What We Leave Behind

by Weinstein, Rochelle B.

  “My husband’s in town,” I blurted out.

  He nodded, staring at the brown ground beneath him, not really swinging but dragging himself back and forth.

  “He doesn’t know about any of this. I’m going to tell him tonight.”

  He looked up from his frozen gaze, turning to face me.

  “Jess,” he began in a way that first stopped my breathing. The word might have been fine on its own, but the face…I didn’t have any more strength to hide from it. “I think we should have this baby.”

  Hearing those words after days of tap dancing around them took a minute to process. All discussions regarding Michelle’s treatment had led to this. I watched my shoe as it dipped beneath the sand in front of me, unable to meet his stare.

  I knew what he was proposing was in response to saving Michelle, but I wasn’t sure what having another child with Jonas would mean to me. I had once believed I was destined to love Jonas for the rest of my life. I chalked it up to old loves, something about how we never get over the first one. But over time Jonas faded into the background, a place I seldom visited, somewhere distant and grainy. When I’d come across his name or a memory would flicker, I’d gain access to the fuzzy picture, unclear to the human eye, but there and very real. I often equated it to a cavity. Sometimes my tongue would brush across the sensitive tooth, a system of checking, to see that the pain was still there. And even though it would hurt badly, just brushing up against it like that, there was an equal amount of comfort in the movement. The familiarity of the feeling was the sensation I was searching for, the comfort that it hadn’t left. The thought of extracting it was far more severe. And slowly over time, the pain diminished, as did the cavity, but the sensitivity remained.

  Marty gave me the Novocain to upend the wound. Through his eyes I saw a different world, one filled with joy and possibility. I opened my heart in a way different from before, storing everything related to Jonas Levy, all the pieces of the puzzle that never quite fit together, in a place where no one would ever find them. And for a long time, I didn’t go searching for them either. It was a part of my history, what I had left behind. I was both proud of it and ashamed of it.

  But what was I feeling now? I couldn’t get a grasp on it. In managing difficult times, I had always found the ability to compartmentalize. This over here, that over here. But this, this whole thing, there was only blurred vision, no light leading me toward a clearer path. Loving Jonas yesterday was getting mixed up with loving him today.

  He was staring at me, awaiting a response. I was off somewhere important and he knew it. The eyes beckoned me for an answer. I could see in between the blinking motion that they were sad, worried, and hopeful all at the same time.

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” I answered, hesitant to say any more.

  “I know,” he answered. “I understand. I’ve thought about it as much as you have, and it’s more than a little outlandish. But I can’t sit here and watch my own flesh and blood deteriorate before my eyes. I took an oath.”

  He waited a few minutes before beginning again. There were more reasons he had to explain.

  “I love you, Jess. I’ve always loved you. I don’t know what I might have done at the time, when we were kids, but if you had come to me and told me that you were pregnant, I’d like to think I would have made some radical changes in my life. But you didn’t.”

  “That’s unfair,” I said. “You know why I didn’t tell you. I cared about you too much.”

  “I want to have this child with you to save our daughter. I would request custody, and that way you don’t have to worry about your husband. He won’t have this situation rubbed in his face.”

  He had taken the reins, and I hadn’t even gotten on the horse yet. “If Michelle reaches remission after this second round of treatments, and assuming we get pregnant immediately, we could witness a transplant by the following year at around the same time.”

  “Doesn’t that all depend on this child being a match?”

  “I’m hopeful, Jess, aren’t you?”

  “How do we know she’ll even survive a bone marrow transplant?”

  He looked so convinced, so sure, so Jonas. It was hard to imagine the years that had passed us by. Being so close to him, his hands gripped around the swing’s chain, there were memories of my youth flooding my pulse—his hands on my leg, his arms around my shoulders. I saw in that split second that his mind was already made up. It was my turn to decide a fate that would again change everything around me.

  I stood up from the swing. “Marty’s waiting for me at the hotel.” I owed my husband the truth, and maybe then we could go back to the life in which I once had a peaceful existence. Maybe there, speaking with Marty, I’d find the answers.

  “Think about it,” he said, standing next to me, so close I could see the lines on his face. Then he turned to walk in the opposite direction, and I watched him and thought about how easy it would be to run after him and beg him to hold me again.

  CHAPTER 33

  Dialing the hotel, I reached Marty on the first ring. We agreed to meet at the Seaport in half an hour. I took my time, knowing that things would never be the same, wanting to freeze the passing of that moment.

  He was waiting when I approached the pier, leaning against the stone wall adjacent to the Gap. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, something I hadn’t seen him do since we had Ari. The pillow of smoke formed above his head as he exhaled a foreboding steam. He had to know that I was nearby, turning around abruptly, throwing the butt on the floor, and stomping it with his boot.

  “Hey, pretty lady,” he said, as I moved in closer.

  “Hey, yourself,” I smiled back. His arm weaved itself around my shoulders, dragging me in one smooth gesture to his side.

  I didn’t waste any time. I figured I had waited long enough. He deserved to know the truth. He deserved to know the direction we might be headed. As we tiptoed along the water’s edge, hardly noticing the cloud of cold air that wrapped us in its hands, I told my husband my story.

  Marty already knew about my love for Jonas. He knew how we’d said our good-byes and that a part of my heart was closed off to anybody’s reach. What he didn’t know were the much larger truths. I filled in the blanks. Mulholland. Tuesday night.

  “There was a baby, a little girl. I was sixteen, Marty, my choices were limited. I couldn’t subject her to a life without a father. You know what living without mine had done to me.” He sat there stonefaced. If I had wanted him to sanction this, it didn’t look promising.

  “Jonas never knew about her. I didn’t tell him.”

  He saw I was capable of lying to the only two men I had ever loved.

  “It was a part of my life I wanted to be over, forgotten.”

  Marty’s reaction at first was calm, but as accusations flew from his mouth, the calmness dissipated. “I can forgive the act, Jess, and the decision you made, but I don’t know if I can live with how easily you looked me in the face and lied. You turned the things we shared together into bullshit. From the start, we were based on a lie, and the firsts that we shared were all lies, fucking lies.” I winced at the words. Marty had never spoken to me like this before. I had to turn away. “How did you look at me every day, Jess? How’d you sit there as we marveled as the baby grew inside of you? The excitement, the nausea? It was all bullshit, all of it.”

  “Just because it wasn’t the first time didn’t make it less special.”

  “You lied to me. The whole time you were lying, and it was a lie that just got bigger and bigger…this thing…it’s not something you can hide from. It’s a person.”

  “I’m sorry.” It came out as a whisper.

  “You should be,” he chastised. “You did this. You. I never asked for this. You did this to us.”

  Words did not come easily, even for me. Shattered glass would be easier to imagine. One piece was Marty, one piece was Jonas, one piece was Michelle, one piece was me.

  “Is she here in New
York? Is that why you made up that bogus story about work? God, Jess, I would never have thought you were capable.”

  “There are things I needed to take care of out here.”

  “Things? What the hell does that mean?”

  He lit another cigarette, and I told him how she was sick. I told him she might die.

  The terminal facts were the only things that had the power to freeze time and reactions. His voice sounded changed, but it was still Marty saying, “I’m sorry to hear that, but what does it have to do with you?”

  I outlined Michelle’s options and what a full-blooded sibling would mean.

  “Is there another child?” he asked. “Is she the only one?” The way he asked me was insulting.

  “Damn it, Marty. I’m trying my best to make this thing right. I could have been any one of those girls you screwed who wound up pregnant, any one of them. Who knows for sure if there aren’t any little Martys running around Los Angeles right now.”

  He grabbed my arm, “But you’re not one of those girls, Jess. You’re my fucking wife, the mother of my child.”

  “And that hasn’t changed,” I said. “I’m still all those things…I still want to be those things.”

  “You’ve been gone for five months.”

  “What do you want from me, Marty? So much has happened. It hasn’t been the easiest time. My head’s really messed up.” I wasn’t about to throw in his face what I’d seen on MTV the other night.

  He was slipping away. I would have preferred his hand around my arm again, even if in anger. “I know you’re upset, and just as I made that time in my life disappear, I wish I could make this go away, but I can’t. This little girl needs me. Her life depends on it.”

  It was painful to watch the slow and subtle transformation on Marty’s face as I continued talking, the way his tightly controlled jaw and eyes turned sad, how he first felt empathy, then shock, and finally anger. The cigarette went flying.

  “So what are you telling me?” he asked, his fury no longer containable, rage taking over. “You’re going to screw this guy and have another baby so there’s a full-blood sibling to save your daughter?

  “You have to be kidding me,” he said as I turned my head down, staring at the pavement, looking at anything but his face. “This is a fucking joke,” he shouted, as his arms reached for his head, shaking and nodding in disbelief.

  “I wouldn’t joke about something like this,” I remarked.

  “You’re considering fucking Jonas Levy and having a child with him?”

  He backed away from me as if the close proximity would spread the insidious disease that had taken over my brain and disrupted my rational train of thought.

  I tried to think of something to say, anything to ease the tension, but what he was implying was correct. I was asking for my husband’s blessings to do the unthinkable.

  “I wouldn’t be actually having sex with him.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “What if it was Ari?” I asked. “What if he was the one fighting for his life? Wouldn’t you do anything to save him?”

  “It’s not Ari, not even close, and other than blood, what’s your responsibility to this kid? You don’t even know her.”

  “How can you say that?” I spat at him. “How can you minimize this? She’s my child, and even though I didn’t raise her, she’s part of me, and you, of all people, should respect that.”

  “I can’t believe you are deluding yourself into thinking this is logical. It would be one thing if you and I were faced with this and decided to have a child again, a married couple with a foundation where it’s legally and morally acceptable.”

  “I told you it was complicated. It affects a lot more people than just us.”

  “Jonas. I’m assuming you’ve spoken to him?”

  I figured it would be best to forego anymore dishonesty. “I’ve seen him.”

  Marty took a deep breath. I watched as the air filled him up with thoughts he couldn’t put into words, accusations he wasn’t ready to hurl. A boat hurried along the river, releasing a loud horn into the air, giving him time to think it through.

  “Do you love this guy?” he asked. “I mean, has this been going on? Have you been carrying on with him all this time?” He was humbled, and there I was, unsure if this made me sad or somewhat satisfied. “Is there something else you’re not telling me?” Marty asked, cross-examining me with his eyes, “something that would help me understand why you’d risk everything we’ve built together to save his child?”

  “I love her,” I whispered. “Already, I love her. She came from me, my body, and there might be a part of Ari in her, or a part of my mother or maybe even my father. That’s my life, Marty, a piece of me. You can’t ask me to turn away from that.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said, pausing so the words had time to sink in. “Do you still love him?” he asked. “Because if you do…”

  “That’s not what this is about, Marty. It’s about a girl with little hope, and there are two people in the world who might be able to change that. I know you’d do the same, I know you. You’d be able to put that other stuff aside and do the right thing because that’s who you are.” I had to take a breath before adding, “And, no, there hasn’t been anything going on all this time.”

  “Is this about the baby?” he asked.

  “You mean Joshua? He has a name.”

  “Maybe you’re trying to compensate for his loss. This isn’t going to bring him back. It’s only going to make things worse. It’s going to pull us further apart.”

  “You’ve done a good job of that already.”

  “How you can say that is an outrage,” he said, shaking his head back and forth. “I’ve tried for months to save our marriage. This is such bullshit.”

  He started to walk away. I wanted to follow him, but his walking away from me packed me with so much fear, the only way I could diffuse it was to be angry. When he had reached a safe distance, he turned around and said, “I understand why you’re doing this, I do, in theory. You’re an amazing, strong woman with a huge heart, but in practice, in the context of our life today, I don’t see any way we’ll get through this together. You’re not even capable of answering a simple question.”

  “I answered you. I told you it hasn’t been going on all this time. I haven’t seen or spoken to Jonas Levy in thirteen years.”

  “That wasn’t the question I was referring to.”

  He began to back away from me again.

  “I asked you if you loved him.”

  I returned to the hotel, and he was gone. There was no sign of him having been there at all. The bed was made. The place was in perfect order, and Marty was nowhere to be found. I lifted my cell phone from the table and began to dial his numbers, but they went directly to voice mail. I called down to the front desk. They said they hadn’t seen him since this morning when he got into a cab with me. I looked out the window and the darkness that descended over the city and knew he was gone. Not just from the hotel, gone from New York. I could no longer feel him there.

  I picked up the phone again, this time dialing our home in California. There was no answer. When I saw it was four o’clock there, I figured my mother had taken Ari to the playground. I was alone and exhausted. The bed lay before me so I slumped myself down, nowhere else to go but beneath the warm comforter. I hid beneath the crisp folds, remembering how many people before me had lain across the fabric. The germs were rampant, and I didn’t even care. This was my refuge, and I shared my sorrows with the soothing pillow. I ached for the baby I had lost, for the baby I gave up and now might lose again, for the love I once shared with Jonas, and for a marriage that was probably over. I racked my head with the unborn possibility of hope, the symbol this baby would stand for, the gift I could give Jonas, the gift I could give Michelle. I wasn’t sure if I could ever learn to separate the two.

  I didn’t hear from Marty that night. My mother called to tell me that he was home,
asking what was going on between us.

  The decision I faced quieted her, quieted me. I was being pulled into a deep, dark sea with no more strength to ride the oversized waves. At least, if I were in a river, there’d be some direction, some range of motion. I was anchored down by the stillness of indecision. “I feel so stuck, so limited,” I said. “Any direction I move in, someone is going to get hurt.”

  “This is a bigger decision than anyone should have to make, but please try to figure out a way to make it work with Marty, or that little boy of yours is going to inherit all your problems.” The thought of Ari suffering stayed with me the duration of our conversation.

  “I wish I could be there for you,” my mother said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come out to New York?”

  I was sure. I hadn’t even called Beth yet. This was something I needed to do alone. “It’s more important you’re there for Ari,” I said.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “As you should,” I answered her, not making any bones about the fact that I was a complete wreck. “I always screw things up.”

  “You couldn’t have predicted any of this would happen.”

  We hung up and I closed my eyes. There are people who spend years behind bars for unspeakable crimes, their physical constraints visible. Others commit sins, and although not punishable by law, their sentences are as confining as those in jail. The burden of my sins was condemning me, emotional constraint was my punishment. The lie that had sprouted out of love had turned into something that I realized might destroy an innocent child, a decent marriage, a good man. These were the nooses I carried around with me.

  I had to face the unthinkable, conceiving another child with the one who had been the great love of my life, the one who still swore he loved me, only this time, for reasons barely a handful of people would understand. Hester Prynne had better move over, I thought. I was starting a new breed of adulteress women, one that combined heroism with a dash of betrayal. Was there not a more sympathetic name for that character than Hester?