The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  The agony slowed and I was able to speak. “‘I’ve got to go back to school, Mom. I’ve got classes in the morning.”

  She didn’t try to make me stay the night. She didn’t tell me it was crazy to drive all day to get there in the rain just to turn around and drive all the way back. She didn’t tell me everything would be okay, because it wasn’t, and we both knew it, and what would be the point of patting each other on the backs and saying, “Everything will be all right?” No point.

  Back at the apartment I tried to focus on the next thing only, the next class, the next day at work. I counted on the routine to pull me slowly from the mire, but it was too slow to notice, like the movement of the minute hand on the clock. You know it’s moving, you just can’t see it, and so you can’t really be absolutely sure it’s moving at all.

  Weeks passed, and then months. Kate didn’t come back. She didn’t call. One night I found the pad of paper under the bed. Pages of words, all in my handwriting, outlining a life other than my own. No wonder it failed, but as time passed some of the bad things about Kate diluted and some of the good things rose slowly to the top. Maybe she was in a horrible situation? Maybe she needed me? I drove around town, past the bars, past the yellow house, past the bank, the restaurant where she used to work. No one had seen her. She hadn’t gone to her classes. Maybe she went back to Oklahoma. Maybe back to Jeff Temple.

  On a cold morning I opened my front door and stepped outside. There was a man.

  “Are you James Winwood?”

  I was startled. My breath came out white in the freezing air.

  “Yes.”

  And he handed me some papers. Divorce papers. Katherine Shepherd Winwood, plaintiff, vs. James Early Winwood, defendant. The papers said Kate was pregnant, and I was the father, and she wanted custody, and me to pay child support, and she planned to marry a man, an older man named Russell Enslow, with a good job, financial stability, who would help her provide a fine home for the baby. And the papers said I had “tendencies of violence,” having beaten a man in his home, and I was controlling, “stalking the plaintiff since high school,” basically “imprisoning the plaintiff in my apartment,” and more and more and more.

  I expected to read, “He tried to feel me up on my deathbed.” It was like we were in two different relationships, in two different places, with me and my Kate on the faraway distant planet, enclosed in glass, observed by aliens as we ate ice cream and fornicated happily all day, while the other Kate and the other me were locked in a musty apartment strung out on control issues and implied threats of violence waiting for something bad to happen. We didn’t have to wait long.

  two

  My lawyer looked like an idiot, tall, gaunt, with big ears, one sticking out farther than the other. I guess I shouldn’t complain. My mother paid his bill.

  Kate’s lawyer was sharp-dressed and angry. He pranced around the courtroom pointing his finger and raising his voice. Kate’s new boyfriend, the rich old guy, Russell, paid his bill.

  The judge said, “I’m not entertaining the issues of paternity or custody until the child is born. After the child is born and the DNA tests are completed, we’ll deal with all of this, gentlemen. In the meantime, the mother can move to California as long as she comes back after the birth of the child and consents to jurisdiction here.”

  I tried to stare straight ahead. I tried to look at the judge, the bailiff, a black speck on the top of the table where I sat. I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to see her. I suppose the man who shot his wife in the courthouse hall on my wedding day must have felt such things. The anger of losing something. The fear of falling to your knees and begging to get it back. The prospect of a lifetime alone.

  The falling apart happened so fast. The healing seemed not to move at all. I surrounded myself with the fortress of daily routine. Class and work, brush my teeth, remember to eat, go to the library, don’t think. The worst parts were those minutes between the tasks. Forced to acknowledge there would be a baby in the world soon, and I would be kept from her, by a judge, by distance, by a sharp-dressed angry lawyer, by my own stupid decisions and mistakes. And it was all outside my control, happening to me when somebody else decided it would happen.

  I started smoking cigarettes again to fill the empty spaces in the routine, but I found myself creating more spaces than the ones I filled.

  “What if I’m not the father?”

  But the question went unanswered, sitting in the dark on the ground with my back against the wall next to the barbecue grill, smoking another cigarette. Sleeping sometimes wasn’t possible. It’s when all the loneliness settled in the room until I couldn’t breathe. Everything she’d touched, I threw away. The sheets, the shampoo. Everything that smelled like Kate I carried out to the dumpster in the rain. It was impossible to separate her from what was happening to me, from the self-pity, the futility, the embarrassment, the longing. But the options were limited, and I got up again, and did it all one more time, and waited for the healing to begin.

  Gretchen Anne Winwood was born in Sacramento, California on April 22. My lawyer called to give me the news. The divorce and custody trial would be scheduled in the summer. I hung up the phone and then sat for a very long time, thinking about my father, and how, if he hadn’t been killed that day, things might be different. Trying to go year by year in my mind, from age eleven to the present moment, imagining my father still alive, and how his simply being alive could have changed me. And it made me think about the baby girl so far away born into this world without me being the first to hold her. Some other man being there instead, and how she could get confused by everything and think I didn’t love her, which wasn’t true.

  The DNA test was positive. It was my mindless sperm responsible for locating and penetrating the ripe egg despite Kate’s disdain, her limp legs wide open, our relationship smoldering like a bombed-out city. You would think an entity as capable of creating the miracle of life could take a few minutes to grasp the circumstances of the surroundings before deciding to plow ahead and make a baby inside a madwoman. But no. Nature hasn’t quite caught up to the complexities of a modern overpopulated world. The crazy sperm blindly twisting and swimming at all costs for the opportunity to further complicate the universe.

  My mother walked over to Kate and Russell where they sat in the hallway with baby Gretchen. The same hallway where Clay Namen had accidentally killed his daughter. My eyes scanned the walls for bullet holes, but I couldn’t find any. There were sections with slightly newer paint, and I imagined a man on a ladder filling the holes with plaster and painting over the spots.

  “May I hold my granddaughter?” Christine said.

  I stayed at the other end of the hall, sitting in my suit, listening. She said the words without begging, without sympathy.

  My mother sat down next to me, holding the baby. She was pink and quiet, with a nose you could see up inside, and eyes like Kate’s. She looked at me like I was just another person in the world. Like it was perfectly normal to meet your father for the first time in the hallway outside of a courtroom. I wanted to say, “Don’t you understand what’s happening here? Don’t you see what’s going on?”

  The lawyer told me we should reach an agreement. He said I was in no position, working and going to school full-time, to take care of a baby. He said if I agreed to let Kate have custody out in California, which he said the judge would undoubtedly do anyway, they’d agree for me not to pay child support until after I graduated college and could afford it. He said I could visit Gretchen, and talk to her on the phone, and later, if I wanted, I could come back and try to get more visitation, or even go for custody if Kate slipped.

  His ears stuck out from the sides of his head like they were pulled by invisible fishing line. I felt myself wanting to reach up and cut my hand through the air along the sides of his head to reveal the clear string, pulling the line tighter with the pressure of my hand, forcing the ears outward even further.

  My mother told m
e it was the right thing to do for the time being. We couldn’t prove Kate’s drug problem. She’d never been arrested and she tested negative on the urine test. She would impress the judge holding the baby in her arms as she testified. Russell’s money had bought good legal representation, a nice place to live in Sacramento, California, and I couldn’t match their financial stability. What judge would order the baby removed from her mother’s arms to be handed over to a part-time barbeque restaurant cook who could barely pay the electric bill?

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Clay Namen, having the only thing he loved in God’s world taken from him, his daughter. Walking past his wife and her smiling family on his way to the bathroom and knowing they would win and he would lose because everybody knows a father can’t be a mother.

  I graduated from college in finance and took a job as an investment broker in a national firm. There were three of us in the office and three secretaries. I sent a child support check every month to a central collection office. Sometimes when I’d call to talk to Gretchen they’d answer the phone. More often it would ring and ring and ring and I’d slam the fuckin’ phone against the nearest wall. I’d send cards and never know if they were received. Father’s Day passed with nothing.

  I buried myself in my work for ten years. I remember very little about the efficiency. I bought a small house, with a room set up for Gretchen. The first time she came to visit we sat on her bed like strangers. She was six.

  “You’ve got your own bed here. And look at the sheets. Pink, your favorite color.”

  She held her little bag in her lap like she might stand up and walk out the door any minute. Like a small replica of her mother.

  “There aren’t any toys here,” she said.

  She was right. It was like a picture of a child’s room in a magazine. Perfect color coordination. Perfect alignment of the furniture, but no toys, or stains on the carpet, or half-eaten Pop Tarts.

  “We’ll go get toys,” I said. “We’ll go buy as many toys as you want and fill up the room.”

  She didn’t move. I expected a fine reaction, a big smile, a hug.

  “You don’t have any books to read, or movies.”

  “We’ll go to the bookstore. We’ll go to the movie store, too. I promise.”

  We sat silent on the bed. My tie was too tight around my neck.

  “Just give me a chance, Gretchen. Please. Just give me a chance. I’m your dad, and I know it’s all weird, but we’ve got to get a chance to know each other.”

  And I started telling her more than I planned. “My dad died when I was eleven. For a long time I was really mad. Mad at my dad, mad at God. When I got older, instead of being mad about all those years I didn’t get to spend with him, I started being happy about the first ten years we had together.”

  On Gretchen’s visits I used my vacation time from work. It always took us days to get familiar again. Every time I heard her call Russell “Daddy” it was like a cold icepick shoved in my ribs. I took her to the zoo, the theater, the park, trying to cram a year into a week, a lifetime into a few days. Each time I saw her she seemed like a different child, older, taller. I stayed away from the subject of Kate but secretly looked forward to fragments of information, stored later inside my mind in a certain place, all together.

  “Why don’t you have a wife?” Gretchen asked one day.

  I hadn’t dated much. I’d overheard one of the secretaries at work tell another secretary she thought I was gay. I couldn’t even muster the energy to tell her any different. Nearly every woman I met scared the shit outta me. What was behind them? What poison lay just under the skin? What secrets did they hide until it couldn’t be hidden any longer, until it was too late? If I’d been so wrong before, I could be so wrong again, and it just wasn’t possible to survive another round. Goals at work could be reached. Bonuses earned. On some channel, somewhere, a baseball game, or a boxing match, was happening, pure. I started running. Long distance running. It allowed me to organize my thoughts, discipline my mind to a degree. I looked forward to it, hated it after a few minutes, and then loved it again standing in the shower.

  Kate and the old man had gotten married. They’d had another child, a girl. It’s all I really needed to know, but I knew a lot more. Through bits and pieces from Gretchen the picture had come together. Russell was the father figure I couldn’t be. The father figure Kate always needed. She felt safe, secure, and it didn’t matter if she loved him, or if he loved her. She was a long way from the house in the woods down the dirt driveway. A long way from the old man sitting in the darkness. But both of us knew, both me and Kate, she was never too far away from where I found her.

  Gretchen asked, “Why does your house smell funny?”

  If it smelled funny, I didn’t know it. Ten years of living alone does strange things. Empty refrigerator, hair on the soap bar, too much fast food, too much sausage. Nobody to point out all the obnoxious habits until they build on top of one another and sooner or later you’re not fit to be around people, unable to smell your own smells. Some people might say those ten years were wasted time. They weren’t wasted. They were lonely, necessary, but not wasted. There was a time I thought I’d never heal.

  And then one day I was in the grocery store. There was this woman, about my age, up ahead of me in the cereal aisle. I don’t know what it was about her that made me stare. There was no ring on her left finger. She was buying food kids would eat. I liked the way she moved. Quietly and gently, like she was quiet and gentle inside. Her hair was clean and short, sandy blond. She dressed casually, but carefully.

  There was a rhythm to her existence. It’s hard to explain. A simplicity.

  I passed her and took a deep breath through my nose, trying to smell her. Not too much perfume. I lagged behind at the oatmeal until she passed me by again. I hadn’t felt such a way since Kate, light like a boy. Like anything was possible.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said back, too quickly. Premature response.

  She smiled. A good smile. An inviting smile. A new light at the end of a long tunnel.

  three

  I went to the same grocery store every day at the same time for a week. I saw her again. There she was next to the milk. I’d planned the moment. She needed to see me first. I’d be able to tell everything from her immediate reaction, before she had time to be polite. Would she be glad to see me? Would she be pleasantly surprised? Or would she not even recognize my face, turning away to check the expiration date on the milk?

  I stood in front of the cheese ten feet away. So many different kinds. White and yellow, shredded and block, Mexican, mozzarella. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her put a small carton of half-and-half in the buggy. She stared at something level with her eyes, and then glanced at me to her left. My timing was perfect. I turned a split second after her glance and we were looking at each other.

  She smiled again, like before, except this time with recognition. She remembered me and was glad I was only ten feet away next to the cheese.

  I forgot my line, betrayed by the exhilaration, and instead said, “There’s lots of cheese.”

  “Yes, there is,” she said.

  “My name is Early Winwood,” I said, and stuck out my hand like I was meeting a guy at the lumber yard. She stuck out her hand and we shook, awkward but nice just the same.

  Her hand was very soft and well-manicured. She was smaller than I remembered, relaxed with herself, and me.

  I abandoned the master plan altogether. The coy little conversation I’d rehearsed in front of the mirror. She liked me. There was no need to beat around the burning bush. I was over thirty years old, not seventeen. We were grownups, in the grocery store, liking each other.

  “Would you go to dinner with me tonight?”

  She didn’t flinch one way or the other. Just stood there, smiling. I tried to put myself in her place. I could be a murderer, a rapist, a con man. She not only had herself to protect, but probably children. The chil
dren at school, looking forward to drinking milk when they got home.

  So I said, “I’m thirty years old. I’m an investment broker. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve got a ten-year-old daughter, Gretchen, who lives in California. I’d like to be more coy and mysterious, but we wouldn’t be able to have dinner tonight, and it would be at least another week until we ran into each other again. And then I’d probably say something stupid like, ‘There’s lots of cheese,’ so I was wondering, would you like to go out to dinner with me tonight?”

  She listened to all my goofy crap with the same pleasant smile. Her eyes were good and blue. A deep blue. Almost gray, and her skin looked extra-soft. I was struck by the desire to reach out my hand and touch her on the face, but I didn’t, thank God, and instead waited patiently for her answer.

  “Yes, Early Winwood, I would like to go to dinner with you tonight.”

  I went home in a new mood, feeling things I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I called Gretchen on the phone, not to tell her about my date, but just to talk to her, connect my good things with each other.

  “Is it a beautiful day out there in California?” I asked.

  I didn’t expect her to question my upbeat mood, or even notice it. Gretchen sometimes struggled with the obvious. I had, however, detected in her some perceptive ability. She was shy in new surroundings. Watching. Noticing. And picked up on things about people.

  “I can’t wait until Thanksgiving,” I said. It was Gretchen’s next planned visit. Christine and Gretchen had a bond. It was subterranean and strong. They seemed to have an understanding, sometimes looking at me like I was the weak link in the chain. I was jealous of the bond at the beginning. It seemed I’d never be as close to either one of them as they were to each other. But the jealousy went away, and it was healthy, appropriate, and provided me a glimpse into my mother I couldn’t get otherwise.

  “I’ve got a date tonight,” I blurted out to Gretchen on the phone.