Work of Art

by Monica Alexander

  I quickly pulled away and turned to face him, wiping my eyes, but it didn’t do any good. It was obvious I’d been crying.

  “Is everything all set?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Yes, ma’am, and Mr. Cooper gave me his credit card, so everything’s paid up.”

  “Thank you, Anthony,” I told him as I walked past Ryan to open the front door. “We appreciate you coming out on such short notice.”

  “Anytime, ma’am.” Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  Not in the way you’re thinking.

  I shook my head. “No, he didn’t. He was comforting me.”

  Anthony nodded. “You’re a beautiful girl. Make sure he treats you right.”

  “I will,” I said, not having the heart to tell him that Ryan and I weren’t together.

  When I returned to the living room, Ryan was sitting in the middle of the couch staring at the wall with a shocked look on his face. He looked up at me in surprise, almost as if he hadn’t expected to see me there.

  “I had a son?” he finally said, looking at me like what I told him couldn’t possibly be true.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting down on the coffee table opposite him, and I couldn’t help but start to cry again. “And he was beautiful and perfect.”

  Ryan met my eyes, and I could see he was fighting back tears. “What happened?”

  I knew how he must have felt learning about this for the first time, but when he’d signed over his parental rights, I had no obligation to tell him anything about our child, and I’d honestly been too pissed off to tell him what was happening at the time. And I’d truly felt like everything would work out okay. I never thought Tyler wouldn’t make it.

  But now I realized that not telling Ryan was a mistake – a mistake I’d made because I hadn’t wanted to face him and relive everything that had happened between us, and I hadn’t wanted him to reject us again. He’d already done it twice, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of him rejecting Tyler, who was such a sweet and amazing child that anyone who met him instantly loved him.

  “Harper, what happened?” Ryan insisted when I didn’t answer.

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to talk about Tyler, in fact I hated talking about him, because when I did, it made me miss him so much I could barely breathe. But I knew I had to tell Ryan what had happened to his son.

  “He was healthy for the first year of his life, and then when he was a little over a year old, he got sick.”

  “What do you mean, he got sick?” he croaked.

  I swallowed. I hated talking about this. I wanted to tell him about the good times I had with Tyler. How when he was old enough, he would sit with me and paint or how he loved to ride the trolley or how he’d laugh at practically everything. But Ryan needed to hear this version of the story, because it was truly the one that mattered.

  “He was born with a degenerative heart condition, and it first started affecting him when he was a little over a year old. He went through different treatments, and I had to regulate how physical he was, but nothing worked, and the doctors let me know he probably wouldn’t live without a heart transplant.”

  Ryan dropped his head, and I saw tears roll down his cheeks. I reached out and took his hand, knowing it might help, even just a little. I rubbed my thumb repeatedly over his hand, as his shoulders shook. After a few minutes, he took a deep breath and looked up at me.

  “Did he?” he asked, and then took a few seconds to compose himself. “Did he look like me?”

  I felt fresh tears spring to my eyes. “Yes. He had blond hair and blue eyes, and he looked just like you. He was beautiful.”

  And that was when he lost it, slumping forward and burying his face in his hands, so I moved next to him and put my arms around him, comforting him as best I could even though I knew there was no comfort that would make the pain he was feeling go away.

  Ryan fell into me, his tears soaking my chest, his weight heavy against my body. I rubbed my hand against his back, as I held him against me, as he shook. I just wished I could take the pain away, but I knew I couldn’t.

  “Ryan, he was happy, and he was so loved. Up until the end, he was loved.”

  “But he was sick,” he croaked out.

  “He was. But you wouldn’t have known it if you talked to him. He loved to laugh and cuddle and read stories. And he was never alone.”

  He pulled up and looked at me, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen. “What was his name?” he asked, his voice trembling.

  “Tyler,” I said, and it was still hard for me to say his name even after all the time that had passed. “Tyler William Connelly.”

  He sucked in a breath. “That’s a really strong name,” he said, his voice cracking.

  I nodded. “I know, and he was such a strong little boy, Ryan. When the doctors put him on the transplant list, I was so fearful that he would die before he’d get his new heart, but then, soon after he turned three, we got the call that they had a heart for him, and it was the best news we’d gotten in so long. So we had the surgery, and Tyler was so brave throughout all the tests and the prep, and even afterward, he was so strong.”

  I watched his eyes fill with tears again, because he knew this story didn’t have a happy ending. “What happened?”

  I started to cry again, the lump in my throat practically suffocating me. “His body rejected the new heart,” I said, my voice cracking. “He died a week after the surgery.”

  “No,” he said, almost refusing to believe me. He pulled out of my arms. “No. How could that have happened? The doctor must have done something wrong.”

  He was trembling, fighting to stay in control when it looked like he was going to crack down the middle. And I knew exactly how he felt.

  “He was our son,” Ryan said then, more fire in his voice than before. He was angry. “He was mine, and I had no idea this was happening. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have wanted to meet him, to know him, to be there for him and to have the chance to know that he was happy. And shit, to help him.”

  I could hear the anger creeping up in his tone. “Ryan, you signed over your rights. You wanted nothing to do with us. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “You keep saying that, but I never signed a letter.”

  I threw my hands up. “I have a copy of it. I’ll show you. It’s dated and signed and everything. I figured your sister told you that I’d decided to keep the baby which was what prompted you to send me the letter.”

  “My sister?” he questioned, looking thoroughly confused.

  “Yeah, I ran into her on the street when I was about six months pregnant, and she laid into me about being irresponsible and trying to ruin your life and bringing a bastard child into the world. Things got heated, and she told me I was basically an awful person. And I told her to fuck off, so she left.”

  Ryan watched me with wide, shocked eyes, his mouth hanging open. “Lisa knew you’d kept the baby?”

  “Yes, she knew.”

  “Harper, I didn’t know,” he said, his hands balling into fists where they rested on his knees. “I had no idea. I thought you had an abortion and left town. I had no idea.”

  “But you signed the letter.”

  “I didn’t sign any fucking letter!” he roared, jumping to his feet and turning on me. “I never would have signed over the rights to my child. Had I known, I would have been there, with you, helping you through your pregnancy like we planned, and then I would have helped you raise our son, like I told you I would. And maybe if that had happened, he would still be here!”

  He was pacing back and forth across the room now, breathing heavily and looking like he wanted to kill someone.

  “Ryan, that’s not true. There wasn’t anything the doctors could do for him. His heart was so weak.”

  He stopped and turned to glare at me. “How do you know that? My family had money. We could have paid top d
ollar for him to get the best treatment.”

  “He had the best treatment,” I said, standing up to face him. “My father and I sunk every penny we could into making sure Tyler had the best doctors and the best treatment and was at the best hospitals, and in the end, he still died. Nothing you or your family could have done would have made any difference. It was meant to be.”

  I had taken me years of therapy to come to that understanding, but the words still tasted like acid on my tongue. Not a day went by that I didn’t wonder if I could have done more for my son.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. He was my son, and he should have had the best life. He shouldn’t have died when he was three. That is not the way things should have happened.”

  He was crying again, and I knew what he was feeling. I’d been there, many times.

  “Ryan, come on,” I said, as I reached for him and pulled him into my arms, letting him sob against my shoulder, knowing it was the only thing that could remotely help, even though I knew the pain would never truly go away.

  Tyler’s memory was with me every single day. Some days I still cried when I thought about how old he would be or what he would look like or what things he would enjoy doing. It was heartbreaking to lose a child, but if you let it overtake you, you would fall apart. I learned the hard way that the best you could do was grieve when you needed to, remember and move on with your life feeling like a piece of you was just missing. And you knew you’d never be whole again.

  “I want to see the letter,” Ryan said after a few minutes. “And the email I supposedly sent you. I want to see them.”

  I pulled back and looked at him, the fire and determination in his eyes scaring me just a little.

  “They’re at my apartment,” I told him.

  “Fine, then let’s go.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Now,” he said, moving to the couch to gather up his stuff, as I stood there watching him and not really knowing what was happening.

  Had he not sent that email? Had he not signed over his rights? Had everything I’d thought about him and our relationship and how it had ended been a lie? How was that even possible?

  * * *

  Ryan followed me into my parking garage and parked in one of the guest spots, and then he silently walked behind me as I let us into the building and we rode up the elevator. When it dinged on my floor, he waited for me to get out, so he could follow me to the end of the hallway to my apartment. I let us in and dropped my keys on the counter as he turned to me expectantly.

  “Where are they? I want to see them,” he demanded, and I decided to let his tone go. He’d just had a bomb dropped on him that I knew hadn’t been easy to swallow.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told him firmly, going into my studio and retrieving the file I’d kept with the two pieces of information in it. I pulled out the email he’d sent and the legal letter he wanted to see.

  When I came back into the living room, Ryan was standing in front of my fireplace mesmerized by the pictures sitting on top of it. There was one of me and Tyler that my dad had taken on this third birthday, just three months before he died, there was one of Tyler and my father fishing when he was around two and a half, and there was one that I’d taken of Tyler when he’d taken his first steps. I was surprised the shot had come out since I’d been shaking so much, I’d been so excited, but it had come out beautifully. In my studio, I had a whole wall that was nothing but pictures of Tyler that I’d taken in the three years he’d been in my life, but I wasn’t sure Ryan was ready for that.

  “He looks like me,” he said, reaching out to touch Tyler’s smiling face, and I felt tears prick the backs of my eyes yet again. “But he looks like you too.”

  Ryan looked at me, and in his eyes I saw the boy I’d loved when I was a teenager, and I also saw his son. Tyler had looked like him in so many ways, and now seeing him standing next to Tyler’s picture, it was even more evident.

  When Tyler was a baby, I’d imagined what it might be like if I ever ran into Ryan and he saw his son for the first time. I never thought it would be like this. I assumed because he didn’t want us that he’d have no emotions, but it was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. Ryan was breaking down on the inside. I could see it as his eyes focused intently on his son as he looked at him for the first time, and he was gazing at him with such reverence and pride and confusion that it actually made my heart hurt.

  “Come on, let’s go sit,” I said, taking his hand and leading him toward the couch, knowing he needed to take a break.

  He sat, but he kept his gaze on the pictures across the room. I settled next to him and handed him the two pieces of paper. He took a few minutes to scan each one and then closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them, he turned to me.

  “This isn’t my signature, and this isn’t my email.” And then as if to prove it, he pulled out his wallet and handed me a credit card. “The signatures are similar, but it’s not mine. And look at the email address.”

  I looked down at the name I’d seen a hundred times in emails when we’d been dating. He used to send them to me all the time, little love notes and promises of the future.

  “RyanCarson@livemail.com,” I read.

  He shook his head. “My email address has a dot between my first and last name. It’s the same one I’ve been using since high school,” he said, pulling out his phone and clicking on his LiveMail account. “See.”

  I looked at it and gasped out loud. The email address was Ryan.Carson@livemail.com. The dot separating his name was missing in the email that changed everything for us, and I’d never noticed it.

  My hand instantly flew over my mouth. “Oh my God! You didn’t send this.”

  He shook his head. “No, I never would have sent you something like this.” Then he took my hands in his. “We had a plan Harper, an agreement. And I loved you. I never would have left.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yeah, because you told me you had an abortion. I couldn’t forgive that. It was too much to hear that you’d done it without my knowledge or consent, and I was pissed. But then school started, and I missed you, and I figured I could forgive you in time, but you weren’t at school, and your cell number was disconnected. I sent you an email, but you never responded.”

  I shook my head. “My mom had my cell turned off, and my email was through her AOL account, so she locked me out of it. When she kicked me out of the house, I got a new number and a new email account.”

  “Well that explains why you never answered any of my emails in the past ten years.”

  I looked at him in confusion. “You emailed me?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, every few years or so I would try again in the hopes that, I don’t know. I think I just wanted to see how you were.”

  I tried to wrap my head around that information. He hadn’t stopped thinking about me. He’d reached out, and since I hadn’t responded, he’d assumed I’d written him off.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, shaking my head as this all started to sink in.

  “No, I’m sorry, Harper,” he said then, and I knew he was trying to apologize for eleven years of anguish that he could never make right, even though none of it was his fault.

  He’d tried to get in touch with me, but more than that, he hadn’t wanted to let me go in the first place. He’d wanted me, he’d wanted us, and someone, someone who didn’t want him to want those things, had interfered in an effort to keep us apart. And it had worked.

  Tyler never knew his father, and he never would. And Ryan would never know his son.

  And I’d had to go through everything alone – giving birth to our son, raising and nurturing and loving him, and ultimately, holding him as he took his last breath, because I thought his father hadn’t loved either of us enough to want to be in our lives. And I was so wrong. But it had been my reality for years, all because someone had felt the need to manipulate us into believing a lie.

  And now that the truth w
as coming out, a part of me wanted to feel relief, because I hadn’t been dismissed so easily, and Ryan had loved me as much as I though he had, but the truth also didn’t change the past, and it didn’t change the fact that someone had taken something from us that we could never get back.

  I suddenly had to look away from him, because there was too much emotion building up inside me, and I was getting angry. I knew it was his family. I knew they’d meddled, and they did everything in their power to keep us apart and to keep Ryan from knowing he even had a son. It was cruel and heartless and sick. It was just sick.

  “Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if I’d been there?” Ryan asked quietly after a few minutes, and I closed my eyes to ward off the tears that were brewing just behind my eyes.

  Every fucking day, I wanted to tell him. Because every day I’d wished he’d been there with me. Every time Tyler did something for the first time or he laughed or when he started talking, I’d wished Ryan was there. Because I’d held on to the Ryan that I’d loved, and I knew that Ryan would have been as excited as I was to be experiencing parenthood with me. But I also hated the Ryan who’d left me, so when I thought about him, it almost always made me sad.

  “Who sent this?” I asked instead of answering his question, because I was afraid to go there with him. It was too soon.

  I looked back to see the anger building in his eyes as I held up the email he hadn’t written.

  He shook his head. “I think we both know exactly who sent this.”

  I looked up and met his gaze. “Your parents.”

  “Yes.”

  Then he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. “Fuck. Voicemail.” Then he dialed another number. “God dammit!”

  He threw his phone into the corner of the couch and ran his hands back through his hair, all the anger that had been simmering just beneath the surface suddenly exploding out of him. I put my hand on his forearm, hoping I could calm him down. I was just as pissed as he was, but I also knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  “I’m done,” he spat. “If I find out that they did anything to hurt our relationship or that they signed over my rights to my son without my permission, I will fucking kill them. They meddled and they tried to get me to break up with you so many times, and I didn’t, because I loved you. And then when I got that email from you, I just figured you’d panicked and made a decision that went against what we’d decided, and I was pissed. I never thought for one second that my family was behind it. I never thought they could be so vindictive as to manipulate something that affected my life on this gran of a scale.”