For James, second best was never an option.
In the afternoons I slip into the basement and sift through old shoeboxes of photographs to prove to myself that it was real, those twinkling moments of fatherly love. I didn’t imagine it. I find a picture that five-year-old Mia drew with an inelegant hand, her childish block letters adorning the illustration: I LOVE YOU DADDY. There’s a taller figure and a shorter figure and it appears that their fingerless hands are clasped. Their faces are embellished with enormous smiles and all around the periphery of the paper she’s placed stickers, nearly three dozen red and pink heart-shaped stickers. I showed it to him one evening after he’d come home from work. He stared at it for I don’t know how long, a minute or more, and then took it into his office and placed it, with a magnet, on the black filing cabinet.
“It’s for Mia’s own good,” he says, breaking the earsplitting silence. “She needs the time to heal.”
But I wonder if that’s truly the case.
I want to tell him there are other ways. Adoption, for example. Mia could give the child to a family who is unable to have their own child. She could make some unfortunate family very happy. But James would never see it that way. There would always be what-ifs: what if the adoption fell through, what if the adoptive parents chose not to take the child, what if the baby was born with a birth defect, or what if, when the baby turned into a young adult, it searched for Mia, ruining her life all over again.
Abortion, on the other hand, is quick and easy. That’s what James has said. Never mind the guilt that will haunt Mia for the rest of her life.
When Dr. Rhodes finishes her session with Mia, she walks her into the waiting room and before we leave, she lays a hand on Mia’s arm and says, “It’s not like you have to decide today. You have plenty of time.”
But I see in James’s eyes that he has already decided.
Colin
Before
I can’t sleep, and this isn’t the first time. I tried counting sheep, pigs, whatever, and now I’m pacing the room. Every night is hard. Every night I’m thinking about her. But tonight it’s worse because the date on my watch reminds me that it’s her birthday. And I’m thinking about her all alone back home.
It’s pitch-black, when all of a sudden my feet aren’t the only ones in the room.
“You scared the shit out of me,” I say. I barely make out her profile, my eyes not accustomed to the dark.
“Sorry,” she lies. “What are you doing?” she asks. My mom always nagged me about how heavy I walked. She said I could wake the dead.
We don’t turn on a light. In the dark we run into each other. Neither of us offers an apology. We shy away and retreat in our own direction.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. “Trying to clear my head.”
“About what?” she asks and at first I’m silent. At first I’m not going to tell her. She doesn’t need to know.
But then I do. It’s dark enough in the room that I pretend she’s not there. But that’s not it. That’s not why. It’s something about the way she says, Never mind, and her footsteps start to leave the room that makes me want to tell her. Makes me want her to stay.
I say that my father left when I was a kid, but it didn’t matter anyway. It’s not like he was ever there to begin with. He drank. Went to bars and gambled. Money was already tight without him wasting it away. I say that he was a womanizer and a cheat. I tell her that I learned about life the hard way: how there wasn’t always food on the table or warm water for a bath. Not that there was anyone to give me a bath anyway. I was three, maybe four years old.
I tell her how my father had a temper. I say that he scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. With me it was a lot of screaming and not a lot more. But he hit my mother. More than once.
He worked, sometimes, but he was usually between jobs. He was always getting fired for not showing up. For showing up drunk. For telling off the boss.
My mother, she worked all the time. She was never home because she’d work twelve hours in the grocery store bakery, up at 5:00 a.m., then moonlight as a bartender where men hit on her and touched her and called her names like sweetie and doll. My dad called her a slut. That’s what he said: You good-for-nothing slut.