All By Herself

by Tasha Blue

“You don’t really love Jakob, Anaya,” Hannah said exasperatedly. “Owen’s only known this other girl for five minutes—”

  “It’s been over six months now,” Anaya corrected her.

  “Whatever. The point is, you and Owen have a long history together and you care deeply about each other and now there’s a baby on the way; if there are repressed emotions that you’ve both been holding back, now’s the time to lay it out on the table. Either it’s awkward but you get over it, or you discover that you both feel the same and that you could actually have a pretty nice life together,” Hannah said.

  “You make it sound like I can just drop it into conversation,” Anaya laughed. “‘The next sonogram is on Tuesday. Oh, by the way, I may love you, but I’m not really sure, so would you mind dumping the only girlfriend you’ve had in the last five years just in case? Thanks,’” she mimicked a conversation with Owen.

  Hannah sighed. “Something’s got to give, Anaya.”

  Since realizing that she could think about Owen romantically, it seemed to Anaya that this was the only place her daydreams took her. Now when she thought back over sweet childhood memories she did so with the sweet knowledge that one day she would tell her grandchildren about how she and Owen had grown up together and in that fantasy she and Owen were old together with their grandchildren gathered around by their feet in the home that they shared. She didn’t know why her imagination kept putting her and Owen together because there was no way such a thing could ever be now. Every time that Anaya had those kinds of thoughts, she had to scold herself and lament over the fact that she hadn’t noticed him sooner.

  Although this baby was unplanned, the thought of having a child and a life with Owen didn’t scare Anaya the way it did when she thought about having a life with Jakob. In fact, the thought comforted her and gave her a warm sense of satisfaction. She could just imagine herself living in his dream with two kids in a house by the sea and all those dogs. What’s more, the image was almost as pleasing to her as the prospect of being a success in New York. Where she had never been enough for Jakob when ambition and success were calling, she could imagine herself being content to just be with Owen and their child.

  That realization shocked her, as she knew that somebody could only have those kinds of thoughts about someone they truly cared about. Then again, she did care about Owen deeply. He’d been a part of her life for as long as she could remember, and he knew her as well as she knew herself. She reasoned that all her fantasies about her and Owen together were just hormonal projections and the knowledge that Jakob was not the father of her child playing on her mind.

  For Owen also the situation was strange. For some reason, he still hadn’t told Lisa about the child. He knew that he should, and he knew that things would be so much worse for not telling her, but he kind of felt that his relationship with Lisa was what was saving his relationship with Anaya. Anaya needed to know that he was secure and happy so that she could live her life without feeling guilty. As far as Anaya knew, Lisa had been unhappy about news of the child, but understood that it had happened before they’d started dating and had decided to stay with him.

  Owen didn’t want to be a third wheel to Jakob and Anaya’s relationship or an outsider looking in as the couple raised his child without him. He preferred to have his own relationship with Lisa which could help him push down the fact that he was madly in love with Anaya and that nothing would make him happier than being the father of her child and her husband. He’d even move to New York for her if that’s what she’d wanted. They could live in a skyscraper and get one of those little Chihuahuas that could fit in a handbag and a tiny New York apartment. Yes, he’d let go of his house by the sea and his hundred pets in order to follow Anaya across the world. He allowed his imaginings to take hold the more time that he spent with Anaya during the months of her pregnancy.

  ***

  “I think Matthew for a boy.” Anaya said one afternoon when Owen had dropped by at her work to have an hour of her time over lunch.

  “I’m not sure,” Owen said, making a face. “I was thinking something more zany.”

  “Zany?” Anaya laughed. “Like what? Xavier? Galactiko? Bus Route 9?”

  Owen laughed. “No. Just something less traditional than the usual.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Anaya had teased. “You had enough trouble with the name Owen. You had no confidence with women; do you think your son Starchild would stand a chance?”

  “I happen to like the name Starchild for a boy,” Owen joked. “Will he have my last name or yours?”

  “I’d like to say yours, but that would drive Jakob crazy.”

  “Well, he can’t take Jakob’s last name,” Owen said pointedly. “He’s my son.”

  The harsh truth, however, was that even now that Anaya was pregnant with his child she had chosen to stay with Jakob. Owen didn’t understand it and he didn’t condone it, but he knew that this was another instance where he could only blame himself. If he had wanted to be with Anaya, he should have told her to forget Jakob and be with him and that they should have been a family. Then again, he didn’t want her to be with him just for the sake of their child because he never wanted to make Anaya feel trapped. If she chose to be with him he wanted it to be because she loved him deeply and not because she was afraid or felt duty-bound.

  He kept on seeing Lisa to take the pressure off of Anaya to humor him with affection just because he was the father. As long as he was with Lisa and she was with Jakob, they could go on as two people who had simply had an unfortunate one night stand without having to think too deeply about the messy and complicated emotions that had come to the surface since. Now and then, Anaya would bring up his relationship with her and Owen never knew if she was simply interested or trying to find out more.

  “Don’t you get tired of running every day?” she asked him one day when he arrived at her apartment in workout clothes once again.

  “Lisa likes to keep fit,” Owen shrugged.

  “You might not have time to go running with her for hours every day when there’s a baby to look after,” Anaya said pointedly.

  “We’ll make it work,” Owen assured her. “After all, I’m guessing that you’ll have your days with the baby and I’ll have mine. I can’t imagine that I’m going to be intruding on quiet nights in with Jakob to put the baby to sleep. I’ll go running with Lisa when you have the baby.”

  Anaya sighed heavily. “I hate thinking about the logistics of it all,” she admitted. “I just wish you could be here all the time.”

  The vet didn’t want a child to make it seem as though there was love where there was none. He didn’t want Anaya’s hormones or his desperation to bring about a coupling that wasn’t meant to be. If he lost Anaya as a friend, Owen knew that life would never be so full again. For this reason he kept his mouth shut about his feelings for Anaya, he kept quiet about his disdain for Jakob and he didn’t say a word to Lisa.

  Apart from the mess of emotions and responsibilities he had landed in, Owen enjoyed the opportunity to be with Anaya as she carried his child to term. They somehow managed to retain a little of the lightness and laughter between them even through the confusion of the situation and as Anaya grew closer to delivering his child into the world, Owen became more and more certain that he was ready to be a father.

  They found themselves laughing one day when Owen had come over to help her set up a stroller. It was not going well and it kept folding in half every time that Anaya tried to push it forward.

  “Please don’t guillotine my child in that thing,” Owen laughed.

  “You’re the man!” Anaya accused. “This thing must be missing a screw or something. Oh God. Our baby is going to be flattened.”

  Owen found the situation incredibly funny as both unprepared parents struggled with the most basic of baby equipment and began to laugh out loud. Anaya looked over at him holding the instructions helplessly and began laughing too. She crossed the room to put her arms around
his waist and rest her head against his chest with a sigh.

  “We’re not good at this,” she said.

  “We’ll learn,” Owen promised her. It felt good to have Anaya so close to him and he wrapped his arms around her as she stood there, defeated by the stroller and seeking comfort. He wanted so badly to kiss her, but thoughts of Lisa and the reality of a situation that was already much too complicated prevented him.

  “I remember when my father asked me to replace the garden fence,” Owen reminisced. Anaya burst out laughing before he’d finished the story and remembered the day out loud with him.

  “You somehow managed to knock the whole thing over in one fell swoop and it started blowing away in the wind. You knocked over the paint and it ran all over our rabbit hutch and Bugs was green for a week,” she recalled.

  Owen laughed. “Our kid may be at risk from our poor DIY skills, but at least he’ll learn to have a good sense of humor.”

  He hadn’t really considered the idea of fatherhood before, except in distant imaginings of a faraway future, but now the reality was on his doorstep, he felt prepared and even excited. He looked forward to having a little son or daughter to take to the zoo and read stories to at bedtime. He looked forward to having someone who was a little bit of him and a little bit of Anaya in the world. In time, Owen and Anaya learned that they were having a daughter and Owen was over the moon. They were going to call her Zoë after Owen’s mother, although Anaya was going to tell Jakob that she just loved the name.

  Owen was disappointed that Anaya felt she had to pretend not to be spending time with him throughout her pregnancy just to avoid Jakob going off the rails. What did she think would happen after the baby was born? Owen hated the idea of Anaya raising Zoë in a house with that man while he had to stay away to keep the peace. It didn’t seem fair to him that he had had a twenty -ear relationship full of affection and mutual respect with Anaya that their child would never see. Rather, Zoë would likely be raised in a house with a man who would never love her like his own. It hurt Owen deeply every time he considered these things and he wondered how on earth he would be able to get Anaya to trust him enough to walk away from Jakob. He supposed that he couldn’t expect her trust now. Anaya was right. He was with another woman and if things got more serious with Lisa, he wouldn’t be able to spend so much time with Anaya and it wouldn’t be fair on Anaya to be alone.

  It wasn’t a great situation, but both Anaya and Owen fell into their old habit of not talking about things, which were bothering them and swallowed their emotions until the very day that Zoë came into the world. She was a beautiful little girl with her mother’s wild hair and dark eyes and Owen’s timid smile. She didn’t cry very often and had an inquisitiveness about the world which reminded Owen of his own childhood spent picking up bugs from garden fences.

  Life with Zoë in it was wonderful in so many ways. Anaya fell in love with her at first sight and was a natural mother. She enjoyed nothing more than cuddling her baby close singing lullabies and having a new model for her designs. She made baby Zoë little tiny romper suits and dresses and everyone cooed over how beautiful she was. Owen too took to being a father as though he’d had a hundred children before. Diaper changes and bottle feeds came to him like he’d been doing them forever, and Zoë loved her father. Her arrival in the world brought Anaya and Owen even closer together as neither of them could bear to be parted from their little girl and so found more and more time to sneak away from Jakob and Lisa and be together. Things weren’t perfect, but Zoë was and so Owen and Anaya made the most of their little girl and just left unspoken all the other things.

  The Final Chapter

  Anaya didn’t like arguing in front of the baby, but it made no difference to Jakob if his yelling made her cry. He had found out that she had spent the afternoon in the park with Owen and the baby and was furious.

  “I don’t want you seeing that man!” he exploded.

  “He’s Zoë’s father, Jakob,” Anaya said calmly.

  “He’s a one night stand gone wrong,” Jakob hissed. “Are you telling me that you’d risk everything that we have over him?”

  “I can’t just cut him out,” Anaya told him. “He’s Zoë’s father and he’s my best friend.”

  “You don’t sleep with your ‘friends,’ Anaya.” Jakob raged. “How can I trust you to be alone with him when you’ve already proven that you can’t resist jumping into bed with him as soon as my back is turned?”

  Anaya fixed him with a cold glare. “We were on a break and you know it damn well. I didn’t see you for two months. I was free to sleep with whomever I wanted.”

  “And then see him every day ever since?” Jakob snapped. “I don’t know how you can think I’d be all right with that.”

  “I don’t need you to be all right with it,” Anaya told him coolly. “It’s the way things are and the way things are going to be. I’m not going to tell the father of my child that he can’t see our daughter because my boyfriend—who would drop me in an instant if a better offer came along—doesn’t like it.”

  “I’m more than your boyfriend, Anaya!” Jakob insisted. “We’ve been together for eight years.”

  “Eight years, eight years!” Anna parroted furiously. “That’s all I ever hear from you and it’s all that I ever think about when I wonder why I’m with you. You know what? I’ve known Owen for twenty years so if we’re basing our relationship on duration then he’s winning.”

  “You’re meant to be my girlfriend, but all you do is go behind my back to be with him,” Jakob told her.

  “You’re meant to be my boyfriend, but all you do is stand me up and let me down,” Anaya retorted. “You told me you’d stand by me when I had this baby, but you’ve not so much as looked at her since she’s been born. You won’t hold her or feed her. You’re never going to treat her like your own.”

  “She’s not mine!” Jakob exclaimed. “If you wanted to have a child with me then you should have had a child with me.”

  “I wouldn’t put a child through that,” Anaya said flatly. “You know what? I’ve had enough of this. I’ve had enough of fighting with you. I’ve had enough of you snapping at me and putting me down. If you can’t accept Zoë as my daughter, and you can’t accept Owen as her father, then this relationship is never going to work because both of them are in my life for good now.”

  “You’re giving me an ultimatum?” Jakob said disbelievingly. “I stuck by you even though you got yourself pregnant while I was away and now you want me to back down? You’re never going to find another man like me to take care of you.”

  “Take care of me?!” Anaya scoffed. “You tolerate me. You don’t believe in me. You forget about me and the only reason that I have stayed with you all this time is because you made me believe that I can’t do better, but I don’t believe that any more. I believe that I can find someone who loves me and loves Zoë and won’t go out of his way to make me feel guilty and unloved every day. We’re over, Jakob and this time for good.”

  Jakob scoffed in laughter. “Seriously, Anaya? You think you can raise a baby on your own? You think you’re going to find someone else as a single mother with another man trailing her around all over the place? If you turn me away now, you’re going to be alone forever.”

  “That used to scare me, Jakob,” Anaya confessed. “Now I’m sure that being alone is better than being a downtrodden shadow of myself. I used to have fun, remember? I used to have dreams. I used to have a life before you made me feel bad for having one.”

  “Well good luck having fun and dreams and a life as a single mom,” Jakob scowled. “You’ll be sorry.”

  Anaya held open the door pointedly and glared at Jakob until he left.

  “I don’t think I will,” she predicted.

  As soon as she had shut the door, she realized that her hands were shaking and all at once the terror of what she’d done kicked in. She’d turned away a man who’d been willing to stand by her as a single mother and she didn’t
know if she would ever find another. Owen was with another woman and Anaya might end up being alone forever with his child. She was just about to fling open the door and run down the corridor after Jakob when she pulled herself together and told herself to be strong. Whether Owen was with her or not, she had a responsibility to Zoë now, which meant keeping her safe and surrounding her with people who loved her. If Jakob couldn’t love her daughter, then Anaya would just have to love her enough for them both.

  She went to her daughter’s crib and picked up her little girl to cradle her close and enjoy the feel of her tiny body resting on her hip. Zoë was beautiful and her greatest achievement in life. She wouldn’t trade her for the world of take back a single moment of her night with Owen because this little girl was worth all the trouble and heartache life could dish out. Every time that Anaya looked at her, she felt her heart swell with love and she knew that no matter who she had been or who she had ever dreamt of being, the only person she wanted to be right now was Zoë’s mother.

  When she told Owen about the breakup, she pretended not to notice that brief instant when his eyes lit up before he offered his condolences and promised that he would take care of her.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he told her.

  “I should have known better than to take him back in the first place,” she sighed sorrowfully.

  “Well, we have Zoë now,” Owen comforted her. “You’ll always have someone to love.”

  “Our daughter’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” Anaya’s face glowed with happiness.

  “She takes after her mother,” Owen said with a shy sideways glance at Anaya that quickly turned into watching over the baby before it grew into something more.

  In all her heartache and fear, that single moment of gladness in Owen’s eyes gave Anaya hope that his feelings for her were perhaps deeper than he’d have admitted. It should have caused him panic to know that she had left Jakob, as that meant she would be leaning all the heavier on him now, but he hadn’t looked concerned or annoyed, he had looked glad.