When I am done, my lungs are burning, and my back heaves up and down, my diaphragm expanding and contracting painfully. It takes a long while before my breathing resumes its normal pace.
“Damn,” Eric says. “What you so mad about?”
“Dani? You there?”
Rand catches me as I am getting out of the shower. I didn’t bother checking to see who was calling, because I was wet, with a towel only partly wrapped around me. I had a crappy day, with two difficult clients, and my plan was a large glass of pinot and a reheated bowl of pad thai that I hadn’t finished at lunch.
When I hear his voice, I kind of freeze.
“Hi,” I say, as casually as if I haven’t been deliberately ignoring his calls for two days. “Are you back?”
Rand sighs. “Nah,” he says. “That’s why I’m calling. I’ll be out here another night.”
“Oh,” I say. My voice is cool, dispassionate. Even though I am dying to ask him why. Even though my stomach clenches, and I feel like crying, or demanding that he return as planned.
“I’m going later … to give a sample, for a paternity test. Then I’ll be on the earliest flight out in the morning.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Having a paternity test done is the responsible thing to do, the only thing to do, under the circumstances. But I can’t help but be angry that he is even in the position where he must think about “the responsible thing.”
“Freya says she’ll get Little Rocket after daycare, so can I come to you?”
The fact that he’s even asking is a sure sign—as if we needed another one—that things between us are not kosher. Normally, he wouldn’t ask. He would just tell me when he was coming by; or not tell me, but just show up at my door, having just completed a trip from covering a game somewhere, with a five-o’clock shadow, tired eyes and a grin that tells me he’s been thinking about me the entire time he was gone.
He’d walk right up me without pause, dropping his bag at my front door and scoop me up, so I have to wrap my legs around his waist. Then he’d walk us back to my bedroom where we’d collapse on my bed, sometimes with my legs still around him.
And we’d talk for a while, telling each other all those little things that seemed too minor to mention during the phone calls. Then, often, Rand would fall deeply asleep, between my open legs, his head on my chest, arms wrapped around me while my heels are pressed somewhere in the region near the small of his back.
“Just … call me when you get in, okay?” I stall. “And we’ll play it by ear.”
“C’mon, Dani, don’t do this,” he says.
I sit on the edge of my bed. I am still wet, and can feel the snail’s crawl of a droplet of water down the middle of my back.
“Don’t do what?” The hardness of my voice surprises even me.
“This. Not answering my calls … and being so …”
“It’s just been a couple of days, Rand. Just give me … I need a minute.”
“To do what? Don’t start thinking all kinds of crazy shit, okay? All of that, with Rayna? That was then. This is now. We’re now.”
“And so is her daughter. That child is now. And she might be yours,” I say. The last word comes out almost choked.
“Might. But we don’t know that she is, yet. So, until then, please, just don’t do this.”
I don’t know how to resist Rand asking me to ‘please’ anything.
So, I say nothing at all; and for a long while, we both just sit there with the silence, two thousand miles, and a million complicated emotions separating us.
“So, lemme get this straight,” Garrett says. “She just happened to see you at a pool party and said what? ‘Oh cool. Funny I should run into you, but you might be my kid’s father?’”
“She told me she never planned to look me up, or say anything. Wouldn’t have. But once she saw me, thought it would be unfair to Liliana to not at least try to find out the truth.”
While I’m pacing my hotel suite, after getting off the phone with Dani, I decided to call my brother-in-law. Garrett is always the voice of commonsense. My sister, too. But she is much more emotional about it, and will not be able to resist the urge to lecture me about ‘chickens coming home to roost’ or share some other homespun wisdom like that, if I dared tell her about my predicament.
Garrett is my cold-hard-facts guy.
“How old is her kid?”
“I did the math. It … she could be mine.”
“You wasn’t wrappin’ it up, man?” Garrett asks, sounding pained.
“Course I was! But you know … sometimes things happen. And you …”
Garrett gives a long, deep exhale. “So, not every time.”
“Yeah, man. Every time. But you never know, right? Especially on those nights when you go two, three rounds. There’s room for error is all I’m sayin’.”
“You was a real piece of work,” Garrett says, and I can see him now, shaking his head.
Garrett has always been, as far as I can tell—a straight-arrow. One of those dudes who has no trouble at all mating for life. I never was that guy. At least not with Faith.
Now, with Dani, the idea that I might lose her over some bullshit I did two years ago is making it difficult for me to even sit still. Even while talking to Garrett, I’m pacing, and replaying in my mind the way she sounded. Like she doesn’t trust me anymore.
I wanted to tell her Rayna’s daughter, even if she turns out to be my daughter, is not the result of the man I am today, but the man I was back then. But I didn’t say that, because I know she will find that excuse despicable, like I’m dismissing a kid who might be mine as if she is the remnant of a night of hard partying gone wrong. And I don’t want to do that. Especially not if she’s mine. But I do want to dismiss from Dani’s mind, the idea that I could ever be that guy again.
“Now this is gon’ sound real messed-up,” Garrett says. “But what kind of woman …”
I cut him off. “I don’t fault her. I was doin’ my wife dirty. She was just …”
“Doin’ herself dirty,” Garrett said. “I never understood shit like that. Don’t even know who the father of your kid is? C’mon now … that’s just …”
“Yeah. It’s messed up. But not keeping track of your seed? That’s pretty damn messed up, too.”
Garrett doesn’t argue with that.
“You tell Frey?” he asks instead, referring to my sister.
“Nah.”
“Don’t,” he says.
“Had no plans to. Until I know the answer.”
“So, you got to what? Spit in a cup, give some hair?”
“Get swabbed, I think.”
“And then?”
“Takes about ten days to get the results. Then I’ll know.”
“How’s your girl takin’ all this?”
“Icing me out.”
Garrett grunts, a sound that may be one of comprehension, or approval. I can’t tell which.
“Get your own sample,” he says.
“What you mean?”
“Get a sample of the kid’s DNA and send it to another lab. One you pick.”
“You think …?”
“I don’t know what to think, Rand. All I know is, you can’t be too careful with stuff like this. You ain’t seen this woman in almost three years and she happen to run into you, and suddenly you’re her baby’s daddy? That don’t even sound right.”
“She said she didn’t want to disrespect what I was goin’ through after Faith died.”
“But disrespecting your marriage while Faith was alive … that was cool?”
“I was the one who disrespected my marriage.”
“Alright, alright. But don’t let your guilt make you stupid. This woman had two years to contact you and she didn’t. Now she sees you lookin’ all … rich and successful again and suddenly, she wants you on the hook for … what? Child support?”
Actually, Rayna hadn’t mentioned money at all. She said she wanted her daughter to have a fa
ther. She looked me dead in the eyes, and hers seemed to be imploring me to—for once—act with an ounce of human decency.
‘I never had a father,’ she said. ‘Never thought I would repeat that cycle with my own kid. So, if I can correct it, I want her to have what I didn’t have.’
I’m not stupid. She could be playing me, but that hit me. Because I barely remember having a father either. He died before I was even a teenager and details about him have long disappeared to the back of my mind. Now, all I recall of him is shadowy, and indistinct. But, even so, I’ve missed him my entire life since he’s been gone.
I think about Little Rocket, and how not having Faith affects him. I don’t wish the absence of a parent on any kid. Especially not one that could be mine. Especially not if I don’t have to be absent.
“I just have to take it as it comes,” I tell Garrett. “If she’s mine, then yeah, I expect to pay child support. I’ll have to do more for her than that.”
“Nah, of course you do.”
“Speaking of kids, how’s my little man?” I ask.
There is a brief silence. Very brief, but enough to make me wonder what Garrett is about to conceal from me.
“He’s … he’s good,” he says finally. “Gettin’ a little antsy with you being gone for more than a week, but, you know …”
“He actin’ out?”
“Not really, nah.”
But he lets the last word drag, so I know there’s a little subjectivity in there somewhere. I want to ask more, but whatever it is, my sister and Garrett are handling it. And I’m not sure what good could come of me knowing with me all the way across the country.
“He around?”
“Nope. Just stepped out with Frey not too long ago. Call him in the morning.”
“I’ll try. But tell him I asked for him, a’ight?”
“Yeah. I’ll do that,” Garrett said. “But make sure you don’t miss your flight or nothin’ like that.”
“I won’t,” I say, once again curious about what I’m not being told.
When we hang up, I add Little Rocket to my list of current worries, along with the trip to the lab for the paternity test, and my situation with Dani.
~10~
“… love my family, I really do. But there’s always all these micro-aggressions. Because I don’t want to go to the country club, or have dinner with my old friends from Shipley who they think are more suitable than my real friends, or … shop with my Mom at fucking Lily Pulitzer. I mean, seriously, have you seen the shit in that store …”
My phone vibrates on the table between me and my client, June. I discreetly let my eyes fall to it once again.
Rand. Again.
June’s eyes follow mine. It’s the fourth time he’s called just since my session with her began, and I am starting to get annoyed.
“D’you need to get that?” June asks.
She is trying to sound concerned, but I sense that she is a little irritated as well. After all, she has paid for my time, and my undivided attention, and she isn’t getting either. I should turn the phone off. I decide I am going to, but then it vibrates again.
This time, the name on the console is ‘Freya’.
I glance up at June’s curious and somewhat exasperated face.
“I’m sorry,” I say, already standing. “This could be …”
I take the phone with me and step out of the coffee shop where we are meeting. June doesn’t like to meet in my office. Many of my clients don’t, because it feels too clinical. But June, in particular, prefers to feel like she is simply talking about her life with a friend.
“Freya?” I answer the phone just as I get to the sidewalk. “Is everything …?”
“Oh, thank God,” she says in a rush before I can complete my question. “Rand said you weren’t answering your phone.”
“I saw that he called, but I’m with a client. What’s going on?”
“It’s Little Rocket. Where are you right now?”
My heart lurches, and I put a hand to my neck. “What about Little Rocket?” I demand.
“No, don’t worry, he’s fine,” she says hastily. And then, “well, not fine. But not hurt. He’s at daycare, and apparently there’s a situation …”
“What kind of situation?”
“He’s having one of his …” She hesitates as she searches for a word. “Episodes.”
I grimace. Little Rocket’s episodes are something I’ve heard about, but never witnessed personally. Rand told me once that he has times when he ‘kirks out’. And when I asked if he meant tantrums, he said after a moment’s thought, ‘nah, it’s much more than that.’
He told me he took Little Rocket to a behavioral therapist, and was told that he would likely grow out of it, and that it was a manifestation of frustration that he doesn’t yet know how to voice, and feelings, he doesn’t understand.
Rand told me he thinks it’s grief. But he’s still afraid that Little Rocket could hurt himself, and said that he didn’t want his son to be one of those kids whose parents have to put a helmet on them, to prevent self-harming.
“Oh no. So what …”
“That’s why we’ve been calling. I’m in Camden for the day at a conference. Rand just landed, and won’t be able to get there for a couple of hours from now, and Garrett can’t leave work. So, we wondered whether … and I know this is an imposition, but if you could go …”
“No,” I say right away. “It’s not an imposition at all. Of course, I’ll go. Where’s his daycare?”
Freya recites the address and gives me the name of Little Rocket’s teacher and the center’s director, telling me she will also text all the information as soon as we hang up.
“I’ll get Rand to call them, and let them know to expect you,” she adds. “And thank you, Danielle. This is above and beyond an everyday favor. I know that …”
“Don’t mention it,” I say. And I mean that literally. Because this doesn’t feel like a favor at all.
“And we think he needs to be brought home,” Freya adds. “Because of the state he’s in. Not to my place, or anywhere else, but home. Do you know where Rand’s lockbox is?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
Then she goes on to describe its location, and give me the combination. As I listen, I head back inside to tell June that, unfortunately, our session for today will have to end prematurely.
I hear the wailing and screaming before I even enter the building.
Little Rocket’s daycare center is called La Petite école, and is housed in a quaint, white clapboard building surrounded by a white picket fence. The sign outside is in cheerful, primary colors and the logo is of little stick figures of children, holding hands, each of them different colors like a caveman’s rendition of a United Colors of Benetton ad.
Practically as soon as I open the door, I am greeted by a harried-looking older woman in a white blouse with lace collar, and a staid, grey skirt. Extending her hand almost before I cross the threshold, she is so stereotypically a teacher type, she looks like she might just live in a schoolhouse.
“Hello, hello.” She says the words quickly, as if she wants to get past the niceties as quickly as possible and down to the business at hand. “You must be Ms. Erlinger.”
“I am. Where is …?” I want to get past the niceties as well.
“This way.”
She puts a hand at my back and begins leading me down the long hallway that runs the center of the building. There are pictures and murals painted on the walls, giving the space a sunny, expansive feel. It looks like a wonderful place to leave your child, if you must leave them anywhere, for the day.
“It’s upsetting to the other children,” she says. “All of the screaming. Especially since it isn’t clear to them, or to us for that matter, what exactly set him off.”
I nod, listening as we get closer to the screams. They are a little hoarse, now. My heart breaks a little. It took me almost twenty minutes just to get here, and I can’t hel
p but wonder how long this has been going on, especially since Rand and Freya had been trying to reach me for about ten minutes before that.
“I’m Mrs. Lewis, by the way,” the woman says. She looks flustered. “The director here.”
We stop outside the door of a room, and I can see inside. It is not, as I expected, crowded with frightened or alarmed-looking children. Instead, there are only two people. A youngish woman, maybe in her early twenties, in jeans and a t-shirt, sitting on the floor. Her arms are wrapped around the thrashing body of a child.
Little Rocket has his head flung backward and he is howling. I can see, even from my vantage point in the hallway and from the other side of the door, that his face is almost crimson. I reach for the door handle and Mrs. Lewis stops me.
“I’m completely out-of-sorts,” she apologizes. “I should have asked sooner. I need to see some identification, and have you sign him out.”
I am about to ask her whether she could possibly be serious, and whether she really thinks that her bureaucratic process is the priority right now, but then I realize that it would be grossly negligent of her to do otherwise. As it is, she is probably deathly afraid that the Center will be blamed in some way for what almost looks like a child having a psychotic break.
“Okay,” I say, trying not to sound impatient. “What do you need me to sign?”
We go one door over and she shoves a clipboard at me. I scan it, and find where I can sign and note the time. Then I show her my driver’s license which she glances at cursorily and then hands back to me.
I heave a sigh when we are finally headed back to the classroom and this time, I don’t wait for Mrs. Lewis’ cues before shoving open the door and going inside. Once in the same room, I get the full effect of Little Rocket’s screams, and watch with a knot of pain in my chest as his little tennis shoes slam against the carpeted surface in useless thuds, as he kicks, and turns, and tries to get loose.
“Rocket,” I say, in a clear and firm voice. At first, he doesn’t hear me, so I say his name again, and this time, mimic the tone I’ve heard Rand use when he is trying to focus his son’s attention, or warn him not to do something he shouldn’t.
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