Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  She had let go of the idea of Jake little by little, but he never went away entirely. He reappeared at odd intervals, at pivotal moments. When Sam smiled for the first time, when he laughed for the first time, when he reached out and grabbed her nose, when he rolled over. No matter how much her parents celebrated with her, Jake was there, a presence, an absence.

  Only not Jake. Some guy she’d made up. A hopeful, naive dream.

  She got out of bed, sat at the desk she’d set up in her bedroom, and checked her email. She’d emailed work the night before to beg for another week to find childcare. There was a new message from her boss. It said only, “We need you Monday.”

  Her stomach started to hurt. Bad.

  “Mommy, is it Saturday?”

  Sam was in the doorway, so skinny, his face eager.

  “Hey, bud. Yeah, it’s Saturday.”

  “Can we call Grammy and Grampy?”

  It was their Saturday morning tradition for Sam to call her parents. Early morning was the best time to talk to her stepmother, Lani, who lived in Fort Myers, Florida, where Mira had moved with her parents when Sam was a year old. That was one of the things she couldn’t get used to about living in Seattle again—having three time zones between herself and her father and stepmother. By the time she got Sam settled in bed, her parents were sound asleep.

  She wasn’t eager to call them this morning. She knew they’d hear her troubles in her voice and want to help. And she’d moved clear across the country to get away from her father’s brand of well-meaning but suffocating help.

  “Maybe later, Sam.”

  “But they’ll go out and get busy, and then it will be too late.”

  He was echoing words she’d said on many other occasions.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  She let Sam dial and talk to them, hoping they wouldn’t ask to talk to her, but Sam handed her the phone after only a few minutes. “Grammy wants to talk to you. Can I play on your iPad?”

  “Go ahead, bud,” she said, and he trotted off.

  “Hey, baby. I miss you so much!” Lani said, distant but clear.

  The sound of her stepmother’s voice made Mira’s throat tight. “Hi, Lani. Miss you, too.”

  Mira’s stepmother was the only mother she’d ever known, the best mother she could have imagined. Mira’s biological mother had ditched her infant daughter and joined a commune—or, as Mira’s father usually said, with some bitterness, a cult. She’d visited infrequently after that—sometimes less than once a year. She had breezed in, bestowed gifts, then disappeared. She’d died ten years ago in a skiing accident.

  Mira hadn’t mourned. Her life had always been her dad and Lani.

  “You okay, sweetheart?” Lani asked.

  Three seconds in, and her stepmother knew the score.

  “Mira?”

  Mira sighed. “I saw Jake.”

  “Honey?” Alarm rang in her stepmother’s voice.

  “I took Sam to physical therapy and he was there.”

  In the background, her father demanded, “Is everything okay?”

  She heard her stepmother’s muffled voice. “She ran into Sam’s father. In the physical therapist’s office.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” her father said, clear as day.

  “Hang on,” Lani said. “I’m putting you on speaker.”

  The phone beeped and her father said, “What happened?”

  She was glad to hear him, and for a moment, she thought, I could be there. I could be with them. Instead of here, swimming upstream—

  She cut off the thought. This was what she wanted. To make her own life. A life where she made decisions, solved problems. She wanted to be sure she knew who she was. That was why she was here.

  She gripped the phone tighter and listened for any sound from Sam’s room, but it was quiet. “He showed up in the waiting room at physical therapy.”

  “Did you tell him about Sam?” her father asked.

  She instinctively recoiled from the concern in his voice. She’d traveled three thousand miles to put some space between her father and his love, which was deep but rarely tidy. When her father found out she was pregnant, he’d accused her of being irresponsible and stupid. He’d told her she’d ruined her life and theirs and that she would pay for the mistake for as long as she lived. He’d called her selfish and told her she was worse than her mother.

  Lani had reasoned with him, pleaded with him, and of course ultimately Sam had brought him around. It was impossible to hold Sam, to smell the clean baby smell of the crown of his head, to feel his trusting weight in your arms, and still believe him to be any kind of mistake. Or see anyone’s life as ruined.

  But Mira’s father had been against her trying to contact Jake. The situation was bad enough, he’d said, without adding another complication. A man none of them knew, a man foolish enough to engage in unprotected sex during army leave with a barely of-age girl who was almost a stranger.

  With the phone clutched to her ear, her parents waiting for her to answer, she felt a peculiar twist of defensiveness on Jake’s behalf.

  “Yeah. I told him.”

  “Do you think that was wise?”

  She took a breath. “I’ve always believed that if I ever saw him, I would tell him the truth. No matter what the circumstances. I’ve always believed it was the right thing to do. He’s Sam’s father.”

  “How did he react?” her father asked.

  “He didn’t believe it.”

  “Oh, honey,” Lani said, which was somehow way worse than her father’s “Mira, I think you need to be more cautious.”

  Why was she surprised every time he demonstrated how little he thought of her judgment? Why did it still hurt that he didn’t think she could manage to run her own life without screwing it up?

  “How did he seem?” Lani asked.

  “He has a prosthetic leg.”

  “Oh, honey.” Ten thousand subtleties to the way those words could come out of her stepmother’s mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “Christ,” said her father. “Do you know anything about the circumstances? Where was he? Iraq? Afghanistan?”

  When she didn’t respond, he sighed. “I think you need to call a lawyer.”

  “Why?”

  “What if he wants to have some kind of relationship with Sam?”

  “What if he does?” For a second, she let herself fantasize about it. About what it might mean to Sam. A father. For so many years, he’d been stoic about his fatherless status, but that didn’t mean that it didn’t bother him.

  “Mira, I think you need to think these things through more.”

  She had to take several deep breaths.

  “A lawyer could help you anticipate potential consequences. The best defense is a good offense.”

  “Defense against what?”

  “What if he wants visitation? Custody?”

  “Why would he?”

  “He might. Now that he knows. You could spend the rest of your life negotiating the terms of where Sam will be, when.”

  “Hon, stop, you’re going to upset her,” Lani said. “I don’t see how a lawyer changes things, anyway. There’s nothing she can do to keep him from seeing Sam, if he’s the father.”

  “She can put more distance between them.”

  “How?”

  “Move back.”

  “Dad, come on.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lani said.

  Her father had hated the idea of the move. Hated it. Lani had done her level best to help him understand how important it was for Mira to make her own life, and what a great opportunity the job was. How important it was for Sam to see different parts of the country. “Plus we’ll be able to have time together. To travel,” Lani had told her father.

  When her father had stayed adamant that he believed Mira was making a mistake, Lani had helped bolster Mira’s determination to go anyway. “I love him to death,” Lani had said to her. “But it’s time for you to d
o this. If you stay here—”

  She hadn’t had to finish the sentence. They both knew Doug wouldn’t give Mira the space to grow up as long as she was under his roof.

  The job was a terrific opportunity. It turned out that Mira had an unexpected talent for programming, which she’d discovered while taking an online coding class whose teacher turned out to be Seattle-based. Mira had written an app for the class, trying to find something that would take the sting out of a finals period spent in solitude in her bedroom, online, instead of partying with friends on a college campus. She’d been half brainstorming, half shoe shopping, and she’d thought to herself for the ten thousandth time that she’d be ever so much more likely to buy shoes online if she could see them with one of her outfits. She lost a week’s sleep writing code, but when she was done, she had “If the Shoe Fits.” If you took a barefoot picture of yourself in a particular outfit, the app would show you what you’d look like in a given pair of shoes—more or less.

  A lark. A homework assignment.

  And, it turned out, the ticket to gainful employment. Her professor worked full-time for an e-tailer that had acquired an online shoe-seller. The group was hiring, and he’d connected her with Haley, who loved Mira’s app and was looking for people in Seattle who had both technical talent and people savvy.

  At first, Mira hadn’t wanted the job. She’d listened intently to Haley’s job description and sold herself dutifully in phone interviews, but she’d thought, I’d have to be crazy. Because in Fort Myers, she had everything queued up for her: a safe, warm, comfortable home, people who shared the cooking and cleaning tasks, free childcare. A built-in family for Sam. A safety net. If sometimes it felt more like a wet blanket, well, that wasn’t such a high price.

  And then, twenty-four hours before she owed Haley an answer, she’d been out with her boyfriend, Aaron, and they’d driven up to an espresso shack. He’d tossed his wallet in her lap so she could restore his money to the leather folds, and she’d seen it. Nestled in there. A check. Her father’s handwriting.

  She hadn’t thought. She acted on instinct. She pulled the check out. “What’s this?”

  He glanced over, then did a double take. “Oh,” he said. Only that. Oh.

  “Aaron?”

  She was having trouble catching her breath. In the lower left-hand corner of the check it said, Dinner for two.

  “Why is my father writing you checks?”

  “Just—some money he gave me.”

  “Dinner for two?”

  “He wanted me to take you somewhere nice.”

  “That’s—that’s kind of weird, Aaron. Has he done that before?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “You never mentioned it. You should have told me.”

  His expression told her exactly why he hadn’t. Because he’d known it would make her uncomfortable. “Aaron. You have to tell him you can’t take his money like that.”

  Silence.

  “Aaron?”

  “It’s not such a big deal, is it, Mir?”

  “You don’t want to tell him you won’t take it.”

  “I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “You don’t want to hurt his feelings, or you don’t want to tick him off?”

  “Either. He’s my friend.”

  Of course she knew that. Aaron and her father had hung out before she and Aaron had started dating. They were woodworking buddies, and Aaron worked occasionally for her father as a weekend-and-evening apprentice. And then he’d started sticking around for meals, and then sometimes her dad had encouraged her to go out with Aaron alone …

  “Which is it, Aaron? Are you his friend? Or my boyfriend?”

  “Can’t I be both?”

  “I guess so,” she’d said.

  But it rankled, and then it rankled more, until it was like a splinter under her skin.

  She believed Aaron cared about her. She believed her father’s motives were pure. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, she was starting to see that there was nothing that was hers. No piece of her life she could make without her father’s “help.”

  There had been other moments like this, and they had all piled up on her. The day her father had told her he wouldn’t pay to send her to art school because art wasn’t a real career. Because it wasn’t practical.

  The night he’d found out she was pregnant.

  She’d gone off to college and waited until it was too late to terminate the pregnancy before she’d told her father.

  “Why?”

  He’d asked it over and over again. Why had she let this happen, why hadn’t she told him, why had she waited until it was too late?

  And she couldn’t answer the questions. She couldn’t explain why. Because I can’t. Because …

  Because one night she’d painted it, the not-yet-him, a bean in an ocean in her belly, and she’d used her tiniest brush to put intricate details on his little bean face. And she’d known she’d keep him.

  The bean in her belly felt like a secret. It felt like a rebellion. It felt like the best decision she’d ever made. “Why, Mira? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you consult us?”

  Because she’d known he’d poke and prod and doubt. She’d known that he would erode her certainty, that he would question her conviction that carrying the baby to term was the right thing for her to do.

  That was why.

  But she hadn’t said any of that to her father, because she knew he wouldn’t understand.

  Not telling her father she was pregnant until it was too late for him to influence the outcome had been the only way she knew to make sure the decision was hers and hers alone. But it had been like whispering in the wind, because he’d come to school and packed her up and brought her home to live with them again, and there was nothing she could do about it. Without his help, there was no way she could give her baby the life he deserved.

  For seven years, she’d bided her time. She’d fought the good fight, when she could, when it mattered. She picked her battles with her father, and she won the piece of territory that mattered most to her: She decided where Sam should go to preschool, how much time he was allowed to spend on the computer, whether refusing to eat vegetables was an action subject to discipline, what time bedtime should be.

  In doing so, however, she lost the big fight. She took her father’s money. She listened to his advice. She gave up the right to build her own life from scratch, her way.

  For a long time it had been worth the trade-off. His love, the security of his household, for a little autonomy.

  Until she saw the check in Aaron’s wallet. Because she knew her father had the best of intentions, but she was drowning in his good intentions. In his love. She had to remove herself. She had to retake, remake, her life.

  She accepted the job. She took Sam and she went to Seattle.

  It was the first thing she’d ever done as an independent adult, and she loved it. Even the hard and complicated parts. Even the canceled sitters and Jake’s unexpected appearance. Because it was hers.

  Her father was talking again. “I think this situation calls for extreme caution. He’s been badly injured. As far as we know, he’s been fighting the last eight years. I’ve been reading about this. They’re giving soldiers these long deployments, more engagement with the enemy than in past wars. More consecutive deployments. They’re coming back with much more serious mental issues, and that’s setting aside the fact that we know he’s lost a limb, which has to be incredibly traumatic in and of itself. This is a guy we don’t know, who’s been exposed to we-don’t-know-what, who is potentially going to be involved in my grandson’s—”

  “Dad?” Mira said. “I can handle this.”

  “Huh?”

  “I can handle Jake. You can relax over there.”

  She heard a sound on the line that might have been Lani snickering.

  On the kitchen counter, her iPhone buzzed. She crossed the kitchen to pick it up. The text said: It’s Jake. Wh
at’s your email?

  Her heart pounded. She hesitated, then tapped, mirashipley@mailthang.com.

  I’m sending you things.

  Shld I be scared?

  No.

  Her father sighed. “Just—”

  “I know, Dad. Be careful.

  “I’d better go,” she told her parents.

  “Just promise me you won’t—”

  “Love you, guys,” she said, and hung up.

  She went to the computer and waited for Jake’s email.

  Back when she was pregnant, back when Sam was little, she hadn’t challenged her father’s view of Jake. Stupid. Hotheaded. She and Jake had been stupid, both of them. And hotheaded.

  At eighteen, she’d been willing to see the world through her parents’ eyes. You had to be at least a little bit hotheaded to sleep with an eighteen-year-old girl you’d known only a few weeks. To go off and fight a war.

  It had been okay for her to accept her father’s version, back then, because there was nothing at stake, not really. Jake was far, far away, both geographically and emotionally, out of their reaches. They could believe whatever they wanted about him, whatever prejudices, whatever half-truths. But now he was here. In Seattle. And he was Sam’s father. Not some abstract concept, but a man who might, depending on what they did next, play a role in how Sam came to see the world. It wasn’t enough to just accept what she’d been told about him.

  For Sam, she needed to know who Jake really was.

  For herself.

  Her computer pinged its acceptance of new mail. From Jacksontaylor@mailthang.com.

  Jackson Taylor.

  No wonder it had been impossible to track him down. It hadn’t occurred to her that Jake was a nickname for something other than Jacob.

  I’m sending you some references, the first email said. Watch your in-box.

  Her heart gave a little squeeze. He was wooing her. On Sam’s behalf, admittedly, but—he was pursuing them. Her and Sam.

  She did a web search on “Jackson Taylor,” and there he was. An article in the Tacoma News Tribune. Jackson Taylor was an Army Ranger—God, that would have been a helpful piece of info, too. How had she conceived a child with someone she knew so little about?