One Small Thing

by Barksdale Inclan, Jessica

  Here it comes, Avery thought. She bent down to her knees, pushing her body together as if touching her own flesh could save her.

  “Okay. What can I do?”

  “When we went to the home, we found Randi’s papers. Years ago, it seems she wrote a will, and indicated that, well, you were the boy’s father.”

  Avery had known that was what was coming, and yet, to hear a stranger say what her brain had been spinning since she found Dan on the phone made her dizzy. A father. A father already. Of course his sperm had been good, mobile, perfectly formed and shaped. He’d already produced one child. It wasn’t him that was damaged. There was living evidence of his reproductive health living in foster care in the Central California Valley.

  “Oh.”

  “He’s ten years old. Does that work in terms of a time frame?” Midori asked.

  “Yeah. It does.” Dan sounded cold, shut down.

  “So, here’s the thing. We need to do a DNA test. To check for paternity. And then we can talk about what you want to do. There’s not really any obligation—“

  “Obligation.”

  “What I mean is, the boy could stay in foster care. While we want to establish paternity, it doesn’t mean you have to take custody. Paternity would necessitate some form of support from you, however.”

  “Custody.” Dan was turning into a robot. Avery sat up and rubbed her forehead, unconsciously looking for a pen and paper. He should be taking notes, not repeating words. They were already talking about money. Jesus! She walked into the hall and then into the kitchen, cradling the phone as she moved. Dan was slumped over the counter, his face pale.

  “We assumed you might want to—“

  “Of course.” Dan sat up when he saw Avery. “Yes. I see what you mean.”

  “So the DNA testing is very quick, very easy. It involves only a quick swab of your mouth. Once we have those details confirmed, we can talk about the rest. It seems overstepping to go into too much at this point.”

  “Okay,” Dan said.

  “Did you have any knowledge about this child?” Midori asked. “Did you have any discussion with Randi after you left Sacramento?”

  “No. None. I left for Cal and never talked to her again. That makes me wonder—how did you get my phone number in the first place?”

  “Your parents. She’d indicated their names. They were at the same residence, which made it easy.”

  “When did you talk with them?” Dan looked up at Avery, his mouth open slightly.

  “This morning. I was so glad they were home.”

  They were home because they hadn’t wanted to come here, Avery thought. They hadn’t wanted to see what this was about. They cut themselves off, one more time, from Dan because of who he’d been, what he’d done, his past that trailed behind him. They didn’t like the real Dan, the one she was just beginning to know.

  Dan shook his head. “God.”

  “So, I’m going to FedEx you this paperwork, and the sooner you get to the doctor, the better for the boy.”

  The boy. The boy. Avery finally spoke, hearing the jerk of surprise in Midori Nolan’s voice. “The boy. What’s his name?”

  “Mrs. Tacconi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Hello. I didn’t know you were there.”

  Avery pressed the phone against her check and brought a hand to her throat. She was here. She’d heard it all. “I am.”

  “HHHHhhWell. The boy. Daniel. His name is Daniel.”

  After they’d both hung up the phones--Midori Nolan assured that Dan would get the DNA test, call his lawyer, call the social worker in Contra Costa County who would be handling the case from this end--they stared at each other. Avery wondered how they were supposed to turn off the lights and go to bed. How would it be possible to slip back into the rhythm of life that was based on lies? But yet, it was Dan in front of her. Dan. She wanted to move next to him and run her fingers through his thick dark hair, comforting him as she might a child.

  “Aves,” he said finally, standing up from the counter. He stopped, swallowed, ran his own fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his eyes. As long as she’d known him, Avery had never seen Dan hurt, at least for long. Sometimes after conversations with his parents or Jared, he’d flare quickly or stand still for a moment, his arms crossed, but he’d never let her see what she saw in his face now. She wanted to walk to him and comfort him. She wished she could make things better, but did she? After all the lies he’d told—or was it truths he hadn’t said? Avery shook her head and bit her lower lip.

  “Don’t. Let’s not talk about it right now. I can’t hear any more. Not one more word. Let’s just go to bed.”

  “But—“

  She raised her hand. “Seriously. I can’t.”

  “All right.” As he followed her into the bedroom, both of them flicking off lights as they went, she could feel his eyes on her neck, and she wanted to cover it with her hands. He couldn’t look at her bare skin, when she’d never seen him at all.

  He had known everything, her feelings about her father and mother. He knew that the very inside parts of her wouldn’t do what they were supposed to, and during all her confessions and pleas and talks, he’d never said, “We all have past.,” After any one of her crying fits about something or another, he could have launched into the story of Randi and their eight long years together. And he wouldn’t have had to lay it all out at once. A casual remark, leading to details. A remembrance. A recollection. A confession late at night after lovemaking. Slowly, he could have unraveled the twisted story. Now she could see why it had happened, Bill so strict, so firm, so unyielding, the exactly the father she’d never want for her own children. Of course Dan had been unhappy in that house. So why didn’t he tell her, letting her know about the drugs and the stealing and the police? If he’d revealed it bit by bit, piece by piece, she could have put his past together with the person he was now and still believed in him. But to hold it all in! Why?

  Avery went into the bathroom and closed the door, leaning against it and staring at herself in the mirror. In the bedroom, she heard Dan’s shoes thunk to the carpeted floor, drawers opening and closing, the quiet squeak of the bed. Now, she had to sleep with the past and Dan in one bed. She didn’t know if there was room for them all.

  In bed, her arm pressing down the blanket between them, she stared up at the dark ceiling, points of streetlight or moonlight slicing between the curtains. Dan was awake, his breath inaudible, not the deep, snoring rumble that he made each night until he turned on his side and tucked her arm around him. Her eyes felt red and rough, as if she’d been up for days. But she couldn’t close them. She didn’t know what she would see if she did.

  “Aves?”

  “What?” she whispered back.

  “What will we do?”

  She brushed her hair back away from her forehead and turned to him. “You’ll make the calls you told her you would. You’ll go to the doctor.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, what will we do if he’s mine?”

  Her stomach lurched in that same way that had often made her think, for an instant, she was pregnant. “I don’t know.”

  “If he’s mine—“

  “Dan, we don’t know that yet. From what you’ve told me, maybe she wasn’t the most . . . what I’m saying is maybe there was someone else. Or someone just after you. You can’t even think about it until you have the test.”

  “You’re right. But why would she name him Daniel, Aves? And why would she do that and then not call me? It’s not like she did it to lure me back. She was giving him . . .“

  Avery closed her eyes and listened, even though she wanted to pull the blankets over her head and block out the sound of his sad voice. Yes. Of course. He was right. Why would Randi do that if she had no intention of trotting a toddler up to a frat house and saying, “Here he is. Your son!”

  When Avery was a teenager, one of her classmates got pregnant by one of the most popular, talented seniors, a guy
who approached her at a party, handed her drinks, and then had sex with her out on the lawn as the party raged inside. Nine months later, she named her son Jason, after the guy, Jay, who had ignored her from the moment he pulled out of her and walked off the lawn. Avery’s friend told everyone about her baby, told them his name, hoping that Jay would take the name as a calling and recognize the baby as his son. He never did.

  Randi had never done that. She’d never called, not in ten years. There had been no awkward visit, Avery opening the door to a stranger and baby. No requests for money. No clue to lead Avery sooner to what she knew now.

  “You’re right,” she said, her voice muffled. “He probably is yours.”

  Dan was silent, and he turned to the ceiling. “Yeah.”

  When her father was dying in the hospital room, she and Mara and Loren sat in the waiting room. No one came in to tell them anything, their mother behind the closed door of their father’s room. One minute they were all sitting around his bed, trying to ignore the fact that the surgeon had told them there was nothing he could do. The cancer was everywhere, liver, kidney, bones, intestines. The next minute, the girls were rushed out by a nurse because something—blood pressure, heart rate—was wrong, off, weird, and then the door closed, and they were alone.

  In her bed now, Dan on the other side, her arm pressed firmly between them, the truth in the air above them, she felt the same as she had in that hospital room fifteen years ago. Whatever was behind her father’s door, whatever the DNA tests would prove, would change her life forever. And there was nothing she could do about it but wait. Again.

  In her dream, she saw her father’s pale face, his dark hair pushed back, his brown eyes closed. But she knew he was alive. There was still hope. A chance. A voice—she didn’t know if it was hers or someone else’s or just a thought—told her to pull the needles out of his cheeks and chin and forehead in less than five minutes and he would live. That was when she noticed the thin, quivering needles. So many of them. But she had to do it, and the voice told her to start, and she pulled and pulled and pulled. There were so many. Her fingers began to cramp, but she kept at it, even as the light began to fade. Her father’s face dissolved into the background, everything a smooth, pale gray.

  She woke up, her body rigid, her eyes looking into the dark room that could have been any room, any place, perhaps her bedroom back in 1987. Breathing in and out, inhale, exhale, she slowed her thoughts, saw the shadow of her dresser, the fluid swathes of curtain, the ridge of Dan’s body on the other side of the bed. Avery grabbed at her chest, trying to stop her heart’s wild beating. She couldn’t fix her father, even in a dream.

  Dan turned, his arm falling between them. Avery looked at the ceiling, knowing that she couldn’t fix this either. There was no way to keep what she had wanted alive.

  

  The next morning, Dan still asleep, Avery slipped out of bed, into the hall, and then pushed open the door to the room they called the nursery, or at least, she did, saying, “Oh, I had the bassinet delivered. Could you put it in the nursery, Dan?” For him, the word (not to mention the purchases) was presumptuous or simply bad luck, she could tell, but to Avery, it meant that it could happen, just as easily as when she said, “I’m a Cal graduate” months before graduation,” or, “I’m Mrs. Avery Tacconi,” long before she and Dan were engaged. If you said something and meant it, it could come true.

  The air was still and smelled of plastic wrapping, cotton, and wood. In the corner of the room, she’d stacked paint cans. Martha Stewart colors, viburnum, the palest off-pink white, and linen for the trim. She and Valerie had decided that with these colors, she could add any color of wallpaper trim, blue or pink. As they stood at the cash register at Sears with brushes and tape and paint trays, Valerie had rushed to the back wall and picked up wallpaper samples. “You never know. We might need these tomorrow!” That shopping trip had been a day before a visit with Dr. Browne but then, as usual, the results were negative. No baby that month. She hadn’t gone back to Sears since.

  Even though Dan shook his head slightly when she read the advertisements in the Chronicle, she went to the sales at I Bambini, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Toys R Us, Mervyns, Target, Emporium. In the past two years, she’d found the bassinet, a crib, a complete layette, diaper genie, bathtub, stroller, car seat, baby shoes, playpen, changing table, dresser, a baby name book. She’d kept some of the stuff in boxes, tucked neatly away in the closet, but she’d made Dan put the crib together and she’d filled the baby’s dresser with clothes and supplies, the top covered with ointments and lotions. And only a week ago, Valerie had handed her a bag full of tiny newborn T-shirts and sleepers, things that Tomás at only three months had already outgrown. “I want you to have them,” she’d said. “I want your baby to be the one we hand-down to.” With each purchase or gift, Avery crossed off an item on the list she kept in the bottom drawer.

  She’d also picked out the baby names she liked best. Of course, there were the inevitable but unlikely and slightly ridiculous family combinations: Isabel Marian, Marian Isabel or Walter William, William Walter. She would touch the crib and imagine Sophie, Ana, Mackenzie, Keegan, Connor, Brandon, Julia, Jordan, or Ashley.

  Now, she walked over and rubbed her hand on the sheet that she’d put on the mattress, the bumper that softened the edges of the wood, its ruffles between her fingers, the wool blanket with its soft pastel threads. How stupid. How presumptuous, as Dan would have said if he’d dared to say anything about the baby to her. What was she thinking? What was this room anyway? She looked around at all her purchases, some of it two years old, maybe out-of-date, out-of-style, useless, replaced with other, cleverer baby gear. Here it was: Avery’s sad museum of desperation.

  She slipped down the wall, her butt on the floor, and hugged her knees. These past two years had been a game, a mirage, a fantasy. Dan had played along with her as had Valerie and Isabel and Loren, but, as her father used to say, she’d “put the cart before the horse.” A huge, stupid, ridiculous cart with no horse in sight.

  Wiping her eyes, she thought of what she used to do when she came home from high school her freshman year. Mara was in college at Wellesley, Loren was at cheerleading practice, and her mother was in her nest in her downstairs room, her face pressed flat against her pillow, her hand tired and limp on an open book. The bedroom was always hot and smelled like Oil of Olay and Caress soap. Quietly, Avery would open the window, bending down to breathe in clean air, turning back to her mother who never moved a muscle, not until at least six when the darkness woke her.

  Going back upstairs, Avery would flick on the television and listen to the shows as she cleaned up the breakfast dishes and the sad half-empty glasses of water and coffee and plates of uneaten soda crackers and toast Isabel had left around the house. Once a week, she would vacuum everything, the machine leaving straight, comforting lines in the red carpet. She would feed their dog Pippin, change the water in her steel bowl, and drop flakes into the aquarium, feeding the last of her father’s exotic fish. The sad fish swam in the murky water as the filter burbled. Then she would take out a pad of paper and make lists: her homework, her dream boyfriends, her perfect life. She’d never gotten the dream boyfriend--her long legs and full breasts hidden in the folds of Loren’s too-big hand-me-downs--but she’d always finished her homework, and then her perfect life had just about come true.

  But the list she had been keeping for the past two years needed to be torn up. Standing up and walking around the nursery, Avery touched everything, and then began to pick things up and place them in the closet and dresser—the animal mobile Valerie had found for her while shopping for Tomás, the case of baby wipes from Target, the diaper genie, the boxes and bags of teething rings, Destin, Johnson’s Baby Lotion, Burt’s Baby Bees Soap. She put the paint and brushes by the door, so she could take them to the garage. She stripped the mattress of the cute sheep and ducky sheets and bumper, folding them up and putting them in the closet as well. Upending the mattre
ss, she leaned it against the wall. Later, she’d have Dan come back in here to dismantle the crib. Maybe Luis would help him. Or maybe it was too sad a task to invite anyone in for.

  Finally, she opened the window, the plastic, cotton, wood smell leaking out into the morning air. She breathed in and turned around, as if expecting to see her mother, sleeping.

  Later, after she made the coffee and emptied the dishwasher, she clicked on her Palm Pilot and looked up the number. They would be out of the office because of the holiday weekend, but she could leave a message. It would be better that way. She wouldn’t have to talk with Mary, who would ask questions and try to commiserate and cajole. She wouldn’t have to explain to the well-meaning nurse that she’d made a mistake, made the wrong kind of list, prepared for the wrong set of circumstances altogether.

  Avery dialed and then listened to the long options, irritated by the voicemail system. As she waited, she looked to the hall, hoping Dan wouldn’t come out now. Finally, she pushed 1 to leave a message, walking into the family room as she did.