Tethered

by L. D. Davis

  “It was perfect,” she says of the show, and smiles warmly. Emmy is the organizational genie of Emmya. She was just helping out before, but I hired her on permanently after I decided to do Fashion Week. She makes sure that all administrative aspects of the business run smoothly. She catches problems before they can occur, but if they at first escape our notice, she handles it and conquers it like a beast. I kind of stole her from Kessler, Keane & Grayne and Associates. It was Emmy that had put the law firm on the path of success soon after she moved to Chicago. Luke gives me a hard time at every opportunity he gets about taking away his administrative diva, and I love to rub it in his face.

  “I’m not a fashion expert,” Luke says to me now, slinking an arm around his wife’s waist. “But I think you’re very talented.”

  “I’m glad you think so. Now maybe you will stop crying about me taking Emmy from you,” I tease.

  “Don’t count on it,” he grins. He puts a hand over his wife’s baby bump and kisses the side of her head. Emmy, like Ginny, is also seven months pregnant. She too is glowing, and I know that Luke has just as much to do with her healthy glow as her pregnancy.

  I look over Luke’s shoulder and smile at Sam and Fred as they make their way over to us. Sam hugs me so hard that I find it difficult to breathe.

  “It was wonderful,” she says, wiping at her eyes. “And your hair looks…well, it isn’t bad.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say, rolling my eyes before turning to Fred.

  He holds me for a long time, and tells me how proud he is of me. I don’t know why, but when Fred tells me he is proud of me, it carries a heavier weight than it does when it is coming from Sam or even Emmy.

  “Thank you for always being there for me,” I whisper to him.

  “I love you, Kiddo,” he says and kisses my cheek tenderly.

  “Grampy, what about me?” Rosa asks, poking her lip out as Fred releases me.

  He moves to pick her up, but a warning glare from Sam and me stops him. He shouldn’t be picking up five year olds if he expects to keep his heart in decent shape. Instead, he settles for kneeling down and embracing her.

  “I love you, too, Mini Kiddo,” he says.

  “Don’t kiss me,” Owen says, holding up a hand.

  I laugh and then listen to Sam as she sends regards from the rest of the family. They couldn’t all make the trip to New York, though she and Fred brought three of the teenage granddaughters with them. I hug my nieces and I tell them I have every intention of upholding my promise of taking them shopping tomorrow.

  I am vaguely aware of Helene snapping pictures of me. She is no longer a freelance photographer, but works for Emmya. I don’t like to keep her and Marcus away from home for long periods, but every few months or as needed, she and her husband travel to whatever location I need them in – usually the Chicago headquarters – and we work, and dine, and enjoy each other’s company. I’ll never forget her kindness the day I met her when my heart was aching over Emmet.

  I feel that familiar tug in my chest and know without looking that my sweetheart has walked into the room, but I look anyway. I always will look. I meet his eyes through the chaos and hold his gaze as he moved purposely towards me. He’s carrying a groggy looking EJ in his arms.

  “It was perfect,” Emmet says and kisses me sweetly on the lips.

  I admit my trepidation was great after Emmet convinced me to do Fashion Week. Every night that I had to work late I went home full of anxiety as I worried about Emmet’s reaction. I had a difficult time focusing whenever I had to go away for a day or two for business, because I couldn’t help thinking that the distance and time away from home was eventually going to be too much for our marriage and family, but Emmet’s reaction was always the same. He missed me, he hated being without me, but he always spoke encouragingly. He always gave me his full support, and eventually my nervousness faded.

  “I couldn’t have done this without you,” I say to him.

  “You can thank me later, Mrs. Grayne,” he says in a whisper that sends tingling sensations throughout my body.

  “Oh, I plan to, Mr. Grayne,” I answer with a wink. I put my arms out for EJ, but Emmet sets him down on his feet instead. He ignores me entirely and runs to his big brother, his hero. I give Emmet a look.

  He shrugs and says “He’s almost three years old. We shouldn’t be carrying him around anyway.”

  I don’t point out that he was just carrying him and that he still picks Rosa up from time to time. I know his motivation for setting EJ free, and as much as I want to scold him for it, I can’t. He is taking care of me, as he always does.

  Emmet takes my hand and we rejoin our family and friends.

  *~*~*

  After the show we all went out to dinner. Afterward, Emmet and I set the nanny free for the night and then we piled into our bed with the kids in our suite to watch movies. Rosa and Emmet Junior fell asleep halfway into the second movie and Owen went to bed when it ended.

  “It’s been a long day,” I say quietly around a yawn.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Emmet asks, as he reaches over the two sleeping little bodies to push my hair off of my forehead.

  “Just tired,” I promised.

  “I want you to relax tomorrow, okay?”

  “I promised the girls I’d take them shopping.”

  “Let mom do it. I want you off of your feet for the day.”

  I was too tired to argue. “I’ll make it up to them another time.”

  Emmet smiles with satisfaction. He reaches for me and rests his hand on my belly. Apparently, pregnancy is contagious and I caught it from my friends, because I am four months pregnant.

  “Is this everything as you hoped it would be?” I ask him after a few minutes.

  “What?”

  “Our life, our family, all of it,” I say.

  “It is more than I could have ever hoped for,” Emmet says with a fascinated gleam in his green eyes. “I knew we would make each other happy, but I never imagined that we could be this happy. I never imagined that our life would be this perfect.”

  “It’s not perfect all of the time,” I say, thinking about some of the arguments we’ve had over the years, and some of the unexpected speed bumps. The biggest one we had was when the ink was still wet on our marriage license…

  Jerry had called me out of the blue only weeks after Emmet and I married. He was in town for a double header and got permission from his coach to take off for the morning to meet me for breakfast if I was willing. I refused the breakfast, especially since Emmet was in federal court and I couldn’t discuss it with him first. I did agree to meet him at the Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park. I didn’t need the media sniffing out this very public meeting, but I refused to be alone with him.

  “You look really good, princess,” Jerry said when he found me at the fountain.

  “Don’t call me that,” I snapped at him. I stood before him with my arms crossed and all of my defenses up. “What do you want, Jerry? What do you have to say that you couldn’t say over the phone?”

  He sighed and hung his head for a moment. He then pushed his sunglasses back on his head so I could see his eyes, but I kept my sunglasses in place. “I’m sorry, Donya. I’m sorry for what I did to you and Rosa, especially on that last night.”

  “It’s been months, Jerry,” I snarled. “Months! You never even checked to make sure your daughter was okay. We left and you didn’t care so why do you care now?”

  “I’ve always cared,” he said with another sigh.

  “If you’re just going to stand there and spew bullshit than this is a waste of my time,” I said and began to turn away.

  “I want a second chance with Rosa,” he said quickly before I could take more than a couple of steps.

  I froze for a moment and then spun around to face him. I was astounded that he had the nerve to even say that. To me!

  “I’ve been in therapy,” he said softly and looked away, embarrassed. “I don�
�t have a reasonable explanation for my behavior right now, but I do know that I’ve missed out on a lot and I want to get to know my daughter.”

  I shook my head, both in disbelief and to deny him. “No. No way, Jerry. I don’t care how much therapy you’ve had. I have no reason to believe that you won’t physically and emotionally hurt her. You’ve done enough of that.”

  “But I’m her father,” he argued quietly.

  “No, Jerry,” I said. “You are a sperm donor. I just married her father. A matter of fact…” I opened my purse and produced a manila envelope and passed it to him. “Consider yourself served. My lawyer was going to do this before your game tonight.”

  “What is this?” he asked, eyeing the envelope skeptically.

  “I want you to sever your parental rights,” I said. I actually felt a little bad for handing him the paperwork right after he just asked to see Rosa. “Look, Jerry,” I sighed. “I really appreciate your apology, but for once in Rosa’s life be fair to her. Let her go. Emmet loves her like his own and he’s the only real father she’s had in her life. If you love her at all, you will sign those papers and let her go.”

  He suddenly looked so sad that I had to look away. When Emmet and I decided to go through with this so that he could officially adopt Rosa, it was easy because I had not thought I would have to lay my eyes on Jerry again. I never thought I’d have to see his face when he received the news. Furthermore, I never thought that he would care.

  “Can I think about it?” he asked after a moment.

  “You have some time,” I said, shrugging my shoulder. “But there isn’t much to think about,” I added softly.

  I had nothing else to say, and I didn’t want to listen to anymore of his apologies or to see his sad and confused face anymore. So, I gave him a final look and then walked away.

  Meeting Jerry had sparked an enormous argument between Emmet and me. He didn’t like that I went to meet him by myself. I had argued that I was perfectly safe, but Emmet said that my saying so didn’t make him feel any better. He said that he would never forget how I passed out on Emmy’s front doorstep sick and weak. He said he’d never be able to shake the images of my frail and bruised body from his mind. I understood and I stopped arguing and apologized repeatedly. Emmet forgave me, but he was angry for days afterward.

  Several weeks later Vivian called me to tell me that Jerry had signed the papers, but a judge still had to approve it. Jerry had all of those weeks to contact me, to put up a fight for his daughter, and prove that he was a changed man, but he didn’t do any of that. I knew he wouldn’t, but I felt rejected on Rosa’s behalf anyway.

  It was more weeks after that when we found out that Jerry’s rights had been severed. Emmet immediately began the paperwork to adopt Rosa, and now she is Rosa Grayne.

  I look at Emmet now in the present and say “We’ve had some issues.”

  “We’ve had our issues,” he agrees. “But we get through them, and it’s the fact that we do get through them that adds to the perfection of what we have.”

  I put my hand on top of his hand that is on my belly. I smiled sleepily at him and let my eyes close. I have never felt as content and happy as I do now. I always knew that Emmet would make me happy, but like him, my mind could not even conjure this level of happiness.

  I used to mourn the time that was lost in our years apart, but then I learned a valuable lesson. Destiny can be tricky. The road to your destination is not always a straight shot. Sometimes the road splits off into different directions and you have to choose. It’s hard to say whether or not your choice was a bad choice or not, because maybe the other path was just as bumpy, or just as rewarding, and the fact is that you can never know for sure. You can sit around for years wondering “What if I had gone the other way” and you will never have a true answer.

  On our mutual journey to our destination, the road sometimes crowded with other people, or maybe parts of the road crumbled away. We often had to travel uphill, and we often had to travel in a sad and solitary country. There were very often obstacles to climb over, go around, or destroy.

  It doesn’t matter what the road looked like or how many times it branched off, all roads led to the same destination. It doesn’t matter how we got here. We were destined to be here and we would have arrived no matter what route we took, and even if our respective roads did not always parallel, we were always able to find each other. That line between us was always present, linking us to each other on every level no matter where we were. That connection will always be present.

  We will always be tethered.

  The End