by Jenn Cooksey
I drop my eyes and talk to the floor when I whisper, “Not always.”
“Uh, yes, always.”
I bring my gaze back to hers and struggle to breathe evenly, fear skittering over every nerve-ending of my body. “Not when the child isn’t yours biologically.”
“Y—you adopted her?”
“No…not exactly.”
“Cole, please. I can’t do the cryptic thing right now.”
“I’m listed as Lola’s father on her birth certificate, Erica. Because that’s what her real father told her mother his name was. And she never heard from him again. She tried contacting him to tell him she was pregnant and tracked him down on Facebook. If you remember, though, I hardly ever got on Facebook so I didn’t see any of her messages until I was enlisted. I read the first one and thought she was nuts because I knew there was no way on Earth I’d fathered a kid so I ignored the rest of the messages she’d sent. I got deployed right after that and life got crazy. Then the Department of Child Services found me about four years ago when I was stationed in Turkey. They told me that Lola’s mother had died and I was solely responsible for a two and a half-year-old little girl.”
I look deeply into Erica’s confused eyes, silently pleading from the depths of my soul for her to do the math so that I don’t have to say it out loud.
“She’s seven?” she asks, tears of reluctant understanding welling up in her eyes.
“Next month.”
She nods and takes a shaky breath, furiously blinking back her heartbreak. “And her mom thought her messages were going to the right person because he was in your profile picture, wasn’t he?”
My throat thick with fresh hurt, I nod. “Yeah, beautiful, he was.”
“Did you know?”
“I just told you…I didn’t find out about her un—”
“I mean did you know he was cheating on me?”
I sniffle and wipe my eyes, shaking my head. “Not until he was gone.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“What was I gonna say, Erica? Hey, I just found out Holden was a cheating scumbag, but don’t let it get you down because I’m more in love with you than he ever could’ve been? Think of how that would’ve played out.”
“That was why you hated him. You found out that day… The day before I left.”
“Mmhm.”
“How?”
“The son of bitch wrote it in a journal he was keeping on his computer. That was how I understood without asking why the DCS came looking for me. He admitted to basically stealing my identity when he went to the river that last spring.”
I will never forget reading that. He said it was easy. He was jealous of me and how easy I evidently made it look to flirt and get girls to throw themselves at me. He coveted the attention. So, he wore my persona as a disguise to see if he could get the same results. And when he got them, he justified cheating on Erica by twisting the rationale I had used on him when he told me he was going to propose to her; that once he was married, he’d never be able to have sex with anyone else so why not do it before he was locked in for good. And of course, what Erica didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. So while I was housesitting for Erica and her grandma while they took some of Erica’s grandfather’s ashes to his family back in Iowa, Holden straight-up fucked a minor who was a virgin, using my name to do it. Then he died and left me to pay for his sins.
I search Erica’s face, hoping to find a sliver of something other than the desolation I was petrified she would experience in learning about Lola. It was why I wanted to know for certain she was over Holden before I told her. And now, even with last night, I’m not so sure that she is. Still, part of our conversation whispers in my ear, reminding me that neither she nor I can change what’s come to pass. We do, however, have a say in what happens from here on out, and I desperately want to share a canvas and paint an epic work of art with her.
“I’m sorry. When I found out, I was prepared to take it to the grave with me because I knew it would only hurt you to know. Then we went our separate ways and I was off the hook. It was a cruel twist of fate though, Erica, when you walked back into my life. I was getting another shot at everything I always dreamed of, but at the same time, I was gonna have to break your heart. Because of Lola, I knew I had to tell you eventually but I was dreading it. Especially once you told me so vehemently how you don’t want a family anymore. And now I…” my words trail off on a nervous sigh, “Well, I want to spend my life with you, forever and always, but…I’m a package deal now. I need to know where that leaves us.”
“I…I’m still having trouble processing the fact that someone I loved—and wholeheartedly believed loved me—cheated on me and has an illegitimate child, Cole. I haven’t even gotten to processing the fact that you’re raising that child.” She shakes her head and looks away, rubbing at her tear-stained face at the same time. Then, it’s as if a lightbulb goes off in her head and she turns on her heel to leave the kitchen; anger, plain as day, in every determined step she takes.
A heartbeat later and I’m pursuing her down the stairs. “Wait. Where are you going?”
She stops in front of the one room in the house she’s never even had the smallest glimpse of. The one Payton and I purposely locked the door of and “lost” the key to. “This is her room, isn’t it?” I open my mouth but she doesn’t give me enough time to even take a breath to answer her with before she makes her bellicose demand, “Open it.”
I beg her with a look. “Erica…”
“I know you have the key. Go get it and open this door!”
Shaking my head and praying, I turn around and go into the laundry room to retrieve the key from where it’s been safely hidden away within the box of Bounce dryer sheets. My hand is shaking so badly when I try to get the key into the lock that I almost drop the damned thing. With the click of the door unlocking, time around me seems to speed up, but I don’t move with it. In the time it takes for a single breath, the door is swinging open and Erica is standing in the middle of Lola’s room, amongst boxes of books, movies, and toys that Payton and I had unpacked and then repacked the night Erica was originally invited for dinner; all the things I brought back over yesterday afternoon with my Christmas stuff. Then she’s at the foot of Lola’s four-poster twin bed that’s draped with layer upon layer of sheer linen of the most pristine white matching the ruffled satin of the downy bedding. She’s turning in circle after circle, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the fantastical scenes and quotes taken from children’s stories that Payton spent almost a week painting on the walls and ceiling, and I’m still standing in the hallway. I take a cautious step inside an elaborate world constructed of pure fantasy and immediately feel my heart settle.
“She sleeps on a cloud…” Erica murmurs to herself, noticing the night sky of deep periwinkle studded with glistening silver stars above the bed, and admiring the visual imagery I worked hard to create below. Looking up again, her eyes follow a particular path of stars to the right that has weaved through them the phrase, “…straight on ’til morning.” Her gaze travels down onto the wall and lights on the scene that the stars blend and fade into. “That’s the mermaid lagoon from Peter Pan… ‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’ That’s a quote from Winnie the Pooh. And, ‘Real isn’t how you are made, said the skin horse, it’s a thing that happens to you,’ that’s The Velveteen Rabbit. ‘The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places’… Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. These are all quotes and scenes from children’s books… Except that one…the dragon on a boat with a billowed sail. That’s from a song, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’.”
She wanders over to the tree in the corner, the trunk made from the old, beat up and broken spines of actual books the library was replacing, and the leaves made from those books’ pages. Almost fearful, Erica hesitantly runs her fingers across a printed leaf, leading me to mumble aloud the quote written on a beribboned sash tha
t’s wound around the tree’s trunk, “‘But all the magic I have known, I’ve had to make myself’.”
“Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends,” she whispers, “And this is supposed to be a representation of The Giving Tree…”
“Yeah.”
“You did all this?”
“Just the tree and the bed. She’s been in Florida with my dad since the day after Thanksgiving and doesn’t know the house is done, or that we’ll be living here for Christmas, so… I wanted to do her room as an early Christmas surprise and give it a fairytale theme because she loves stories—all kinds, but, Uncle Payton was inspired. He’s the one who came up with all this and painted it himself.”
“Uncle Payton…” The words are hushed—uttered almost without breath. Then she looks about her once more with fresh tears in her eyes before bringing her saddened gaze to mine. “She’s real. You’re really raising his daughter as your own.”
I keep silent and still as Erica digests it all, hoping that her tears and sniffling are symptoms of being surrounded by wistful dreams, and not signifying her inability to accept the reality within them.
“The Pokémon quote you have on your shoulder is missing,” she says, fully comprehending now what that quote entirely means, and nowhere near being in high spirits, although not as bereaved as she’d sounded before, and that alone brings me some small relief.
“No, it’s not. It’s in the frame with the pict—” Too late do I realize what I’ve called her attention to, and hope plummets when her eyes fall to Lola’s nightstand and the quote typed as a border on the picture in a bejeweled frame. It’s of both Holden and me.
Erica’s hand flies to cover her mouth as she gasps and stares at Holden smiling at her from behind glass. Horrified, she looks back at me. “She knows?!”
“Of course. She doesn’t know, like…the details, but she knows he was her biological father and that he’s gone like her mother is now, and she knows she never met him because he died before she was born. I’ve told her all about him, Erica. Only the good stuff, though. The stuff she can be proud of him for.”
Her misty eyes give the room one last, awed sweep. Coming to rest on the happy image of Holden, though, they turn agonized. “I can’t be here.”
I grab her by the elbow as she tries to fly past me, fleeing the room as if the boogie man were behind her. “No, we need to talk.”
“We talked last night,” she argues, just shy of belligerence and trying to pull her arm from my grip, all but dislocating her shoulder in her sudden overpowering desire to leave.
I hold firm. I won’t let her escape. Not now. It’s time I go to war and fight for what I want.
“Not like this. Not with us putting everything we have on the table. We’ve never been honest about what we are to each other…what we want to be. We’ve never put it into words and said them out loud. We’ve never done that. Not both of us. We need to figure out where we go from here. I need to know. I need to know how you feel about this…how you feel about me now. I need to know who I am to you really…and, who I’m going to be.”
Still fighting to get free, she cries, “What do you want from me?”
“Everything, Erica. I want everything from you.”
“I don’t think I can give that to you! Everything to you means getting married, having two-point-five kids, and living in this quaint mountain town forever! I mean my God, you already have the dog and cat! And a daughter! I don’t want any of that!”
I shake my head.
She’s full of shit, you know.
Yep. She doesn’t know she is though.
Narrowing my eyes and peering closely at hers though, I wonder if…maybe she actually does.
“Do you ever hear a voice in your head?”
“Crazy people hear voices in their heads, Cole. Are you saying I’m crazy because I don’t want what you do?”
“No, I meant, do you ever talk to yourself in your head…like, the little voice of your subconscious, does it talk to you?”
“Um, I guess. Sometimes. Why?”
“Well, my little voice is a chatty fucker with shitty timing and it has zero tact, but, nine times out of ten, it’s honest. It tells me the brutal truth when I need to hear it the most, which is most often when I’m in denial and lying to myself. Last night, when we were arguing, it finally got through to me and forced me to accept that I had been making excuses, that I was afraid of having what I’ve always wanted…of being happy. And I think you are too.”
“Why in the world would I be afraid of happiness?”
“Because every time you are…every time you open yourself up to being loved and loving someone in return, it all gets ripped away from you. So, I think you’ve spent years ignoring the omniscience of your inner voice when it tries telling you something you don’t wanna hear, because you know it’s right. Because it knows you in a primal way, like no one else can. Like mine knows me. It knows what makes me tick, how I think, and all the desire, the ugliness, the private things and dark secrets the world will never know.
“But also like me, you can’t hide from yourself, so you’ve trained yourself to ignore it, and you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t want what will truly make you happy because on some level, you’re terrified you’ll achieve it. Because deep down inside you where things go bump in the night, you believe that once you have what your heart desires and you experience just enough joy for you to fully feel the annihilation, you and your happiness will be obliterated. You were made to be someone’s wife and mother. You possess every selfless, compassionate, and nurturing instinct it takes in every bone of your body. It’s inherent—implicit in your DNA. It’s integral to who you are and the only way you will ever experience true joy is to live an abundant life that you share with someone who loves you so deeply and as unconditionally as I do, and caring for that person and loving him back just as much if not more.”
“Th—that’s not…that’s not who I am anymore.”
“Yes, it is! You had your heart set on a job helping to bring babies into this world, Erica. And you got it because your passion for new life glows from within you. I was a drunk idiot and rightfully ended up spending a night in jail. You cared so much, you thought back to when we were kids to find the two things you could give me as an adult that were sure to make me feel loved and appreciated. And even though it was just macaroni and cheese, the ingredients you used…real butter, cream, that cheese? Plus, you bought ham and not the store brand of chocolate because you know I like Hershey’s. And that wine is thirty bucks a bottle, Erica. All told, it had to be at least seventy bucks.
“What’s more, you left an ATM receipt in my truck when we got the chains for your car. You hardly have two hundred dollars left, your rent is coming due and what do you do? You secretly buy an old man dinner this past Friday because you felt bad that he was eating alone in a restaurant, and two days before, you slipped a kid twenty bucks when he was only short five on the skateboard he was trying to buy his brother for Christmas. And don’t tell me you were trying to impress me because you didn’t know I overheard you talking to the waitress, or that the kid and his friends came out of the store where I was waiting for you…they were talking to each other about what you’d just done and I heard the whole thing. That was all you. It’s in you.”
“But what you’re asking me to do…I just—I can’t, Cole.”
“This isn’t a matter of can’t. You won’t. But we’re worth it. We’re worth trying.”
“And what happens if we try and fail? Then we lose everything! And I just…I can’t imagine not having you in my life. I think it’s better if we just…go back to being friends. Please?”
“No, I don’t think so. That’s not enough. It’s not good enough. I deserve more. I deserve everything.”
“You do. But so do I. And I wish we could have it together, but I don’t see how. You are the center of my world, but even if we didn’t want different things, I can’t live in a world that includes a day
to day reminder of how I was lied to and betrayed.”
A tidal wave rises up within me, wanting me to rage and lash out at her for what just came out of her mouth and I need a moment so that I don’t spew the venomous words of loathing that are aching to righteously drip off my provoked tongue. Because once said, I can never take them back. She’s had a shock, she’s hurting, she’s pissed off, and she’s doing everything she can think of to push me and all the rest of her feelings away.
“She’s a little girl, Erica. The only thing she should be a reminder of is that life is a precious gift. Period.”
“You’re right, she should be. But that’s not who she is to me. I’m not the person you think I am. Maybe I used to be, but that’s not who I am anymore. I can’t give you everything you deserve. I don’t want the life that you want. I don’t want to be a mother. Not even to my own children. And you want your own, don’t you?”
“I could live without having my own children if it meant living my life with you.”
“Cole…”
“No, I could. I don’t need that. I would give that up.”
“And what about Lola? Would you give her up for me too?”
“But, you’re not asking me to give her up. Are you?” Suddenly, I can’t breathe. Just the idea… I can’t breathe. “You can’t ask me to do that.”
“Just answer the question.”
“Erica…” I look around Lola’s room, trying to imagine its nonexistence. It’s just as impossible as imagining a world in which I never knew or loved Erica. Bereft. Barren. “Oh, Jesus. Erica, I would carve open every vein in my body and bleed myself dry for you…but. But…not that. I can’t do that. I can’t abandon her. I might not have given her life, but I’m her father. I’m all she has.”
“Exactly. And she is the most blessed little girl on the planet because she has you. And I love you even more for how devoted you are and how much you obviously cherish her but, I won’t ever be able to love her the way you do. And for you to ask me to is too much. I’d be living a lie. Just like you would be if you gave her up or gave up having kids of your own some day. I won’t ask you to do that for me. I love you too much.”
