“He wants to meet you,” I said, quickly, to keep myself from raging. “I told him I would find out if you were interested. But if you’re not interested, that’s really fine. It doesn’t matter to me either way. But he’s my son and I love him, so I told him I would try.”
“When?”
“When?”
“When can I meet him?” And now your father sounded actually breathless, Jake. Like maybe he was even crying. Jesus Christ. The fucking moron.
“We’re in Seattle now.”
“Is that where you live?”
“We live in Manhattan, but we’re visiting my sister. Do you remember my sister, Allie?” I knew he didn’t remember. “We’re here through the summer and then we’ll be back in the city. You can meet him then if you want.”
“I have to wait till then?”
“Excuse me?”
“I just . . . Till the end of the summer?”
He had to be kidding me. Seven years ago he never wanted children no matter what and now he could hardly wait two months to meet one? How was this possible? And anyway, two minutes before he didn’t even know you existed! Two minutes before he probably barely remembered who I was!
“I’m sorry, Dave,” I said. “We’re here in Seattle most of the summer. But if you’re interested, I’d be glad to set something up when we—”
“I could come to Seattle.”
“What? No, are you crazy? No.”
“I could,” he said, more insistently. “I could come—I mean, whenever it’s convenient for you, of course, but really I could come whenever. I mean, I could come over a weekend or cancel some meetings.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why do you suddenly want to meet him now? What’s this rush?”
“I just—” He sounded confused. “You said he wanted to meet me. I’d like to meet him?”
“Right, but—” And honestly, Jake, one of the reasons I was so good at my job, one of the reasons my clients just loved me is that I always knew what to say. I always knew how to frame an argument. I was never at a loss. “Dave, we live twenty minutes from you. Why do you have to jump on a plane? Can’t you just wait till we get back?”
“I didn’t know—” your father stuttered. “I just. I didn’t know. I didn’t know I had a son. You never—”
“How did you not know?”
“You never told me!”
“I told you I was pregnant.”
“But then the last time we talked . . . you said you would never keep—”
“You told me that you hated children. That you never ever wanted a child. You had a preemptive vasectomy, Dave. So excuse me for thinking you wouldn’t want to be a big part of this child’s life.”
We both turned quiet. I guess, as a trial lawyer, your father was rarely out of words either, and some small guileless part of me couldn’t help but be touched that he seemed so . . . so eager. So moved. So full of despair.
“Karen, honestly, it had never once occurred to me that you would have the baby.”
“I never said I would have an abortion.” (Jacob, please know that—from the moment I took the test I knew you were mine, I would have you, I would see your beautiful face.)
“I just assumed—” your father said.
“Assumed? Who assumes something like that?”
“I just . . . you know. A single woman with a big career. I just . . . Everything you said—”
“What did I say?”
“That you would . . . I don’t know, and you were always such a fanatic about abortion rights.”
Oh my God. “You assumed because I was pro-choice I’d have an abortion?”
“You went to that rally in DC,” he said, sounding more than slightly crumpled, and now I knew for sure that no matter what else he turned out to be in life your father was also, indubitably, a moron.
“And when I never heard from you again, it seemed obvious—I mean it just seemed clear to me that you didn’t have the baby. Because if you’d had the baby you would have told me.”
“Why would I have told you?”
“Because I’m the father!”
“What about global warming?”
“What are you talking about?” Dave said.
“You said you hated children! You suggested the baby wasn’t yours!”
“I was panicking!” he said. “You never let me make it up to you. I called you—you never returned my calls!”
“You never called!”
“Of course I did!”
He was lying; your father was a liar.
“You told me you didn’t want children!”
“Karen—”
“Global warming!” I said, almost shrieked. “Nuclear proliferation!”
He paused for a long moment. “Karen!” he finally said, his voice breaking, really breaking. “Why didn’t you tell me you had the baby?”
“Dave,” I said. “Why didn’t you ask?”
There was no getting around this one—we were just going to be in it for a while together, each crying on one end of this great North American continent, and I knew for sure that I was right, that when he kicked me out of the house that day after I managed to give him only half my speech, I knew the right thing to do—the only thing to do—was to dust myself off so that you and I could have our life together. Yet this small, guileless part of me wondered if the past seven years of our lives had been lived under the shadow of a horrible mistake.
And then I remembered that the only good thing Dave Kersey ever did in his whole life was get me pregnant with you, that apart from that he was a terrible person and I could not think that I had made a mistake because if I did I would never recover. I would die right now, before my official time was officially up.
“I’d really like to come to Seattle,” he said. “I mean, if that’s okay.”
“But you said you didn’t want children,” I whispered, so he couldn’t hear me crying.
“I’m different now,” he said.
He was different. He was different. If it weren’t for you, Jakey, I’d have hung up the phone and thrown it into the lake. But instead I wiped my nose with my ripped T-shirt, gave myself a second for my heart to come together. Out my window, across the lawn, the lake was fulminating under the assault of the storm. I could see cars backed up on I-90, the bridge to Bellevue. I had thought, more than once, about getting in our little rental Hyundai and hitting the road, driving up to Canada, I-90 to I-5, away from this dumb place and cancer and even you, my love. Just escaping all of it everything and dying alone.
“Tell me about him?” Dave said.
I wiped my cheeks. “About Jake?”
“Yes,” Dave said. “Tell me—tell me anything? What’s he like?”
The skin on my face was hot and wet. “Jesus, Dave, I don’t even know how to start. He’s beautiful,” I said. And then, because it was true: “He looks a lot like you.”
I shouldn’t have said that. Your father started blubbering again, quietly but I could hear the restrained snorting.
I tuned him out. “He’s very smart, but he’s shy. He’s intuitive. He learned to read when he was four. He loves video games. He has a ton of friends at school. He goes to PS 199. It turns out he’s good at tennis.”
“Can I see—can you send me a picture?”
“Well, sure, but . . . here,” I said, wiping my cheeks again, my nose. “I just friended you on Facebook. Click on my profile and you can see everything. His whole life, pretty much.”
There was silence on the other end. I heard, or thought I heard, the faintest of clicks.
And so of course while he was clicking on me, I was clicking on him. Dave Kersey. Dave Kersey. How many times I dreamed of this, cyberstalking Dave Kersey. I never let myself. But now I could.
Dave had just bought a summer house, a nice one, on Long Island. He still drove a BMW. His wife—well, of course there was a wife—her name was Megan.
She was young and blonde and she sur
e was pretty.
He scrolled through my life while I scrolled through his and we both breathed together, shuddered, sometimes whimpered on the phone, hoping the other wasn’t listening or forgave what was heard. “Oh my God,” your father sighed more than once. “He looks just like—”
“Oh my God,” I said when I saw their wedding photos. Three summers ago. The Bronx Botanical Gardens, where I had always wanted to be married, should I have ever gotten married. Megan carried plumeria in her bouquet. She hyphenated her last name.
“He’s beautiful,” Dave finally said. “You’re right.”
“I know,” I said. “And that’s not nearly the best thing about him.”
“He really wants to meet me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Can I come?” he asked. “To Seattle?”
“Are you going to bring your wife?” This was not what I wanted to say, but it slipped out the way things sometimes do. His wife. The reason, I assumed, he was different now.
“Megan’s traveling a lot for business,” he said. “I’d probably come alone.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay I can come?”
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course,” he said, and though there really wasn’t much left to say, neither one of us hung up.
“Jesus, I can’t believe you never told me about him, Karen,” he said after a while.
“I’m sorry,” I said. This was another thing I didn’t want to say, but again, it slipped.
“I am too,” he said. “I can’t believe what a . . . what an idiot I was. I can’t believe what I’ve missed.”
“Well,” I said. “You can get to know him now if you want.”
“I’d like to.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll let you know when it’s a good time to come.” And just like that, your father was coming to Seattle.
“Thank you, Karen,” your father said. “Thank you. I know . . . I know—”
What did he know? What on earth could he have possibly known?
“Thanks for calling,” he finally said.
“I did it for Jake,” I said, then hung up quickly before another thing I didn’t plan on saying slipped out.
I GOT THROUGH the rest of the day and then the night, tucked you in, read you your stories, didn’t say anything about your father. You were very happy because Ross was going to take you and Dustin to Alki Beach the next day, to the place that sold Hawaiian shave ice, and if it was nice out, which it almost certainly wouldn’t be, you’d be able to stick your toes in the water.
I lay with you for a while after you’d fallen asleep, stroking your light brown hair. You were blond as a toddler, and only recently had your hair started to grow darker, but it still had that softness of a baby’s hair, like angel’s wings under my fingers. I felt your little earlobes under my fingertips. If I didn’t know it would wake you, I would have traced your lips.
Later that night, Allie met me in the guesthouse study so we could pore over your father’s Facebook page together. It was midnight and we were drinking white wine, both a little surprised at how often your father updated his status and how little he had to reveal. Since his marriage to Megan, the only big life events seemed to be the house in Quogue and a two-week cruise to Alaska. He still frequented Mets games in the summer and Rangers games in the winter, still favored, as far as his pictures proved, golf shirts and neatly creased Dockers.
Megan seemed to be a little bit more interesting; she invested in Latin American markets for Citibank and clearly racked up the frequent flier miles, at least as far as Dave’s doleful status updates reported: “Little lady’s in Lima again. Drinking a mojito in her honor” or “My wife went to Chile and all I got was this lousy sinus infection.”
His friends seemed to be the same friends, his family the same family, and his car, even, the same car, although probably a newer model. And I couldn’t help but think that while I was bringing you to the pediatrician and getting your hair cut and going to school conferences and interviewing nannies and cleaning your hamster cage and watching you earn your white, yellow, orange belts, your father was just living his dippy New Jersey life, full of Rangers games and sad-sack jokes.
“No kids, huh,” Allie said after we’d gone through each picture in his file, one by one.
“I guess no kids, no.”
“How old is he now?”
“Close to fifty.”
“And how old is Megan?” Allie asked. “Ask Google.”
I clicked around, found Megan’s bio on the Citibank page, which said she graduated from Yale. Yale! A few more clicks and it turned out she was the class of 1992. Just like me.
“She’s my age.”
“She looks great,” Allie said, enlarging her image on the screen. “I mean, not that you don’t, but—”
“She doesn’t have chemo hair,” I said. Instead, Megan had blonde hair in a chic cut along her jawline, blue-green eyes like a Disney doll’s. She seemed to have made a uniform out of gray sheath dresses and black jackets. Her smile, despite what you might think about a woman in her profession, with her degrees and her lithe little figure—well, her smile was unnervingly warm.
“I wonder why no kids.”
“He had a vasectomy,” I said.
“Yeah, but they can reverse them. And we know they’re not always one hundred percent effective, right?”
“But also she’s forty-two or forty-three. If they got married three years ago, then—”
“She’s too old,” Allie said. “So many women wait too long.”
“Not everyone meets the love of their life in high school, Allie.” My sister was the only smart woman I know who married at twenty-two, had children right away. At the time, I thought she was insane, starting a family at twenty-three, the same age our poor mother did, our mother who spent her whole life bent with the burden of us. But Allie loved being pregnant and loved being a mother, and of course her husband, unlike my mother’s, went on to a multimillion-dollar career, which I suppose made the whole maternal enterprise a little easier.
“What do you think she’ll make of Jake?”
“Megan? What do I care?” I said. “She’ll never meet him.”
“Why not?” Allie asked, enlarging an image of Megan’s shoes. “She’s his father’s wife.”
“So?”
“So don’t you think they’ll end up getting to know each other?”
I was galled. “Allie, I’m not setting this up so that they can have a tight relationship or anything. He wants to meet Dave, Dave wants to meet him. That’s fine. It’s not going to go any further. They’re not going to, you know, hang out at each other’s houses.”
Allie looked at me like I was crazy.
“Look, at the moment I’m just afraid he won’t even know what to say to Jake. He’ll be some stiff weirdo and break his heart.” Allie stared into space. “You remember how he hated even the idea of children?” I said. “How he freaked out when I found out I was pregnant? Is this the kind of guy who’s going to know how to behave around a six-year-old?”
“Well,” Allie said, slowly, “I mean, he wants to meet him, right?”
“Yeah, but . . . I think he’s just curious. I mean, I’d be curious. But curious isn’t the same thing as, like, suddenly he wants to be dad.”
“What if he’s changed his mind?”
“I’d be shocked,” I said. “Anyway, even if he has, as long as I’m around, I’m not going to go setting up father-son camping trips or any bullshit like that. And once I’m not here anymore, Jake will be living in Seattle. Which is three thousand miles from New Jersey. Which means there won’t be any relationship.”
Allie pushed at a cuticle. “But what if they want to have one?”
“They can email,” I said. “Dave can go to his, I don’t know, his high school graduation. If he wants to.”
Allie, who didn’t like to wind me up in my delicate condition, made a few benign clicks on Dave’s Facebo
ok profile, away from Megan, toward the Rangers. But I could tell what she was thinking.
“Allie, I know lots of divorced moms who do it that way. They don’t want the father in their kids’ life, for whatever reason, so they just push him to the margins. Which is usually where the fathers want to be, anyway. It’s not like every dad is superdad, like every dad is Bruce.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s just . . . What if Dave and Jake want to spend time with each other? Like, I don’t know, like quality time?”
“Impossible. You won’t let them.”
“I won’t?” Allie stopped clicking. “That’s a hard thing to ask. To keep Jake away from his father.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything except to avoid facilitating a relationship. Dave and Jake will meet, I’m sure they’ll get along fine, or maybe they won’t, I don’t know, and then Dave can go back to his corner and we can have our lives again. Without him.”
“But what if they want more than that?”
“Dave is not allowed to have more than that.”
“But—”
“But?” Rain in Seattle usually came and went with a certain shiftlessness, but all that day it had been crazy, nonstop. We listened to it drive against the windows.
“But, Karen, he’s his father.”
“So?” I said. I was still wearing my ripped T-shirt, Jake; I started tearing at the hem. I needed her to understand the man your father was. For some reason she refused to understand. “Allie, excuse me for sounding a little hysterical, but how is Dave his father, exactly? I mean, how is he a father any more than any other sperm donor might be a father? I’m the one who’s taken care of him for his entire life, I’m the one who’s remembered vaccinations and met the teachers and put food on the table, and I’m the one who’s been the father and the mother, so I’m sorry but I just—”
“Karen, don’t—”
“Please, Allie. Please,” I said. “Don’t let him worm his way in to Jake’s life. He doesn’t deserve that.”
“I wouldn’t do it for him,” she said. “I’d do it for Jake.” She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking out the window, toward the rain and the implacable lake.
“But Jakey isn’t going to want to know him,” I said. “He’s a kid. He might have forgotten about it already. He hasn’t . . . he hasn’t mentioned him or anything about him all day.”
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