Porn Star's Daughter Ch. 16 - Epilogue

I swallowed. I wasn't sure that I wanted to hear this but I didn't know when another opportunity would present itself. "What kind of bad news?" I asked.

"Zoey would have had trouble bearing children at the best of times," she said. "The doctors said that she should never have been able to even get pregnant, especially with all the... damage. But, since she was, there was a high chance that the baby would not survive to term, and an even higher chance that she would not survive the birth.

"Obviously, Zoey refused to consider any drastic action such as abortion," my mother said. "She was just going to do what she wanted.

"That was all Zoey," my mother added. "Damn the water-missile thingies, full speed ahead."

"Oh god," I mumbled.

"Oh sweetie," my mother said, noting my reaction. She reached to stroke my cheek but stopped when she saw that she had a hand covered in soap bubbles. A dollop of suds hit me in the face, and we both couldn't help but laugh a little.

"Shanny, I hope you are okay hearing all this," she said.

Surprisingly, I was. I didn't actually have an emotional connection to Zoey. This was just a story about people I didn't know in a time I didn't belong. I hadn't entertained any associations with her as even being related to me, much less being my birth mother. As a result, it felt like I was just listening to my mother recall a story from her past.

I didn't know how to process it all beyond that, but I certainly wanted her to continue. I nodded.

"You see, you were a mixed blessing," my mother said, and then searched for the remaining small items in the bottom of the sink to finish washing. I thought her hands must be turning into prunes by this point.

"Zoey's health didn't get better, but her personality did," she said. "When Tracy realized that Zoey couldn't go out and play any more, she eventually abandoned her and found someone new to play with. Without Tracy there, Zoey started becoming easier to be around.

"I think Rod helped that, too," she added, thoughtfully.

"How so?"

She handed me the last small teacup after she rinsed it, and then pulled the plug to empty the sink. "He was there every day for her," she said. "He would go with her to the doctor's office and listen to what they would say. They kept talking about percentages, and damage recovery rates, and in general talked about things that I simply didn't understand. I could tell by the tone of their voices, though, that it was serious. When I had questions, he would answer them for me."

I thought about what she had said, but something didn't add up. "Mom," I said, "It sounds like Dad did all the right things, given the circumstances. Why have you treated him so coldly all these years?"

She frowned, thinking about the question. After a while, she said, "He was Tracy's boyfriend. I figured anyone who would sleep with that... her... was a bad person pretty much by definition. He had also gotten Zoey and Christine pregnant, and I kept thinking that he was only pretending to be a good guy. I guess once I started off by thinking he was a bad person, then nothing he did was going to prove otherwise. I know now that it was a pretty stupid way to think about it, but that's what happened."

I was shocked at how insightful my mother seemed to be about the whole thing.

"There was also the fact that I was only barely old enough to drink," she added. "I was spending all of our inheritance on Zoey's legal bills, which wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been the one to put her in that situation."

"But that wasn't really his fault," I protested. "Zoey -" I stopped, suddenly realizing that I was about to reveal that she had hurt herself by her own aggressive actions. I had seen the video myself so I knew the truth, but my mother didn't. I wished that I could sit her down and show her, once and for all, but she would never watch that video - even if her life depended upon it.

"Zoey, what?" my mother asked.

"Zoey," I said, trying to cover my tracks. "Zoey thought she knew what she was doing when she did what she did."

There, that was sufficiently vague. My mother nodded wisely, but I wasn't sure she understood what I said any more than I did.

"I suppose you're right," she said after a moment. "But I was young. I still hated Zoey for everything she did to our parents, and now I was going to have to postpone going to New York. And then things got so, so much worse."

Uh oh. This was the part of the story that I actually was dreading.

"During Zoey's second trimester things started getting pretty bad, and she wanted to spend more time with me and Rod," she said. "That was difficult, though, because things had just started taking off for me and my career. I had a boyfriend. I had done auditions with a couple of avant garde studios and had gotten an invitation to join for the fall season. Everything was coming together."

As she told me this, it was clear to see just how painful this period in time was for her. She went to a cabinet and leafed through a folder for a moment, and then pulled out the acceptance letter from one of the more prestigious dance companies in New York. Her start date was to have been the summer after my birth.

"At the same time," she went on, "your father was spending more and more time with Zoey, trying to take his responsibility as a new father seriously. I see that now. He took on another job - the construction one that led him down his career - in order to earn enough money for taking care of two new babies. I thought that if Zoey died it would be hard, but I could still pursue my career."

She looked at me suddenly. "Oh god, Shannon," she said, bringing her hand to her lips in shame. "That must sound so callous and insensitive."

"No, mom!" I said, reaching for her hand to reassure her. "I get it. You and Zoey weren't close, and she had made your life very hard. You were probably thinking that it was Zoey and Dad's problem to solve."

She nodded, grateful that I could understand what she had been going through. "Yes, that's it," she said. "I didn't like Rod, but there was nothing I could do about Zoey. Either Zoey would survive the birth and then she'd take care of her baby, or she wouldn't and then he would."

She covered her eyes. "Oh no, that sounds even worse," she said.

"Mom, it's okay," I said. "I understand."

She looked at me, hoping that I could absolve her of this guilt. "Believe me," I said. "I get it. But then what happened?"

"That's when everything happened all at once," my mother said. "It became a living nightmare."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We were preparing for you to come along, and your father was trying to spend equal time with Zoey and Christine," she said. "We needed to come up with contingencies. We knew that Zoey may not survive - she was very ill - but we still had hope. No one wanted to believe that she would actually die.

"But there was still one additional problem, and it was a big one," she said.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Christine," she said her name with a mixture of sadness and anger. "Christine expected your father to marry her. She thought that because he got her pregnant that he would forget all about Zoey and you and go take care of her and Simone instead."

I had a hard time imagining my father shirking his responsibilities like that, and said so.

"You got it," my mother said. "That's just not who he was. So Christine kept refusing to admit that she had her own responsibility. She kept putting pressure on Rod to give her things, take care of her - and that was even before Simone was born. She gave him a hard time whenever he spent time with Zoey, which was almost every day at that point.

"Then everything just seemed to... change," she said, wincing at the memory. "It turned out that Rod and Zoey actually liked each other. The more time they spent together, the more they wanted to spend time together. They started to fall in love, and really enjoyed each other's company. Zoey would tell me that she could see herself being with him, as in, forever. In fact, if Zoey had lived, I think they may have actually gotten married at some point."

Her eyes were staring into the distance, her mind working on autopilot. Suddenly, she refocused on me. "Sorry, Shannon," she said. "I got a little carried away there. What I was trying to say was that things seemed to be going okay, despite Zoey's health. No matter what, you were going to be taken care of. That was what was important."

"What about Tracy?" I asked.

My mother's face clouded over as she recalled what happened. "Tracy is a psycho," she spat. "She did everything in her power to mess everything up. At first, she pretended that nothing had changed. She was spending time getting her 'adult business' -" my mother made air quotes with her fingers - "off the ground. She even gave videos to everyone involved."

Her expression hardened. "Video tapes that Zoey paid for, mind you," she added. "When Christine and Zoey got pregnant, though, she got it into her head that she could make 'preggo porno,' as she called it," my mother said. Hearing the word porno come out of my mother's mouth was unsettling. "Of course, she wanted your father to star in it."

"Oh my god," I said, trying to picture my father's cock penetrating a space that was already occupied by a baby.

"I know, right?" my mother was incredulous. "Zoey was in and out of the hospital on almost a weekly basis, and Tracy kept pushing. She even said that the money from the new porno would help pay for the medical bills, once it sold."

"Wait, they actually made it?" I asked, disturbed at the thought.

My mother shook her head. "No, and outside of the copies that Tracy made for the actors, she never sold a single thing. It was a complete bust."

"At first, Rod was trying to please everyone," my mother said. "He was dating Tracy, but he took this parenting thing very serious. Christine went off the deep end, and began drinking and doing drugs while she was pregnant. I'm sure that Tracy had something to do with that, too.

"When Rod found out about that," my mother said, "he broke up with Tracy for good. He was already falling in love with Zoey, but that was the final straw. He told her that he needed to accept responsibility for being a father of two new babies, and he didn't think that it would be fair to Tracy. I don't think Tracy believed him, though, because she had seen what was going on between Rod and Zoey.

"Thing is, I think he meant it," my mother said, pondering. "Even so, Tracy really didn't seem to be all that bothered, I thought. Two of her friends were pregnant which really cramped her lifestyle, and her boyfriend was falling in love with Zoey. She just kinda left, which I thought was good riddance."

I thought about what Tracy had told me about how she and my father broke up. It wasn't exactly the same story given their perspectives, but everything fit.

"So what happened?" I prompted.

My mother thought for a while, trying to figure out how to explain things to me. "Like I said, Zoey was a much better person without Tracy around, and having Rod by her side made her nicer, too. The more time that I spent with her, the more we started to get better with each other."

"You reconciled?" I asked, surprised. There was a lot of bad blood that had passed between them.

"Mostly, I think," she admitted, trying to weigh her emotions from that time. "We were definitely on the mend. If she had lived, we probably could have completely fixed what was broken."

She paused for a moment, and wiped her eyes. There was a lot going on behind them that I couldn't possibly fathom. She stared down at her hands as some distant memories haunted her.

After several moments, she glanced up at me again. "The plan was that Zoey would raise you, and I would help for the first few months until I left to join the dance company," she said, glancing at the acceptance letter that had yellowed with age. "If Zoey didn't make it, your father would take you and raise you himself. We honestly didn't think that would happen, until Zoey entered her third trimester. Then everything went wrong.

"It was bad. Really bad. Zoey spent the last month in the hospital," my mother said, her eyes so wet they seemed to reflect every light source in the room. "Rod and I were there every day. I put my dance rehearsals on hold, Rod tried to take as much time off work as he could, but there were bills to pay.

"One day, the doctors pulled me aside," she said, her nose running. "They refused to talk to Rod because he wasn't family. He stood on the other side of the door, and I could see him pacing back and forth through the little window.

"The doctors told me that the baby was in a lot of danger, and that they recommended taking you out immediately," she said. Her eyes were glazed over, as if she were reliving the moment at the same time.

"I asked if that would save her life," she said, "and they said that it might, but that it was a very low chance and that I should 'prepare myself for any possibility.' The way they said it, though, I knew. I knew Zoey was going to die.

"But," she said, and wiped her eyes. "There was no other choice. This way, we could have a chance of at least saving you."

I swallowed, and didn't want to interrupt. When she paused a little too long, however, I asked, "So what happened next?"

My mother's jaw set. "We needed time," she said. "We hadn't taken the possibility of losing Zoey as serious as we needed to, so we didn't make enough preparations. There was no living will, no power of the lawyer people -"

"Power of attorney?" I asked.

"Yeah, that," she said. She was too wrapped up in her memory to be annoyed at the correction, though. "We also didn't have any papers drawn up because Zoey hadn't put Rod down as the father.

"I asked how long we had before they had to do the surgery, and they told me that it would take about two hours to prepare," she said. "Two hours. I only had two hours left with my sister. And there was no time to spend it with her."

The tears were flowing freely now, and she wasn't bothering to wipe them away with the tissues any longer.

"I went out and told Rod, and I remember he started crying," she said. "He took off trying to find someone to help him get the papers for Zoey to sign, but neither one of us knew who to ask."

Her voice hardened. "So, he called the only person he knew who had ever done any kind of legal paperwork."

A chill went up my spine. "Tracy," I said, flatly.

She nodded. "She had some experience with setting up the legal stuff for the movie. He told Tracy everything, about Zoey's condition, the surgery, the legal stuff, and begged her to help. She flat out refused.

"Fortunately, a nurse happened to overhear your father on the phone, and helped him get the papers that he needed," my mother said. "What we didn't know was that Tracy had turned around and called Christine and told her everything."

I flashed back to Tracy calling Simone immediately after having sex with me. This appeared to be a life-long character trait for her.

"She convinced Christine that if Zoey died - which was looking to be a very real possibility by that point - then your father would take you away, and Christine would be left to take care of Simone by herself," my mother explained.

I was stunned. For all the stuff that Tracy had done to me, that was just damned cold.

"Tracy had a suggestion, though," my mother said. "She pointed out that Christine had an option to make sure that didn't happen. So, while Rod was trying to get Zoey to put his name on the paper as the father, he got a phone call from Christine. She threatened that if he took you, she would put Simone up for adoption as soon as she was born. He would never see her."

That would certainly have been better for me, I thought before a wave of guilt washed over me for thinking it.

"Rod panicked, and didn't know what to do," my mother explained, and I was starting to feel this was the turning point for her feelings toward my father. "At that point, Zoey really cared for Rod. So, she begged me to take care of you instead," my mother said. She wasn't able to fight it any longer, and tears began rolling down her cheeks.

I shook my head. "Why?" I asked. "Why did she care if Christine put her baby up for adoption?"

"As I said," my mother said, grabbing a tissue. "She and Rod got close. Very close. In the short time that she was pregnant, she changed. She tried to get close to both Rod and me, and she really wanted to be there for you, too."

Something caught in my throat. I hadn't really considered Zoey as anything more than a name in a story from a long time ago - a name of a very selfish, angry girl who became a very selfish, angry young woman. My mother was still my mother, and Zoey had seemed completely detached. This was, after all, the first time that I heard Zoey actually cared about having a child at all.

My mother hung her head in shame. "I didn't want to do it," she said, not able to look at me. "So I said, 'No.' I told her that she was just as selfish as she had always been, and that it was her problem and Rod's problem, but not my problem."

She absent-mindedly touched the letter once more, as if it explained everything. It may not have assuaged her guilt, but it did seem to represent her internal struggle - it showed just what she had at stake.

"Zoey kept telling me that I didn't understand, that I couldn't understand, that if I didn't do it then Christine would take Rod's child away from him."

She looked up at me, her eyes red and swollen, but this time from anger. "Christine would give Simone to Tracy," she spat.

Oh dear lord, I thought.

The full impact of that hit me like a truck. Tracy as a mother? I had seen what she could do in a matter of weeks. What damage could she possibly do raising a child?

My mother glanced at the letter again, but this time she pushed it away from her. "When she told me that, I knew I had no choice," she said. "Before they broke up, Tracy and Rod were fighting more and more, mostly over the fact that he was working all the time and spending the rest of his time with Zoey and Christine," she said, shaking her head.

That piece fell into place. I could see it all. In Tracy's mind, if she adopted Simone then it would mean that she would always be in Rod's life. She would have used that adoption to convince Rod to marry her, so that they could be a family. All of us. Together. Problem solved.

I shuddered to think of Tracy as my mother, and how I had somehow managed to win the lottery by dodging that bullet. Hell, it wasn't a bullet, it was a water-missile thingy.

My mother's crying broke my heart. "It all happened so fast, Shanny," she said, sobbing. "She was begging me as she was being rolled into surgery. She was crying and begging me to take you and I didn't want to do it. It was the last time I was going to see her alive, and I was fighting with her."

She buried her head in her arms and wept. I stood up and went beside her, and put my arms over her shoulders. She turned and leaned into me and I let her cry for as long as she liked.

I struggled to comprehend what it must have been like for her. None of this was her fault, and she had to bear so many crosses as a result of other peoples' decisions. Your mother is a saint, my father had told me sternly. Now I understood why.

All of this put both my mother and my father in a new light. Both of them were manipulated by Tracy into situations beyond their control, left to pick up the pieces of shattered lives and newborn babies, all while she had no consequences to suffer at all.