Which one of your clients had something on you?”

“That’s what you think happened?”

She crosses her arms over her chest and nods, her eyes narrowed to slits. I can feel the fury building inside her. The storm clouds are growing darker, swirling closer. “That’s always how it happens.” Then like a hiss, she adds, “Layla.”

As if it burns her tongue.

Oh fine. She wants to play it like this, then I will roll up my pig-in-shit sleeves and fight harder. “You want to know?” I spit back at her. “You really want to know?”

“Sure. Try me.”

“Here’s your tip, The Cleaner,” I say, holding my hands out wide, taunting her. “Miranda is my editor too. That make things a bit clearer?”

She raises her eyebrows. She’s not putting two and two together yet. “Miranda? My Miranda? My editor? The woman who edits my articles and publishes my books? How is that even possible?”

“Yes. Mom. Your editor. Your Miranda. And what else do you share with Miranda?” I toss out, wagging my fingers in a come-and-get-it gesture. “It’s not that difficult. See if you can connect the dots.”

She clasps her hand over her mouth. “No,” she croaks. “Please tell me this has nothing to do with Phil.”

I nod, clenching my teeth. Then the tables are turned and I deliver the punishing blow. “It has everything to do with her husband, Phil. The man you were fucking. The man you had an affair with. The affair you told me every dirty, sordid detail like you thought I wanted to know how he liked it with you. That he liked to take you rough. That he’d bend you over the kitchen table. That he pulled your hair. You screwed your editor’s husband, and you thought you were smarter than her. You thought she’d never know because you were in love with him and because you knew how to cover your tracks. But guess what? She found out. And I saved your ass from her.”

My mom’s affair with Phil began last summer. I pegged it instantly.

Phil and Miranda were over for dinner along with a big group of publishing types. My mom’s agent, her agent’s assistant, publicists from the house and on and on.

The living room was abuzz with music, James Taylor or some other seventies singer type that all the adults loved. So much wine was in the air you practically smell the grapes. Drained bottles of reds and whites lined the dining room table and kitchen counter. Miranda was drunk already. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to keep them open, slumping down in a chair at the dining room table.

As I checked to see if I had any texts from Cam about a job, my mother sailed into the kitchen to open another bottle.

A Syrrah, she proclaimed.

“Let me help you, Barb,” Phil said. He stood up from the table and joined her, reaching for the bottle, placing both his hands on top of my mother’s.

“Why thank you, Phil,” she purred and they locked eyes.

She leaned in close to him, her shoulder brushing up against his as he opened the Syrrah. “You have such strong hands,” she said.

I watched as he raised an eyebrow. No one else was paying attention. They were too drunk. Then he said, “I can do a lot with these hands.”

“I bet you can.”

A few weeks later she told me she’d fallen for him. She grabbed my hands at dinner, like she had something incredibly important to say, and admitted she was in love with her editor’s husband. “I feel terrible. So terrible. But yet, he’s the first man I’ve truly fallen in love with since your father so long ago.”

“That’s great, Barb. But he’s married, you know. Maybe you want to look elsewhere?”

She didn’t look elsewhere and their affair continued into the fall. Every time I saw her, she’d drop a new detail. The necklace he bought for her in Soho, the dirty text message he sent the night before, the multiple orgasms he gave her while pounding her on the table. You know, the usual details any daughter wants to hear from her mom.

As they became more entwined, they grew increasingly careless, and soon Miranda started to become suspicious.

One morning while my mom was still fast asleep I dropped by to grab a book I’d left behind. I heard Phil pad out of the bedroom to make a call. He rarely spent the night, but Miranda was in London for business so he was free to come and go. Or so he thought.

“Hi darling,” he said quietly into the phone.

Pause.

“Oh, I’m just getting up and making some coffee.”

Pause.

“I didn’t hear the home phone ring.”

Pause.

“Five times? You called five times. I took a really long shower.”

Pause.

“Sometimes I shower before I make coffee. You know that’s true, darling. Anyway, how are you? How is London? I miss you so very much,” he said.

Idiot, I thought.

He was trying to nip it in the bud, allay her fears. But women are smart and Miranda is one of the smartest of all. Her hackles were raised and she wasn’t going to lower them on account of a shower-before-I-make-coffee cover-up from her philandering husband.

I tried to warn my mom. I tried to let her know she might want to cool it with him. But she would hear none of it. She was madly in love and nothing was going to stop her. Not even the private detective I spotted outside her building the next morning, leaning ever so casually against the building across the street. He held a blue cardboard coffee cup from the bodega around the corner and the New York Daily News, which he pretended to read. He had a mustache, naturally. I even nodded at him. He pretended not to notice and looked away.

As I walked to the subway that November morning, crunching on the last fallen leaves of the season, I counted off the things I knew for sure about the situation.

I knew my mom was going to get caught.

I knew I could prevent her from getting caught.

I also knew I didn’t want her to get caught. She depended on Miranda. She needed Miranda. She revered Miranda. As much as my mom made me crazy, she was still my mom and I would take a bullet for her.

I stayed at her house the next night, rose early, dressed in my sexiest schoolgirl costume, and timed my exit from the house to line up with his morning escape.

I walked out with Phil, chatted with him, linked my arm through his, and smiled flirtatiously at him. He probably thought it odd that his lover’s teenage daughter was being overly friendly. When we reached the corner of Central Park West, out of view of my mom, I grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him in for a long, hungry kiss.

I was going for broke. I had no clue if he’d push me away. All I knew was that cameras were snapping our picture, so I hoped to hell he’d like the way I kissed.

He did.

He liked it a lot. He kissed me back hard, twining his hands in my hair like I was his new lover.

I detested every single nanosecond of that kiss with Phil. I loathed everything about him. The way he turned on Miranda. The way he turned on my mom.

But I didn’t let on. I knew how to pretend. I pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell her. We’ll do this again tomorrow,” I said.

“Come to my office later today. I can’t wait that long.”

“Of course,” I said, figuring more cold, hard evidence would only help. The private detectives followed me that afternoon as I walked into his building, rode up in the elevator, and visited him for a make-out session that necessitated the longest shower I ever took in my life. I needed to wash off his disgusting.

But I sucked it up. I took one for the team. I led him into the trap he didn’t know was being set.

What I didn’t bargain on was that Miranda would have her guys keep following me. That’s how she learned about all the other men Layla had lined up.

My mom shakes her head in denial, shock taking over. Her eyes are wide and glassy, and she can’t speak at first.

Then the smoke detector buzzes, a sharp bleeping directly above us. The risotto has charred. I grab a potholder, remove it from the heat and turn off the stove.

“Miranda was on to you. Miranda knew Phil was having an affair. She had private detectives outside the house. She was going to bust you. And I didn’t want you to get caught. So I took him from you. That’s why he stopped seeing you, Barb. Because he was busted. Because I walked into her trap. On purpose. I got caught for you. I did it so she would never know you were the one screwing her husband,” I say as I toss the potholder on the counter.

She parts her lips to speak but no words come out.

“That’s why I’m writing the book. Because she kept following me. Because she figured out that I was a working girl, and then she blackmailed me into writing the memoirs, and she told me if I didn’t do it she’d tell you everything. So now you know everything. You know I’m a whore, and a liar, and I kissed Phil, and even made out with him to make sure the evidence pointed to me, not you. And you also know I saved your ass and she has no clue you were involved. That the great Barb Coleman who sends scumbags to jail could turn around and do something shady herself. And she never has to know. Because I’m the pig in shit. Right, mom?”

She gasps, then sinks down to the kitchen tiles, hanging in a low crouch before she flops to the floor, completely supine, one hundred percent horizontal. This is her rock bottom, right? This is when she’ll say she’s sorry. When she’ll thank me in some weird way for saving her.

But that’s not what she does.

“I can’t believe you kissed my Phil,” she moans. “I can’t believe you’re a whore. How could you do this to me?”

I blink twice, shocked that this is the part that bothers her most. That I did this to her.

But I don’t have a chance to answer because someone knocks on the door. My mom doesn’t make a move to get it.

“Do you want me to answer it?”

She waves a hand in the air like she can’t handle the question. The decision is up to me. I walk to door and look through the peephole.

“It’s Neil.”

She snaps her head up. “Don’t go near him. Don’t you even think about going near him,” she says and stands.

Well, I guess that settles that. I am officially the Coleman slut and I can’t be trusted with her boyfriends.

“He’s all yours, mother.” I grab the handle and yank open the door.

I run to the park nearby, sink down onto the first bench I see, grab my notebook from my purse, and turn to a blank page after the story of the dogs in the snowy moonlight.

I write words that are more awful than any I wrote for Miranda.

I am nineteen years old, I have kissed twenty-four guys, and my mother thinks I’m a whore.