And then I heard her.
Behind me.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. Her tone sounded a little sad, but not devastated or depressed like mine would be if I had read such a confession from my own mother. She seemed to be taking the news quite well, but maybe that had something to do with her pregnancy. The elevated hormone levels could really make a woman crazy, and Lena was no exception, I supposed.
I spun around, more than a little startled. “I…” I sighed, unable to make eye contact and then remembered Tom’s criticism about my character since Karen’s death—something about my comfort zone. So I locked my eyes on hers and stepped outside that proverbial box. “You weren’t supposed to read that letter, Lena.”
She shrugged like it was no big deal. “So what’s next?”
I studied her for a moment, still amazed by her casual stance. I had to focus a little harder. “I’ve already begun my search.”
“He mentioned the reference letter, will that help?” she asked. “Will you use Tom to help find another job? Because I don’t really believe him.”
Reference letter? Tom?
And then it struck me that the letter she had read was the termination letter, not the one her mother had written prior to dying. I chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” she asked, stepping closer to me.
I shook my head, and then nodded downstairs. “Never mind. I, um, I’ll start looking for a job soon enough. We’ll be okay. The severance is enough to last until next year, but it’s the benefits I’m worried about and…” I caught myself staring at her flat belly, which I expected would start getting bigger soon.
“Uh, Papa Bear?” she said. “Since you’re not going into work, and I’m preggers and all that, maybe you can drive me to school?” Lena asked, batting her eyes at me like she used to. “Pretty please, Daddy?”
I grinned; Karen had always taken a similar approach when it came to getting her way with me. Of course, she never called me Papa Bear, but the batting eyes and use of some kind of backward logic never failed.
“Fine,” I admitted. “I’ll just go shower.”
“Oh, one more favor,” she called out as I climbed the first step. I glanced back and pretended to be annoyed. “Before taking me to school, I have an appointment with the OB at nine.” She cringed like I might throw something at her. Or maybe she cringed at something else, like the sudden frown or annoyance that crunched across my face.
“You need me to take you to the OB?” I asked, stepping back down onto the main level and taking a step toward her. I crossed my arms. The last time I had stepped foot into an Obstetrician’s office had been while Karen and I were expecting Lena. The only difference between now and then was that I thought Lena had been mine; this time around, I was here for moral support only.
Lena backed away from me. Her soft eyes betrayed the uncertainty in her gut. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll figure it out.”
She started toward the basement stairs, but I moved quickly and clamped onto her elbow. “It’s alright,” I told her. “If you need a chauffeur all day, I’m here. It’s just…” I sighed and looked up, my eyes reaching for hers. “I don’t know.”
Her eyes locked onto mine, and the only word that jumped to the forefront of my thoughts was lost. My daughter, biological or not, looked scared and lost. Just like Karen and I had when we found out that she was pregnant (albeit with someone else’s sperm donation). I caught myself biting down.
I released Lena’s elbow and started back toward the stairs. “Let me shower,” I told her, “and we’ll meet back here in half an hour?”
Even though I had my back to her, I could sense her semi-grin and the relief on her face. “Thanks, Papa Bear. I love you.”
“Me too.”
I climbed the rest of the stairs, one step at a time. Half an hour to get ready was plenty for me, but I knew Lena appreciated the added cushion. As much as I hated to admit it, she was a pretty young woman. It made sense why men would want to do what they had obviously done, hence the fetus growing inside her.
For the second time today, I caught myself grinding my teeth.
Entering my bedroom, I inhaled a long, deep breath and reached for Karen’s handwritten note on the end table. I read it a couple of times while standing at the bed, searching for some kind of inspiration that didn’t exist. Maybe not inspiration, but clues. More than anything, I wanted to find Lena’s biological father before she gave birth to her child. Her true father deserved to know his grandson or granddaughter, and I knew that Karen would’ve wanted that as well. If she hadn’t, she never would’ve made this confession, let alone fucked this other man in the first place.
The one line in her note that spoke to me was:
I wanted to give you the gift of a child, a perfect child, and when nature refused to accommodate us so early in our marriage, I resorted to that one option no wife ever wants to.
The idea of a “perfect child” told me she knew the sperm donor. And if she knew the donor, then there had to be something, anything on Facebook.
I left the letter on the bed, then thought better of it. Instead, I folded it back into the envelope and left it under the pillow where Lena wouldn’t find it by accident, and then I reached for the laptop. I opened it and searched through Karen’s Facebook profile again. The messages—FAIL—the long list of friends with names like Nathan, Samuel and Will—FAIL. Except there was one Sammy, a second cousin who lived in Germany, and a William Garth who was openly gay, and a Wilson Bragg who was a truck-driver with his wife, but no Nathan’s at all.
Unlike the last time I had attempted this, I dug a little deeper into the pictures. Rather than letting myself get discouraged or depressed with the photos of Karen and her fake happiness, I ignored her altogether and searched through the hundreds of tags. I made it all the way back to 2009 before I found a “Nathan.”
And that was when I heard the knock at the bedroom door.
“Papa Bear,” came Lena’s voice. “You ready?”
I snapped my attention to the door, my heart pounding in my chest like my daughter had caught me looking at internet porn instead of hunting for her biological father.
Fuck.
“Dad?” she asked, and this time she sounded concerned.
I glanced over at the photo on the screen. Karen with a bunch of friends—among them, the gay William Garth and two of his closest buddies, as well as one of Karen’s best-friends, Jeanine Lipp-Patterson, who had moved to Portland—and in the corner, a guy with a lean face, square jaw, and eyes that made the entire photo look perfectly pretty. He flashed a million-dollar smile, and if I followed his eyes, I saw them locked on Karen’s.
I gulped. Bingo.
“I’m fine,” I said to the door, wondering if my voice sounded as hollow and empty as my heart felt. “Just a few more minutes, okay, Lena?”
I turned back to the photograph. There was definitely something there, and this picture had been taken just five years ago. I moved the cursor and let it hover over the name Nathan Darien before clicking through to his Facebook page.
After a few minutes and a couple of dozen clicks through the photos, I snapped the laptop shut.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered, moving away from the bed. I had progressed a little farther today than yesterday. Hopefully my stomach would calm down enough for me to take another look once I returned from playing chauffeur to Lena.
Hurrying to the bathroom, I showered the quickest I ever had and rushed downstairs, a ball cap pulled low over my forehead. I didn’t have enough time to make myself look presentable, forget about deodorant. Then again, it didn’t really matter, did it? Unemployment had its benefits.
“Nice,” Lena said, rolling her eyes at me as she reached down for her school bag and flung it over her shoulder.
I opened the door for her and walked her to the car, placing her bag in the trunk while she settled into the passenger seat. Taking my time, I closed the lid and stared across the car’s roo
ftop, to the house where Karen and I had lived all these years.
For the past year, I had deliberated selling the house, moving on and abandoning the memories that had haunted me for the past year or so. But the market remained incredibly soft, and I would’ve taken a bath. It became impossible to sell.
“Let’s go, Papa Bear,” I heard from the car.
Settling behind the wheel, I drove the fifteen minutes to Lena’s obstetrician’s office at a flashy medical building. Because we were cutting it close, thanks to my distraction on the laptop, I stopped at the front doors to let her out.
“Meet me up on the second floor,” she said, shutting the passenger door and running off.
I watched her enter the building, then found a parking spot. I was in no rush to hurry after Lena, to be “that father” that supported his teenaged daughter through pregnancy. Because “that father,” according to my own stereotypes, hadn’t paid enough attention to his daughter, and it was that kind of emotional neglect that led to pregnancy in the first place. “That father” should’ve paid more attention to his daughter because he truly didn’t know what kind of friends she had, and never really gave a fuck about the well-being of the girl he was supposed to have raised into a lady, not a whore. And “that father” realized, at these kinds of appointments, that maybe his sudden interest in her life was too little, too late.
I wrestled back the guilt, choked it down because I knew what I had done—or, more accurately, failed to do—over the past year while Lena and I had spiraled into our separate depressions, both of us ruined by the woman who had given Lena life and simultaneously robbed me of the rest of mine.
“Hey, look at you!” I heard as I entered the building. The voice was familiar.
I spotted her at the elevators, holding the doors and standing half-in and half-out of the compartment. If not for her smile, I never would’ve recognized her in those black yoga pants, running shoes, and ball cap. Except now her hair poured out in a ponytail at the back of the hat.
Veronica’s smile brightened as I approached. “Look at us, huh?”
I pushed out a smile, despite feeling a little humiliated—the clothes, the fact that I had brought my pregnant seventeen-year old daughter to her obstetrician… and the lack of deodorant. In spite of my insecurity, I stepped onto the elevator anyway. It was just me and Veronica.
And a young girl wearing a plaid skirt and a shirt with a rainbow across the chest.
My eyes hopped from the little girl to Veronica, who really was a girl as well, at least compared to me and my age. I pegged her in her late-twenties—no lines or signs of age on her face, not even smile lines, and she just looked, well, young. Older than Lena, but fucking young all the same. Depressingly young.
“This is Ava, my daughter,” Veronica said, making an introduction with that youthful smile pasted on her lips. She pressed the button for the fourth floor. “What floor?” she asked me as her daughter held out her hand.
Smiling, I shook Ava’s little hand—four or five years old, at the most. She looked a little miserable about missing a day of school, and coming to the doctor’s office for a needle or some other annoyance.
I replied, “Second.”
“Oh,” Veronica said, and when she checked in on me again, I saw that her perfect smile had melted away. “Obstetrics.” And then she thought about it. “Oh, don’t tell me, your daughter, right, Elliot?”
Guilty. I allowed a smile to tickle my lips as I glanced down at the elevator’s dirty tile floor and continued shaking my head at just how coincidental all of our encounters had been thus far. I couldn’t have planned it to be any more awkward than it had been.
Once I regained my composure, the elevator doors started opening on the second floor. Phew. I glanced over at Veronica and noticed a line of ink crawling out from the neck of her shirt, right along her collarbone. I could only make out three letters—nev—but I caught my curiosity before it could get me into real trouble again. My craving to see the whole word—or sentence or whatever it was—underneath that yoga top would go unsatisfied today.
“Congratulations, Elliot,” she offered, reaching her arm out to hold the elevator doors.
“It’s my daughter’s obstetrician,” I told her, almost apologetically, which I realized would not help my cause. “She’s the one having the baby.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s a really complicated story,” I added, stepping past her.
She stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. Her touch aroused my curiosity. It felt…different. I gulped, moving my attention from her hand to her daughter and then back to her face.
“Then tell me about it,” she said, pulling her hand back like she had only just realized that she was touching a complete stranger, a man she didn’t know, aside from a single delivery and a couple of chance encounters. And, when you really thought about it, that delivery—a sex toy, for all intents and purposes—made me, the stranger in question, more of a freak than potential dating material.
I shook my head. “I…No, it’s not something you—”
The door started to buzz, its alarm asking us to finish with the awkward conversation and let this elevator move on with its purpose. But Veronica seemed determined, something I blamed on the fifteen years or so that separated us, because an older woman would’ve simply given up and found someone else to harass already.
This young woman, however, pulled me back inside the elevator, surprising me to the point where I nearly fell on my ass. The doors closed, and we continued our casual ascent to the fourth floor. I glanced over at her daughter, whose wide eyes seemed to pass along a telepathic warning: don’t say ‘no’ to my mommy, she’s psycho.
“Listen, I didn’t mean to come across as a bully,” she said, her neck blotchy and red, and her cheeks adopting a darker glow, “but I’m just asking for coffee. Or lunch. Not a sleepover.” And then she thought about something new. “Shit, are you married?” The color in her face and neck deepened, and she seemed to take an involuntary step back from me. “I’m sorry.”
I shook my head ‘no’, but before I could say anything, her daughter pointed out, “Mommy, you said ‘shit.’”
The daughter’s voice broke the awkwardness. I intended on telling Veronica about my lack of a job, my financial inability to splurge on lunches and coffees with younger, attractive women, and, if time permitted, I decided I might even tell her all about the current time constraints in my life, courtesy of my top-secret mission to locate my pregnant daughter’s biological father.
But Ava’s voice and words instilled a bit of common sense in me, reminding me of that non-verbal warning about saying ‘no’ to her mother.
The elevator eased to a stop at the fourth floor. Veronica’s eyes bored into mine. She really was a bully; the way she looked at me saying she would not take no for an answer. Not this time.
So I nodded as the doors opened, shrugging. “Okay. Fine. Lunch.”
Maybe I expected fireworks or some kind of high-energy soundtrack to blare from the speakers instead of the medicine-appropriate Muzak. Instead, all I received from Veronica was the professional nod of acceptance. Like a tick-box getting checked on her list of chores for the day.
She reached past me, taking her daughter’s little hand, and as the two of them left the elevator, she noticed the confusion on my face. Chuckling, she said, “I know where you live, Elliot. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Before I could ask for more details—was I to cook, set a table for two, candles, what kind of music should I play, the usual stuff someone who hadn’t been single in nearly two decades might ask—the doors were already closing, and the elevator started its calm descent.
I smiled. For the first time since burying my cheating, lying wife, my face twisted with positive emotions that ran so deep, I felt something I never recalled experiencing before: youth.
Chapter 6
You never truly know someone, I kept telling myself while clicking and reading and learning a litt
le more about Nathan Darien from Karen’s Facebook pictures. According to the information on his page, he was born two years prior to my dead wife, had attended the same high school, and they shared quite a few common friends, mostly people I had never met. And five years ago, they had attended the same party, a party that I had also attended. Fourth of July, 2009, hosted by one of Karen’s coworkers. A backyard party with a swimming pool, outdoor bar, and lots of drinking. Enough to make you lose track of time, lose track of how many drinks you’ve had, and where the hell is your wife, you haven’t seen her for a good half-hour already, but then you find her stepping out of the house, alone, a smirk on her face, and when you ask where she went, she tells you she was just helping out the coworker/host with food prep.
Right…
I stepped away from the laptop, leaving it on the bed as I retreated to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Fuck, I needed to cool down, snap back to reality. While I stared at my reflection in the mirror, I realized that I had wasted a large portion of my day stalking my dead wife’s ex-boyfriend.
Possibly the man who had impregnated her.
Nathan Darien.
But possibly not the man who had impregnated her, my optimistic and rational side suggested.
Bullshit.
The rage pulsating behind my eyes was unmistakable. There had been other photos, half a dozen or so. Parties. Work functions that I had not attended, yet there he was. With my wife, years after Lena had been born.
And, according to his Facebook, Nathan lived in Grosse Point, which made it convenient for them to hook up for a casual fuck during Karen’s lunch hour—twenty minutes from the office, twenty minutes of fucking, then twenty minutes back. Nobody would know any better outside of the messy hair and the deep blue of her eyes—they always turned deep blue after she indulged in a good fuck, and it took those eyes a couple of hours to calm back down to their neutral slate gray.
Surviving Goodbye Page 6