Snow is falling, though. The world outside feels icy cold. My jacket is thin, and I'm shivering. The sun was still shining back in California.
As the taxi pulls away, the front door of the house opens. My father steps out onto the porch and stands there in silence. He’s not surprised. He knew I was coming.
“Kennedy? Is that you?” My mother bursts out of the house and hugs me. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
Her excitement makes me lightheaded. Haze coats my vision.
She drags me into the house, straight past my father, who still says nothing, yet his eyes say enough. My mother wants to chat. I just want to stop feeling like I’m about to pass out. “Can I lay down somewhere?”
“Of course, sweetheart,” she says. “You know where your room is.”
My room is just how I left it, except the bed is freshly made. They expected me, and not just on some ‘you’ll come crawling back someday’ level. Someone warned them.
I get under the covers, pulling them over my head, trying to find some warmth again. I don't want to think about who that 'someone' must be.
Another three days pass. I don’t move unless I have to. I’m sick, and I’m weak, and my mother keeps checking up on me, bringing bottles of water and forcing me to eat crackers and smoothing my hair and telling me it’ll be okay, doing all those things a mother does for her child. And I love her, and I know she does it because she loves me, but I want to scream at her, because how is it possible to love someone so unconditionally? How can she look at me and smile and be so happy that I’m here, that I exist, when she has every reason in the world to be angry for the trouble I’ve caused? All the sleepless nights she endured, all the stress and worry…
“How far along are you?” she asks that third night when she finds me curled up on the bathroom floor. Her voice is gentle as she sits down beside me.
I just look at her.
She smiles softly. “A mother knows.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I open my mouth to say no, because talking is the last thing I want to do. But the denial dies on my lips and comes out as a sob, and once it starts, I can’t stop. She pulls me to her, and I lay my head in her lap as I cry. And words spill out of me along with the tears, all the struggling and fighting, the lies and the broken promises, the resentment that grew when he got swept up in the hurricane and left me behind to battle the storm.
“He’s been calling here,” she says. “Drunk. Your father answered the first call. He wanted to know if we’d heard from you. Said he came home and you were gone, so he thought you might come here. And he kept calling back, but your father didn't answer again until tonight… when he told him if he knew what was good for him, he’d stop.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” she says. “I know what it feels like. Your dad’s the greatest man I know, but he was a terrible drunk. It changes people, and that doesn’t excuse anything, but it means there’s hope. They can get better, but you can’t change them. They have to want to change.”
“He doesn’t want to.”
“Maybe not,” she says. “Or maybe not yet. It took your dad a while. But no matter what he did, I knew I had to look out for myself… and for my kid. And I have no doubt you’ll do the same, because you’re my daughter.”
I feel better hearing that. Not completely, of course, because life is scary and my heart is still broken and the boy I fell in love with is gone, but enough to pick myself up and keep going.
Days pass. A week. A month.
A new year comes.
I gather the courage to see a doctor. I’m still in the first trimester. My father and I haven’t spoken much, but he knows I’m pregnant. He calls it the ‘lovesickness’.
More days.
I get a job at the grocery store, and I hate it, but they give me a lot of hours, and I need money.
More weeks.
I’m starting to show. I stare at myself in the mirror, rubbing my stomach, feeling the bump. It’s weird. There’s a life growing inside of me right now.
The doctor tells me it’s a girl.
You have a daughter, Jonathan, and you don’t even know. I feel the fluttering as she moves around, and my heart is soaring. I’m still scared, so scared, but when I feel her, this overwhelming sense of love flows through me, and I smile.
I’m smiling again.
It’s like I’ve finally figured out the point of it all, the purpose of our story—it’s her.
More months.
The world is thawing. Spring comes.
I’m six months along and sitting on the porch, in one of the rocking chairs, bundled up to ward off the chill, when you pop up. The black town car slowly pulls up to the curb in front of the house, and there you are. My mother has to stop my father from storming out of the house.
You look like yourself from afar, but as you approach, I see the eyes are all wrong. It’s early, the sun barely in the sky, and you’re still awake from last night. You linger somewhere in the gray area between drunk and hung-over, coherent enough to stand up straight but by no means are you sober.
Still as handsome as ever, though. You’re wearing a suit and your tie is tugged loose, a glimmer of a teenage rebel I remember.
“Can we talk for a minute?” you ask, stopping near the porch, and I almost laugh at your choice of words, because that’s what I asked, too.
I say nothing, staring at you.
“I’m sorry,” you say, your voice cracking. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
Something you’ll never know is at that very moment, as you say those words, I forgive you. I don’t even know what you’re sorry for, but I forgive you for all of it. I don’t tell you that, though, because I don’t do it for you.
It’s for her.
I still stare.
You talk some more, going on and on about how wrong you were and how much you miss me and how you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, how hard it is not having me to come home to, and all I can think about as I listen to your words is how much growing up you have to do, Jonathan, because every sentence from your lips contains ‘I’ or ‘My’ or ‘Me’, but you can’t be the center of the universe anymore.
Not this universe.
“So it’s true?” you ask. “You’re pregnant?”
I avert my gaze and nod, because you deserve to know, but I can’t find the words I need to tell you anymore.
“I can tell,” you say. “You’re glowing. You’re so beautiful.”
I look back at you when you say that.
“Come back to me,” you say. “I need another chance, just one more. We can’t let it end this way. We’re having a baby, and I don’t even know… is it a boy? A girl? When are you due? I don’t know anything, but I want to. So come with me. Please. I’m making money now, and I can take care of you.”