by Joanna Bell
"You'll never guess who I saw in L.A."
Her eyes narrowed. "Who?"
"Jackson Devlin."
The spoon she was holding clattered to the floor and we both paused to see if it would wake Brody up. When there was no sound from the bedroom, she sat down at the kitchen table with me and took one of my hands between her own.
I told her everything. Well, almost everything. I left out the part where I had sex with him twice.
"He didn't even know," I said afterwards as we sat quietly, both contemplating what Jackson's promise to call a lawyer would mean for our lives – and for Brody's. "He didn't even know I was pregnant! Brody could have had a father this whole time."
"I don't know about that."
I looked up. "You never liked him."
For a moment I thought she was going to deny it again, as she always used to do. But instead she just sighed. "I guess I didn't. I didn't trust him – or his family. Who knows what kind of father he would have been?"
She went home about an hour later and I went into the bedroom and lay down next to Brody, who barely stirred when I kissed his cheek. My mother was skeptical of what kind of father Jackson would have been to his son. I wanted to share her skepticism. After that scene in his apartment, I probably should have. It would have been easier that way. To almost convince myself that it had all been for the best.
But that would have been a lie, and the truth was I had no reason to believe Jackson Devlin would have been anything other than a loving, devoted father.
Was he right? Was it all my fault? I turned the thought over and over in my head. The reason I didn't try to find him was because I thought he knew. I thought he already made his decision. It was the same for him, wasn't it? He didn't try to find me, either – not for 5 and half years, anyway – because he thought I made my decision. We were both wrong. Why was that my fault? Why was it anyone's fault except his evil family's?
Brody woke up at one point and rolled over.
"Mommy?"
"Hi baby."
"Did you sell your paintings?"
I smiled. "Yup."
He snuggled in close and took a lock of my hair between his fingers. "All of them?"
"Uh-huh."
"Good."
There was so much I always wanted to say to my son about his father. So many times I held back telling him this or that little tidbit of our lives in Sweetgrass Ridge.
He dozed off again a few minutes later and I lay beside him, watching him sleep and trying not to think about the things Jackson said to me, or the awful sense of regret I felt thinking about how different it all could have been.
Chapter 30: Hailey
"Hailey!"
I shook my head and peeled my eyes away from my phone. "Huh? What?"
"Are you even listening to me?"
"Yes!" I lied. "Yes. I – uh – Lorenzo. Lorenzo, right?"
Candy sighed loudly. "Lorenzo Paglia. The Italian I introduced you to last weekend at that New Impressionists show – remember? He wants to commission a statement piece for his new headquarters in Milan."
Milan? I wracked my brain, trying to remember the details of what Candy was talking about. "Uh... yeah."
"He's offering half a million dollars."
I finally snapped out of my anxiety daydreams about custody arrangements and the effects of childhood trauma. Half a million dollars. Yes. I remembered that part.
"I'll do it," I said immediately, thinking of legal fees.
On my phone, the text of an email from my lawyer sat like a rebuke on the screen, detailing Jackson's demands. Or what Jackson's lawyer said his demands were, anyway. He wanted to see Brody. Not once or twice. Regularly. Once a month. And if I wouldn't agree to it they were going to "review their options" – one of which, it was heavily implied, was a lawsuit suing for joint custody.
"Once a month?!"
"What?" Candy asked, mildly peeved.
"Nothing," I mumbled. "Uh, nothing. When can I get the money? From the, uh – from Lorenzo?"
"He really wants you to do this, Hailey. I'm sure he'd transfer it tonight if you insisted."
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, OK. Tell him I insist, then."
***
It was almost 6 weeks since the show in Los Angeles. The show that technically sold out before the doors even opened as the art world's wealthy buyers and investors fought to get in on the action before prices went really crazy, as Candy was sure they would. The show I missed because I was having sex with Jackson Devlin.
I knew, after seeing him in L.A., that I had a choice. I could collapse, because the things he said to me were the most hurtful things anyone had ever said to me, and because it turned out I still cared quite a lot what he thought of me. Or I could put the sex and the cruelty behind me and get on with my work and my life. It wasn't really a choice, to be honest. I had a child. I had work. I couldn't collapse. I couldn't spend the next few months in bed crying. I got over him once. Almost. I had to get over him again. I had to treat him like a co-parent, because that's what he was about to be. And for Brody's sake and for my own, I could not allow Jackson Devlin to be anything more to me than that.
He made good on his promise to get a lawyer. We were just working out the specific arrangements for his first meeting with Brody and I was, as you can imagine, pretty much losing my mind. Not because I wanted to keep Brody from his father – I didn't. I just wanted it to go well. I needed it to go well. I needed Jackson to understand what his newly discovered fatherhood actually meant. I needed him to grasp how sweet and vulnerable and full of hope his son was. And how ready to claw out the eyes of anyone who hurt him I was.
So I had two big things happening in my life. My son was about to meet his father and my art career was blowing up. There was, as Lili insisted when she found me moping sometimes late at night, every reason to be happy, every reason to be optimistic about the future.
She was right and I knew it.
Except there weren't two big things happening in my life, not really. There were 3. There was the situation with Brody and his father. There was my career and the second sold out show. And there was – well, there was Jackson Devlin and the fact that I couldn't get him out of my head. I couldn't forget our fevered, desperate afternoon together.
But I couldn't forget his cruelty, either. His refusal to listen to me when I told him my side of the story. His refusal to put the blame where it really belonged – on his family. The Jackson I used to know wouldn't have done that. The old Jackson protected me from pain, he didn't go out of his way to cause it.
The old Jackson was gone, lost somewhere in the intervening years, in the distance between Sweetgrass Ridge and Los Angeles.
***
On a particularly sweltering night that summer, I finally confessed. I was standing over a pitcher of lemonade in the kitchen, stirring slowly and listening to the ice-cubes clinking against the glass. Brody was in bed. Lili was in the living room tidying.
"I slept with Jackson in Los Angeles," I said, not sure if I wanted her to hear me or not.
She appeared in the kitchen at once, her head cocked to one side and her hands full of Lego pieces.
"I said I –"
"I know," she replied quietly, putting the Lego on the table.
"You do?"
"Don't look so surprised, it was kinda obvious."
I hung my head, suddenly ashamed. And then, with no warning at all, I started to cry. Well, I made an awkward snorting noise as I forced myself not to start crying, anyway.
"Oh Hailey," Lili whispered, guiding me to a kitchen chair. "What's wrong? Why didn't you tell me? Do you think I'm going to judge you or something?"
I shook my head and pressed my fingertips against my lips, trying to physically force the emotions back down. When I spoke my voice was wobbly and high-pitched. "No. No, that's not it. I just – Lili. I, uh..." I gulped and shook my head again, struggling to maintain control. "I miss him. He was such an asshole in L.A., but I –"
The dam broke. A sob escaped my throat and my cousin leapt up to put her arms around me and kiss the top of my head. "It's OK," she soothed. "Come on, Hailey. It's OK. I understand. Of course you miss that asshole. He was your first love. Seeing him just brought back all those memories."
I squeezed my eyes shut and cried onto her shoulder.
"He was," I cried, wiping tears off my cheeks. "My first – he was my first –"
"It's OK, take your time."
I laughed through another jagged sob, embarrassed.
"He was my first love," I repeated a few minutes later when it felt like maybe I could talk without breaking down again. "But he wasn't just my first love, you know? He's my only love. I thought I was over him. I really did. But now I think I'm not and I – that scares the hell out of me."
There it was. The possibility that tormented me every day, almost every moment. The terror that I didn't have it in me to forget Jackson Devlin a second time.
Lili waited patiently, the way she always did, to make sure I was finished. And then she reached out and squeezed my hand. "You're nervous. You're nervous about Brody and Jackson. I get it. I would be, too."
She wasn't wrong. I was filled with anxiety at the prospect of Brody meeting his father. But my fears about my own feelings for Jackson were separate from that.
***
As it was, I was almost too busy with work and Brody to have enough time to brood. Which is not to say that Jackson Devlin wasn't there at almost all times, lurking in the back of mind, waiting to leap out whenever I had a minute to myself. It's just to say I didn't have too many minutes to myself. Lorenzo Paglia, the Italian businessman who had already transferred half a million dollars to my bank account, wanted me to create the work for his new headquarters in situ.
Which is how I found myself perched on top of a scaffold in Milan and covered in plaster dust a week before Brody was scheduled to meet Jackson for the first time. The Italian wanted the work completed as quickly as possible. He also gave me free reign to create not just a painting but a monumental 3D wall piece. Before I even lifted a paintbrush I was sculpting the wall into a series of curved grooves and points, as if the plaster itself was the surface of a rough sea – a fitting motif for my life.
"I love it!" Lorenzo enthused when he wandered in on my third day of work. He was small in stature but enormous in character, his voice rising to a shout even when he stood only a foot away. "Beautiful!"
It was far too early to be making any pronouncements about love or beauty, but I thanked him politely anyway.
"Where is your son?" He continued, looking around. "I have not heard his little feet on the marble this morning."
"I'm sorry about that," I broke in, embarrassed about an incident on my first day when Brody managed to escape Lili's grip and had then spent 10 minutes racing around the opulent, mostly empty headquarters shouting his joy to all who could hear. "It won't happen again, I –"
Lorenzo's expression transformed immediately into a frown. "It is not a problem, you understand. I think it is good to have a child here at this stage – he brings good energy. You may bring him tomorrow, as you like."
And so I earned my first commission scraping away at a wall in Italy while my son ran up and down the empty hallways and broad, spiraling walkways of what was to become the headquarters of Lorenzo's business empire. When we returned to our hotel at night I would bathe Brody before we ate, both of us laughing as we tried to get the plaster dust out of his hair.
"You know who you're going to meet next week, don't you?" I asked him as he lay in bed two nights before we were due to fly back to New York.
He nodded and looked up at me, searching my face for some indication of how he should feel. I smiled. I didn't feel happy, but I would have done anything to keep that fact from my son.
"Because I'm meeting Jackson?"
Even the names made me fraught. "Daddy" was such a loaded word. Brody knew what a father was. He knew his friends at daycare had daddies. And he knew that he didn't. Not the kind that lived with you and played catch in the yard with you and tucked you into bed at night, anyway.
I didn't lie. I told him Jackson was his dad, I gave him a very basic lesson on what made someone a father and how it didn't always mean you lived with them – thank God he was too young to have too many questions about that part of it. But I told him it was OK to feel strange about calling him 'Daddy' when they hadn't even met before and that if he wanted to call him by his name for a little while, that would be fine.
So, at first, Brody called him Jackson.
"Yes," I replied, forcing the corners of my mouth to stay in the upright position even as my heart beat with worry. "He wants to meet you very much, you know."
"Mommy?"
"What is it?"
"What's wrong with your face?"
I laughed. I didn't know if all children were like mine or if only mine had a special ability to intuit exactly what I was feeling, whether I tried to conceal it or not.
"Nothing," I replied, allowing the fake grin to fade. "I'm just – I'm trying to be brave."
"Why?"
I reached down and gently pushed his hair off his forehead. He was fresh from the bath, smelling of the hotel's orange-scented shampoo and more precious to me than anyone or anything else. I wanted to be honest, but you can't well tell a 5 year old that you're going to murder anyone who hurts them, so I watered it down a little.
"Because I want it to go well, my love. I hope you like Jackson. And I hope Jackson likes you."
My son took my hand in his and held it against his cheek – a habit he'd gotten into when he was a toddler and I would sit beside him in bed while he fell asleep. "He probably will."
I chuckled. "Probably. You're easy to like, so that helps."
"Does he like you?"
Oh God.
"I think so, yes."
"Is that why you had a baby together?"
"I, uh –" I stuttered, not expecting such a direct question. "Brody –"
"Jessica says a daddy always loves a mommy."
I sighed. Jessica was the assistant at Brody's kindergarten. He seemed particularly fond of her, and eager to share her thoughts with me. I liked her a lot – she was funny and warm and kind – but she did have a habit of putting her foot in her mouth sometimes.
"Sometimes," I responded slowly, making a mental note to talk to Jessica when I got back to New York. "Sometimes it's like that."
"And sometimes it's not?"
"Right. Sometimes it's not."
I had the lights off in the room but there was a full moon that night. It shone in through the window, illuminating the contours of my boy's face. He looked so much like Jackson. And the older he got, the more the resemblance seemed to grow.
"Well if he doesn't love you, I don't want to know him."
I heard what he said. I don't know why I pretended I didn't.
"What was that, love?"
People don't generally tend to talk of love in violent terms. But that was how I loved my son. Violently. And as he got older and more articulate, I was starting to think he felt some version of the searing, breath-stealing love for me that I felt for him.
"I said," he repeated, slowing down a little for my benefit, "that if he doesn't love you, then I don't want to know him."
I leaned forward and pulled him into my arms, forcing myself to breathe in slowly, and then out again as tears stung my eyes. I didn't want him to know I was crying.
And then, in the moonlight, I held my son tight until he fell asleep.
Chapter 31: Jackson
I was introduced to my son on a playground in New Jersey. We could have done it in a lawyer's office but Hailey and me both wanted it to happen somewhere familiar, somewhere he already felt comfortable. Hence the playground outside Brody's kindergarten and hence the presence not just of Hailey but a smiley young woman named Jessica who worked there as a teacher's assistant.
I drove up in my rented sedan and parked jus
t down the street. I could see Hailey and the woman standing next to each other, chatting. I could also see my son – Brody. His blond hair stood out under the bright afternoon sunshine as he ran around, climbing rope ladders and throwing himself down brightly colored plastic sides.
For about 10 or 15 minutes I just watched from the car. The kid looked happy. Smiling, full of energy, breaking off from his horsing around to fling his arms around either his mother or Jessica.
Briefly, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. After all, I knew my father and it didn't make my life any better. Not only did I know my father, I carried his DNA. So did Brody. How much of the intergenerational tendency to estrangement was down to that DNA, and how much of it was down to a stubborn insistence, in each subsequent generation, on not learning anything from the one before it?
What if that's what I was going to pass on to my kid? Resentment, bitterness, a tendency to family rifts?
That's not what you're going to pass on to him. You're not Jack Devlin. You left him behind in Sweetgrass Ridge. That isn't who you are.
I got out of the car. Brody looked up and saw me when I walked through the gates to the playground. There was an immediate change in his demeanor, a nervous little shuffle towards his mother. Hailey knelt down and put her arm around him, leaning in to say something. Even from a distance I could see she was trying very hard to conceal her own nervousness – and not entirely succeeding in doing so.
I held up my hand and waved, aware that my size could make me seem intimidating and not wanting to scare the kid.
For weeks I'd been thinking about what I was going to say to him. Keeping it casual seemed like a good idea. No reason to burden a child with adult bullshit. But as I got closer and closer to where he stood clinging to Hailey, my throat seemed to tighten more and more.
He really did look like me. So much so it was almost eerie, like looking at a younger version of myself.
"Hell–" I started, coughing when all that came out was a rasping sound. "Hello. You must be Brody."
The boy turned to Hailey and she gave him a little nod. He stepped forward, away from her, and silently stretched out one small hand towards me.