Splendor(81)

Tessa paused to take a tiny sip of the brandy that Ian had insisted she drink. She’d never tried the stuff before, and while the first couple of sips had made her shudder, there was no denying that the undoubtedly expensive liquor was beginning to warm her up.

“Mom was a writer,” she continued. “She actually had several books published and the royalties she got helped support us for a while. Then she started falling deeper into depression and could barely function most days, much less write. And when she did try writing during her manic episodes, it was just a bunch of nonsense, nothing that made sense or that she could ever hope to have published.”

Tessa and Ian were sitting in his library, one of the coziest rooms in his house. He’d started a fire since she had felt chilled, and he was now sitting on the opposite end of the sofa, giving her the space she needed as she visibly struggled to tell him about her life.

“You never tried to find your father?” he inquired gently.

She shook her head. “There was really no place to even begin to do that. One of the few times in my mother’s life when she was actually lucid enough to talk about it, she admitted that I’d been conceived during an especially manic period of her life. The – the research I did later referred to it as hypersexuality. In other words, she slept with a lot of different men in a very short period of time. Any one of them could have been my father.”

Ian gave a brief nod. “And I’ll just assume she never bothered to learn any of their names?”

“Yes, you’d be correct with that assumption. So, no, there’s absolutely no chance of ever learning who my father is. It was just my mother and I, since she’d lost contact with all of her family as well.”

He touched her cheek softly. “Was there no one else then to help you, Tessa? No friends, neighbors, a doctor perhaps?”

“No. We moved around – a lot. When Mom got into one of her manic phases, she’d be full of all these plans, ideas for a new book, and most of those times she’d decide we had to move somewhere different so she could find inspiration. We lived all over the Southwest – Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, west Texas. We’d move at least once a year, sometimes as many as three or four times.”

He frowned. “That couldn’t have had a positive effect on your schooling.”

Tessa gave a bitter little laugh. “It was absolute hell, as one could imagine. I was always the new girl in class, having to play catch up with what all the other kids were learning. I was constantly getting used to a new teacher, a new book, a different way of learning. My grades suffered, and it was usually a struggle just to keep up. And my mother certainly wasn’t any help with studying or schoolwork. When she was manic she’d actually encourage me to skip school so that we could go out and have fun that day instead. And of course when she was down – well, she couldn’t even look after herself, much less take care of me.”

Ian gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. “I’m assuming that due to all your moving around that it was difficult to make friends. Is that why you had no one to help you?”

“Partly, yes. I was shy to begin with, so it took me a long time to make friends. And just when I’d finally begin to settle in, my mother would uproot us again and I’d have to start over. So there were never any long term friendships, people I could count on. And then, as I got older, I’d start hearing horrible stories about foster care, especially for kids my age. I was afraid that if I approached a teacher or a doctor and told them about my mother that they would separate us – that I’d wind up in foster care and my mother in some sort of mental institution. So I – I began to look after her as soon as I was old enough.”

“What?” Ian looked and sounded shocked. “How is that even possible, Tessa? How old were you?”

She shrugged. “Maybe seven or eight. When she was in one of her down phases, I’d try to get her to eat, encourage her to get up and about. I learned early on how to look after myself – fixing meals, getting to and from school, even doing the laundry. I was terrified someone would take me away, Ian. My mother might have been sick, but she was all I had.”

“Take another sip of your brandy, darling,” he urged. “I’m sure this all must be upsetting for you to relive.”

Tessa drank a bit more before continuing. “Things got tougher as I grew older and my mother got sicker. When she was manic she’d usually be able to find some sort of job – waitressing, a cashier, a hotel maid. There was never much money, barely enough to keep us going. But when she was down, she couldn’t work, basically just slept most of the day. We – we lived on welfare during those times, sometimes in homeless shelters, sometimes in our car.”