Chapter 46: Sorting Things Out

Wednesday, December 26, 1984

Jas and I were up around eight-thirty. We again resisted the temptation to break in the bed, but it was a bit of a near thing.

Camille had breakfast on the table when we got up. Andrew and Cammie were up as well. I didn’t see any sign of Francis, but he might well have been at work. Today wasn’t a holiday, after all.

Jas and I both gave Cammie hugs.

“How are you?” Jas asked.

Cammie hesitated, then said, “Better.”

“You’re sure?” Jas said.

Cammie nodded and said, “I am. I’m sure. Not all better or anything, but ... I get it. I’m angry, but I’m not going to let it make me feel bad about myself.”

“Good!” Jas said.

“Definitely!” I said.

Camille shook her head a bit.

“It’s all such a shame. I think about what it would mean to me to do something so bad I was cut out of Jasmine’s life, and ... that would be awful.”

“Yeah, well, they should’ve thought about that!” Cammie said, definitely with a bitter edge to it.

Camille just nodded for a few seconds, then said, “Yes. Yes, they should have.”

Maybe ‘better’ was true, but today was relative to a very bad day. I figured Carly Brewer would have her work cut out for her.

Speaking of...

“Have you called Doctor Brewer yet?” I said.

Cammie shook her head.

“I will. Today, I mean! Thanks for asking, though. I thought about dodging it, but it wouldn’t be good for me.”

“Good,” Jas said. “I know she’s really helping.”

We moved on to other subjects. There was no point pushing at Cammie. She was doing better, I thought, but this was likely going to take a fair bit of time to come to terms with.

Angie and Paige came over around noon. The plan was for us to go out to lunch, but Paige grabbed me and (nearly literally) dragged me off to Jasmine’s room. Once the door was closed, she rounded on me, standing just a few inches away.

“Why are you defending Cammie’s dad?” she growled. “I know you hate him!”

“I’m not...”

“You said he was just ‘acting out’ and ‘hurting’ and...” she said, still growling.

I shook my head.

“Did you talk about this with Angie?”

“I tried,” she said. Her tone gave out a bit, though, when she said, “She didn’t want to talk about it.”

Her tone suggested she might not have pressed Angie much, or even asked the right way. I suspected Angie would want to talk about it if asked the right way.

“You should,” I said. “She has insights I don’t.”

“I’ll try, but that doesn’t answer anything. Especially not why you are defending him.”

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re not really mad at me, so stop making me think you’ve got a knife hidden somewhere and are just looking for a chance to use it.”

“I’ll cut you!” she said, growling, but this time she really couldn’t keep it up.

After a few seconds, she said, “Fine!” and sat down.

“So...” I said, joining her on the edge of the bed, but not too close. “First, I meant what I said. So did Angie. He’s hurting. When people are hurting, they often lash out, because it’s easier to blame someone for your hurting than accept you’re the problem.”

“But that’s defending him!” she said.

I shook my head.

“It’s understanding him. What he did was still awful. The thing is, if Cammie — or you! — went off and tried to ‘retaliate,’ what happens?”

“Hopefully, we hurt him!”

I shook my head again.

“No. You give him evidence he was right.”

“I don’t...” she said.

Then she paused, blushed a bit, and said, “I ... you’re right.”

“The whole thing was intended to get him attention. Denying him attention is the best way to retaliate.”

She slowly nodded.

“I ... I see that,” she said, a bit quietly. “When you put it that way, I mean. It’s ... I want to retaliate!”

“What I want is for Cammie to be happy. She’s not going to be happy if she’s locked in a perpetual war with her parents. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ works, but they have to stay out of sight. Giving him attention keeps him in sight. He’ll just do more.”

“What if denying him attention makes him redouble his efforts?” she said.

“Then we’re kinda screwed, but we would’ve gotten there anyway.”

“I guess so. It sucks, you know?”

“It really does. Also, and for the record, I don’t hate Joseph Clarke,” I said.

She blinked.

“Coulda fooled me!” she said.

“No, really,” I said. “I briefly did, but now ... now he’s just someone I want out of my life until and unless there’s some value to him being there. Hating him means I’m emotionally involved with him. It takes effort on my part. Hate is active. The opposite of hate isn’t love, it’s indifference. Hate and love are both active.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding slowly. “That makes sense.”

“For me, it’s ... well, people should feel what they feel, first. If you hate something, hate it! That’s fine. But understand why you feel that way and what it’s doing to you. Joseph Clarke probably couldn’t care less if I hated him. If he did care, my guess is it would make him feel proud about being so ‘righteous’ that ‘sinners’ hate him. But it would weigh me down.”

“That makes sense, too,” she said, nodding a bit to herself.

“Look ... when I first got here, and I first ‘met’ Angie in the hospital, we got to talking about her mother. At that time, she wouldn’t even use the name ‘Sharon.’ She truly hated Sharon then, and I did, too, for a while. She’d hurt my sister! But, then, you start to learn things, step back from your initial feelings, and realize hating her is giving her power over you. Then you realize Sharon’s a victim, too. Maybe a willing victim — maybe an eager victim, even! — but still a victim. I only know that because we didn’t cut off lines of communication and tried to understand.”

She nodded along with me.

I continued, saying, “The thing is, I don’t know Joseph Clarke at all. Mostly, he’s just been ‘Cammie’s awful dad.’ And, I mean, the things I know all support that. I don’t want to get to know him better, either. But he’s mostly out of Cammie’s life. My emotional energy goes to her. And Jas, Angie, you, Mel, and so forth. I don’t care if he’s hurting. What I do care about is what gets Cammie feeling better.”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “I think this is one of those places where I grudgingly bow to your experience. Cuz, you know, me at eighteen just wants to punch him in the nose a few times.”

“I’ve had my moments like that.”

She giggled a bit, suddenly.

“It occurs to me that it’s way easier when the guy being all ‘mature’ and ‘experienced’ is also the same age as me. If you were ... your age...”

She grinned a bit more.

“ ... I’d be all, ‘What does he know? He’s ancient!’”

“It does come in handy sometimes, I think.”

She smiled and hugged me.

“Thanks! I wanted to talk through things. It just felt weird, that’s all!”

“Maybe it is the age thing. It usually takes some experience to realize that hating someone is about you, not them. Doesn’t bother them at all, unless they care what you think or you have the power to hurt them. If you do, and you use that power, you might be the problem, not them.”

“Which means I need to think very carefully before I burn anyone’s house down,” she said. “Even really sucky people!”

“Definitely,” I said. “That will bother them, but it’ll also probably cause you some grief.”

“I can cover my tracks!”

“I suspect that’s what they all say — right until the nice men with the handcuffs show up.”

She giggled, then hugged me again.

“I love you, you know? Not like I love Angie, not like Jas loves you, but I really love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said, hugging right back. “Which works well for both of us, because...”

“Some day we’ll most likely be in-laws,” she said.

“Seems very likely!” I agreed.

“Thanks, Steve.”

“Anytime! I’m always here for you.”

She smiled.

“That’s the best thing. It’s not just you, but ... yeah. Living with people who I know will always be there for me ... that’s special.”

“It is for me, too.”

She stopped and blinked.

“Wait! I mean ... that’s true, right? I mean, compared to your past. It is special for you!”

I nodded slowly.

“It’s not like I think about it every day, but ... yeah. I don’t have to question whether the people I live with have my back or want to knife me in the back.”

“Honestly, I knew my parents always had my back. Just ... not always the way I wanted them to. But you, and Angie, and Cammie have all not had that. I mean, not parents for you and Angie, but ... well, you know what I mean.”

I nodded, saying, “At various points, yeah. I had it for the most years, but Cammie is the longest in relative terms. Angie maybe had it the worst overall.”

She sighed.

“I gotta think about that more. It goes under my radar. Angie’s so together most of the time, and with Cammie it was always just something to worry about. Until it wasn’t, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding.

She bit her lip a bit.

“That’s ... and no, I’m not calling you a father figure or anything — cuz that would be awkward! — but it’s kind of a ‘life lesson,’ I think. A lot of things are just ‘something to worry about,’ and it’s easy to imagine they won’t happen. Then one of them actually happens, and it freaks you out.”

I nodded. “That’s a good way to put it. Over time, you get more used to the occasional thing that could go wrong actually going wrong.”

She nodded slowly.

“I’ve gotta think about that. Like ... a lot!”

I just smiled.

She gave me a big hug.

“Thanks, Steve! Again, I mean.”

“You’re most welcome.”

“We’d better get back out there before they think we’re fucking,” she said, grinning.

“I think they’d have figured out we weren’t from the lack of loud happy noises.”

“I can keep quiet!” she said, grinning.

“We were together in the RV quite a while, so I know that.”

She grinned again.

“Good!”

When we came out, Jas said, “Jess called. We invited her to join us for tacos. I’m supposed to call her when we actually go to Rico’s.”

She tapped her watch playfully.

“Now would be a good time,” I said.

“So would a while ago!” Angie said. “I’m hungry!”

Jas called Jess, and fifteen minutes later we were getting settled at Rico’s. The place was very quiet, but Rico himself was working. He came out, said hi, and said business was great most of the time, but slacked off a lot during the holidays. He thanked us again for talking the place up with Memorial students and said they were a big chunk of his business.

We talked with him for a bit, then ordered.

“So...” Jas said, grinning at Jess. “Gonna spill any secrets?”

Jess giggled.

“Nah,” she said. “You’ll find out in the spring. I’m not sure when, yet. Probably before your spring break, but the network is messing with the schedule. There are some breaks during the spring. Plus, sometimes they run episodes out of filming order, and this might be one of those times.”

“It’s good?” Cammie said.

“In my totally unbiased, completely humble opinion, it’s great!” Jess said, grinning. “Seriously, I don’t see what’s not to like about it. It was weird watching myself when they played things back, but it was fine. I kinda got used to it, and I think it helped me get better. The other things are: everyone’s learning their lines as they go, the writers are changing things, we’re seeing what people respond to, and so forth.”

Angie nodded.

“So, not much at all like what we were doing?”

“Yeah,” Jess said, chuckling a bit. “Rehearsal? What’s that? We did a table read of the script, then started acting, then redid takes if one was off or if the writers tweaked something. They can’t afford to spend a lot of time in retakes, but sometimes stuff just goes wrong. Someone breaks character or can’t hold back a reaction that’s out of character or whatever.”

“You enjoyed it?” Paige asked.

“Oh, heck, yes! I mean, it was a lot of work. Sure, it’s only a bit over twenty minutes of actual screen time, but you work your butt off to get those twenty minutes done. But I loved it! I can totally see doing it as a career, given the right roles.”

Rico rang the bell for our tacos, so we paused to fetch them.

When we got back, I said, “Any news on that?”

“My agent is thrilled I have a credit!” Jess said, grinning. “One is much better than none! There’s nothing on the horizon immediately, but she says she’s got some leads. I mean, you all know there’s a lot of luck involved. Some people go from nothing to stardom, others are in a lot of things but never as more than bit parts or secondary characters.”

We all nodded. That was pretty obvious.

“We’ll all be on the edge of our seats!” Cammie said. “Even if we don’t watch much TV! Which, honestly, we don’t.”

“Yeah. When was the last time we watched any TV series in the house?” Angie said. “I think it’s only been when we’ve been flipping through channels on our way to something else.”

“It’s a pretty accessible episode for someone who doesn’t know the show, I think,” Jess said.

“That’s good!” Paige said. “Since we won’t!”

“Except maybe two of us,” Jas said, rolling her eyes a bit.

“Maybe guilty?” Angie said, blushing.

“I actually didn’t watch many TV series in college,” I said.

“So you’re not changing everything!” Paige said, pointing her finger at me.

“Never said I was,” I said. “Just most of it.”