His Revenge Baby: 50 Loving States, Washington Read online

  Dad stops for a second to assess the situation, then faster than you can say “ratings gold,” he’s in the mix, too. Showing his true street nature and throwing punches right alongside Dixon, like a man who’s been leashed up in his gilded cage for way too long.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” I scream. The knowledge that I could hurt the baby is the only thing keeping me out of the fray.

  In a burst of strategy, I get in front of the camera, blocking the shot. “He has a head injury. Please stop! Please stop rolling and make them stop fighting!!!” I scream loud enough for the entire legal department of VMH to hear in their matching Brentwood homes.

  Me breaking the fourth wall and pretty much ruining the take is Sandy’s cue to act like an actual human. “Okay, that’s enough, Curtis!” she informs my father. “We need Woods out of this fight.”

  Like an impeccably trained actor, C-Mello immediately stops fighting and starts yelling. “Okay, okay shut this shit down right now. This supposed to be a celebration. What the fuck you all doing fighting up in here?”

  Dixon’s uncle, whose nose is pretty much bleeding and broken, replies, “You think I’m going to listen to you? You ain’t nothing but a…” And that’s when Uncle Fred drops another N-bomb on my dad.

  Having grown up on the mean but mostly black streets of Compton, I realize at that moment that the well-known rapper may not have ever been called that particular word in his life by an actual white Southerner.

  Dad squints at the bloody nosed biker and his voice drops about two registers deeper than I’ve heard it in over a decade as he asks, “What did you just call me?”

  “He has amnesia!” I yell, running to get between the two factions before they can start fighting again. “He has amnesia. I don’t know what you all are so mad at him about, but whatever it is, he doesn’t remember. So please stop this before you seriously hurt him. Please!”

  Mason, who was just gearing up to throw another punch at Dixon now that Colin is finally off his back, lets his arm drop.

  “What?” he asks.

  I would have done anything to not have this go down with cameras rolling. Anything. But my reality life and my real life have finally collided and I find myself with no choice but to step forward and explain, on camera, for all of America to hear: “I don’t know who you are, but whatever you believe this man has done to you is a mistake. He didn’t steal your money. He has amnesia. He presented in my hospital a few months ago with no recollection of who he is or why he was in West Virginia.”

  Mason steps back, both fist uncurling as he asks, “That true, D. You don’t got any memory of me? Or you?”

  Dixon just looks at him, fists still raised. But he admits, “You’re old.”

  Before Mason can get offended like Colin did, I explain, “That’s his way of saying he knows you have a place in his past, but he doesn’t remember who you are or what you mean to him. When we first met he called me new. In fact, everyone he’s met has been new up until tonight.”

  “I bet. You’re real new,” Mason snarls at me. Then he turns back to Dixon. “Tell me you didn’t really marry her like we heard on the news.”

  I peek over at Dixon. Considering how his family is taking this news, this might be a good time for him to confess that we’re not legally married, just promised.

  But Dixon glares at his cousin, brow pulled low. “I don’t care what kind of kin you are to me. She’s my wife, and if you say another word against her, I promise I will end you.”

  For a full second, Mason only stares back at him, mouth agape. Not with anger, I now realize, watching him watch Dixon, but with true confusion. As if Dixon has just said the most preposterous thing he’s ever heard.

  “You cannot feel that way about her, D. You cannot stay with her,” he explains like Dixon is a slow child. “That is not an option for you.”

  “Why, because you said so?” Dixon asks in a way that doesn’t leave much in the way of doubt about his unwillingness to do anything his cousin says.

  Mason shakes his head. “No, dickweed! Because you’re the president of our motorcycle gang, the Southern Freedom Knights.”

  Oh no, I think, he’s the leader of a gang. And that’s all I’m thinking in the moment.

  Forgive me. This is a lot to take in, following the chaos of the fight and all the jaw-dropping reveals. That Woods’ name is really Dixon. That he’s related by blood to one of biggest singers in country music. That he’s apparently the head of—if Mason is any indicator—a really gnarly, redneck motorcycle gang.

  So maybe you can see why it takes so long for the other shoe to drop. Why I don’t get the implication of his and his cousin’s names until my dad says, “Wait a minute, you talking about that fucked up white supremacist gang? Them Southern Freedom Knights?”

  “Yeah, them Southern Freedom Knights,” Dixon’s uncle answers without any embarrassment whatsoever. Then he turns his horrible gaze back to Dixon to say, “We don’t believe in race-mixing of any kind. In fact, the only way any of us would agree to be with one of her kind,” he jerks his head at me, “is if he had a goddamn case of amnesia.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The world spins.

  Not because I’m pregnant.

  This isn’t another fainting spell, but the kind of mental whiplash you get when a ride spinning so fast one way suddenly decides to go in the opposite direction. A sickening reversal from when John Doe kissed me in my apartment, and made every wish I wouldn’t have admitted to harboring—being known only as a doctor by somebody, being kissed for real, not for ratings, experiencing actual attraction for the very first time—come true.

  Our story, the story I thought would be wrapped up with a happily ever after bow when we left for Seattle in two days, unravels as my world spins backwards. And this time, when the spinning stops, I’m not a doctor falling hard for an amnesia patient who needs my help, but a crazy reality star who has let the unthinkable into her heart. Into her womb…

  “No,” I whisper, even as I look at him and see in his eyes that this concept is not new. That it is, in fact, old.

  “Doc,” he whispers. Then stops, wincing as if something painful is happening inside his head. “I don’t know…I don’t understand. But I don’t care what they say, I love you and I want to be with you.”

  Sandy has been a producer for too many years. She must have pulled out her phone and started researching as soon as Mason started talking, because she’s suddenly standing beside me. Silently shoving a phone into my hands, then quickly stepping back so the camera can get a clean reaction shot.

  On her phone, Dixon is dressed in what my mother would call a Sunday Suit. He’s clean cut with the kind of neat, contoured pompadour one associates with upstanding Christian men. My mom would totally approve…

  If he weren’t also waxing poetically and convincingly about subjects so vile, I drop the phone only a minute into it.

  “What the fuck is this?” Dad says as I cover my mouth for fear I will throw up all over my evening gown.

  “Oh my God…Oh my God…” I say. Still not understanding anything, but somehow getting everything. The mystery of who he is has finally been solved. In under two minutes of YouTube footage.

  I look at Woods—no Dixon, as in the freaking Mason Dixon line. His name, and his cousin’s, and all the implications are suddenly as clear to me as a good-bye song in a musical.

  The man standing in front of me is shaking his head like he doesn’t understand any of this. But the man on the fallen phone is steadily extolling his viewers to believe, as he and the Southern Knights of Freedom do, in the separation of races.

  “That’s not me,” Dixon insists, his voice harsh with emotion. “He looks like me and he sounds like me. And what he’s saying—that’s old. I can feel that now. But he’s not me, Doc…”

  He reaches out for me and I scream, “Don’t touch me! Oh my God, don’t touch me…!”

  And though I’m the one screaming, the one who just found out th
e guy she fell in love with is the very well-spoken leader of a white supremacist motorcycle gang, he’s the one who looks like he’s about to cry. “Doc, no…you’ve got to listen to me. You’ve got to—”

  “She don’t got to do nothing but get the hell out of here,” my father answers in my stead. “Sandy, cut them mother fucking cameras.”

  “But this is a rating wonder bomb,” Sandy starts. “When the network sees this, they’ll renew your contracts for sure. You’ll be able to name your price—”

  “I said cut them!” Dad yells at her, his face blazing with 100% real anger.

  With a disgusted sound, Sandy gives the hand signal and the op lowers the camera.

  “C’mon, baby,” Dad says, putting a protective arm around me and starting toward the door.

  But Dixon gets in front of us. “No! She is my wife!” he says to my dad. “She is carrying my baby.”

  “What!?!?” both Dad and Dixon’s uncle roar.

  And fuck orders, the op raises the camera and starts rolling again.

  Just in time to watch Dixon fall to his knees in front of me.

  “What are you doing?” his uncle demands. “Get off your knees. We done told you how it is. How dare you defile yourself like this over a…!”

  Yet another n-word drop, but I’m not sure Dixon even hears the hate his uncle is spewing, his eyes are so intense on me.

  “Doc! Doc!” he implores desperately. “It’s still you and me. I still love you more than anything. I know this is scary. What I used to be is scary. But you’ve got to believe in me, in us.”

  My stomach lurches. I’m torn between so many feelings. I don’t want to be on television anymore. I really, really don’t want to be anywhere near it. Dixon is a monster—a true monster by both belief and trade. And me…I’m the stupid, stupid woman who fell in love with him. Whose heart can’t help but squeeze at the desperate tone of his words, even though I completely understand who he is now.

  Tears well up in my eyes, but this time I don’t let them fall.

  I’m a reality star. I’m a doctor. And now it’s time to stop being a fool.

  I uncover my mouth and pick the tattooed behemoth he was apparently named beside out of the small crowd. “Hold him back. Hold him back, or he’ll try to follow me.”

  Then in a sweep of heavy evening gown, I head to the door without waiting for their responses.

  But Mason, I can tell, is a very, very good soldier for his cause. I hear but don’t see him grab Dixon in some kind of chokehold clinch that makes his, “No, Doc! Doc! Doc!” come out strangled.

  Yet Dixon still manages to yell after me. So loud, I can hear him begging me not to go, yelling how much I mean to him, how much he loves me. How that’s his baby I’m carrying.

  “You two belong with me! We’re a family! You said you would be my family,” I hear him yell as I run for the elevators.

  Then and long after the elevator doors have closed.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  In the days that follow what a few online sites dubbed the “Penthouse Showdown,” I’ve read enough to last me a century about Dixon Fairgood.

  I now know that the Southern Freedom Knights are an organization so old, they started off on horseback and count themselves among the very first motorcycle “clubs” in the country, begun right after World War I. Dixon’s father was actually pretty low on the club’s totem pole, and by all accounts a reckless alcoholic who could barely hold down a job, even a criminal one. He never even made it onto the SFK’s board. But Dixon’s maternal grandfather was the club’s president, and his father’s brother was the club’s Vice President. They along with the rest of the board recognized something in Dixon from a very young age, and he’d basically been groomed to become the president after his grandfather .

  Unlike my father who’s built an entire bragadocious rap career from a one-year stint selling drugs on the street, the Southern Freedom Knights are actually real-deal criminals. The Feds and the state of Tennessee have them under investigation for all types of shit: from selling meth to running guns.

  Colin and Dixon’s father actually did a few stints in jail, but the authorities could never make anything stick.

  In any case, Dixon Fairgood had been doing a much better job in his inherited position. No blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan babies to show for it by the age of twenty-eight, but that speech, which he’d made at a “Whites Right Rally” a few years back, with his grandfather’s encouragement had gone viral. And he’d apparently done a much better job than his grandfather of connecting and working with disparate supremacist gangs throughout the country. The SFK has been allegedly running their various lucrative underground businesses investigation-free ever since Dixon took over.

  Colin might not have liked him very much, even going so far as to declare in one interview he didn’t consider him so much a brother as a man who’d been tragically brainwashed. However, there had been no doubt in either Dixon’s supporters or detractors minds that he’d eventually go on to be the most famous leader the SFK has ever had.

  “Dangerously likeable” one left-leaning political blog described him. Handsome, well-spoken, and smart enough not to “adopt the look,” so he blended in with the rest of the populace. A few bloggers spoke of the possibility of him going the David Duke route and eventually running for public office. Sadly, in the rural part of Tennessee the club called home, it wouldn’t be hard for him to find enough like-minded people to garner a congressional seat.

  And no wonder he’d loved the sweats I’d gotten him. According to the many pictures and reports swirling around on the internet, he’d only worn two uniforms: a full suit or full leathers.

  Being able to walk around in sweats all day probably blew his mind.

  My mama had warned her stadium congregations in more than one sermon that the devil came in many disguises, and in Dixon’s case, it had been a pair of hospital issue sweats.

  This is bad. So bad.

  So bad, Sola calls me shrieking, only to offer to abandon her Moscow Opera directorial debut after I explain what happened. So bad, she also offers to send in her extremely large husband to “handle” Dixon and the rest of his crew.

  I turn down both offers, still too sad and broken-hearted to do anything more than lie in bed most days.

  It’s so, so bad.

  So bad, my mother, who never comes off tour, comes off tour. As does Curt Jr, even though he’s also on tour and has been calculatedly throwing Twitter into a tweeting frenzy with hints that he may debut a character based on his mother when both their tours collided—with cameras rolling of course—in Chicago that weekend.

  But instead of making the reality TV ratings they need to get their contracts renewed, they both fly home to California. And I know it’s really bad when all three of them enter my gigantic bedroom without any film crew, although it was designed specifically for that purpose.

  According to Sandy’s many texts, my story is scheduled for the front covers of no less than four major gossip magazines, and the network is even talking about pushing forward the season so they can take advantage of the press the Penthouse Showdown is getting.

  But I know it’s epically bad when my family doesn’t say, “Wow, you done fucked up.” Or even, “That was some good TV you just made, Nitra!”

  Instead, they all crawl into bed with me, like we used to pile in bed together back in the day.

  When we still lived in Compton, because Mom’s fledgling church was there, and Dad was steady bent on keeping it real. On TV, we’re known for having cozy little conversations in our oversized beds, which are all big enough to fit five people. Conversations ranging from what happened that day to what we’d do if a motherfucking alien tried to come at us and we didn’t have a gun.

  But that was just on the show. In real life, we often used to lie there. Quiet and exhausted and grateful to be part of such an accepting and loving family at the end of a struggle-filled day.

  I know it’s bad, because inst
ead of talking, we lie like we used to for a very, very long time. So long, I wonder if we’ll ever leave the relative safety of where we’ve ended up.

  But eventually Dad says, “I talked with Sandy earlier today. Told her not to bother with contract renewal negotiations. We ain’t coming back.”

  That’s an awfully big decision. One most men would have been expected to discuss with their family before making.

  But my brother tucks a lock of his wig hair behind his ear before quietly agreeing, “Yeah, I think this is a real good place to end this shit show.”

  However, I can’t let them do this. Can’t let them throw away the life they love just to protect me. “No, Dad, you don’t have to do that. This is all my fault. I can’t let you lose your renewal because of what I did. What I let happen.”

  Dad looks at me like I’m crazy. Then he says, “Bitch, is you out your monkey-ass mind? This family 300! I don’t care what you bitches do or why you do it. We in this together. Ride or motherfuckin’ die.” But then Dad’s face saddens, as he seems to realize out loud, “That’s what I should have told you the first time you tried to quit the show.”

  “That’s right!” Curt Jr. calls out from the other side of my parents, like we’re at church. “We family. No matter what happens, Nitra. And you know we have your back no matter what, just like you’ve always had ours.”

  When he says this, I know he’s talking about when he came out as someone just south of transgender when he was twelve. The “unconditional acceptance on top of unending profanity” that made us such a fascinating docu-drama series hadn’t been as automatic as the public was led to believe. And my intractable bitchiness on all subjects from veganism to whether Grenada bought off the rack had come in most handy when wearing both my evangelical mother and my just plain homophobic father down on the subject of letting their only son walk his own path.