Literary Lunes Magazine: November 2011 Issue

I had hoped to wait until after dinner but couldn’t. I needed to get this out in front of us and find out how Sarah and I were going to deal with the rest of our lives.

  I took a gulp of my wine. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “My, that sounds serious.” She smiled, although perhaps a bit worriedly. “ I thought we were talking. Are we broke? Did you lose all our money at the track?”

  She may have been surprised when I didn’t laugh. “No, nothing like that. Something more important.”

  Now, she definitely looked worried. “All right, we’ll talk. What is it?”

  I had opened the door. There was no turning back.

  “I have a child.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “Two to be exact. What’s all this about?”

  “I have a child from before we got married.”

  Her mouth opened wide. “Say that again?”

  “I have a kid. A daughter.”

  “How?” she stammered. “When?”

  “How, was the usual method. When I was seventeen.”

  The color was gone from Sarah’s face. “Christ, Michael, that was almost five years before we met. What happened?”

  I took a drink, trying to figure out the best way to relate the details. But there didn’t seem an easy way to tell the story.

  “I was a junior in high school, and there was this girl. We went out exactly twice and had sex once. She told me she was on the pill but obviously something went wrong. Shortly after that, she informed me she was pregnant.”

  Sarah was studying the back of her hands, averting my gaze. “What happened next?” she asked softly.

  “You can imagine both of us were scared as hell. I asked her if she wanted an abortion, told her I would pay for it, be with her every step of the way. She railed at me, told me I was a baby killer, and she wasn’t going to be part of it. She didn’t even let me come up with some other plan. Instead, she just went and told her parents. That’s when the shit really hit the fan.”

  “Would you have married her?” Sarah asked.

  “Probably not,” I said. “I wasn’t that stupid. But I never got a chance to come up with a Plan B. The next thing I knew, her parents were at my house threatening me and my parents with legal proceedings. They demanded that I sign away all my custodial rights and promise never to try to contact the baby once it was born. In exchange, they dropped all claims for child support.”

  “And you did it, just walked away?”

  I sensed my wife’s respect for me evaporating. “What choice did I have? I was seventeen years old. I didn’t even have a part-time job. I wanted to go to college, have a life. They were rich and could afford lawyers. My parents couldn’t. I didn’t see any way out so I signed the papers.”

  Sarah threw her napkin on her plate. “What a heel. Then, and now. All these years we’ve been married, you never had the guts to tell me.”

  I wanted to get up, walk to her, hold her, but I didn’t dare. “Would you have married me if you knew the story, knew how I acted? Would you have stayed with me if I had told you afterward? Look how you’re reacting now?”

  “You men are all idiots,” she said. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?” I asked.

  “What you did all these years. Keeping this secret from me is ten times worse than what you did to that poor girl. I could forgive you for what happened with her, you were seventeen, horny, and stupid. But how do you explain keeping this from me? For God’s sake, we’re married. You’re supposed to tell me these things.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And why now?” she continued. “Why tell me after all this time? You’ve obviously had no problem keeping your secret through the years.”

  “She just turned eighteen.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “Maybe I’m dense. What does that have to do with anything?"

  “She’s an adult. I can legally have contact with her now.”

  Sarah looked at me like I had just dropped in from another planet. “Wait… you’re actually thinking about contacting your daughter, someone you’ve never seen let alone communicated with?”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head in amazement. “You really don’t get it do you? Because you have a good chance of wrecking a whole bunch of lives. Hers, and ours. What if she wants to become part of our lives? What if she asks to live with her biological father?”

  She paused. “ And why is this so important to you? You’ve sat on this for over twenty years. Why stir things up now?”

  “Because I need to get closure on this, complete this loophole in my life.”

  Sarah got up. “Christ, Michael, that’s what all of this is about? Your need to tie up loose ends?”

  “I need closure,” I said again.

  “And I need a husband who doesn’t have a whole closet full of skeletons.” She began to walk away from the table. “I thought I knew you. Turns out, I know nothing about you.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “How do you propose to find this daughter of yours anyway? You said yourself you haven’t had any contact with her since her birth. How do you know where she is?”

  I had been praying she wouldn’t get around to that question. If news of my daughter did not wreck our relationship, my answer to her question would do it for sure.

  “I hired a private investigator.”

  Sarah picked up a glass. If I were a betting man, I’d have laid odds she was going to throw it at my head. But she gently, almost gingerly, put it back on the table.

  “I’m so sorry Michael, more for me and the kids than for you. You’re a psychological basket case, and you don’t even know it.”

  She began to walk out of the room. “Go ahead and find your kid if it means that much to you. Just don’t expect me to be happy about it.”

  Which is how I came to be in a suburb outside St. Louis at three o’clock in the afternoon. It was hot, Amazon hot, as only the Midwest can be in July. I was in the front seat of a rental car, outside of the Pig & Poke Market where Kathryn, my daughter, worked. Her mother moved here a few years after she was born. How do I know all of this? It’s amazing what a private detective can find out when you pay them enough.

  Kathryn’s picture was next to me. I know I’m biased, but she was beautiful. A full face, not heavy but not gaunt either. A happy face, or so I wanted to believe. From the photo, I couldn’t tell the color of her eyes, but they were light, probably blue or hazel, like her mother’s. She had long, brown hair, my color, flowing straight down her back. I should have been happy to be so close to her after all these years, but I felt more like some kind of stalker. That and like a damned candidate for a twelve-step program for Zeigarnik fools.

  I knew I didn’t have to do it this way. She was an adult, and I was free to contact her any way I chose. I could send her an email, call her on the phone, march up and ring her front doorbell. But she still lived with her mother; she was going to college part-time. Her mother couldn’t do a damn thing about it, but I was scared of the scene she might cause. So, I sat in the car, across the street from the store, waiting for God-knows-what.

  It would have been nice to have a plan. I mean, how do you go up to someone just getting off work, stop her on a public street and say: “Excuse me, I hate to bother you, but I’m your biological father.” What would she do? Faint? Scream? Call a cop? How would Sarah feel about flying from Atlanta all the way to St. Louis to bail me out? Would she even make the trip?

  Still, I wanted to talk to her, had to talk to her. I had to see her up close, hear her voice, look into her eyes. I needed to put a face and a voice to my past, get closure. I knew it had to be done.

  I waited. An hour, then two. I didn’t know when her shift would end. I worried that some resident on the street or a worker in the store would report me as a suspicious individual to the police. How would I explain myself? What could I tell the authorities that would be even halfway believable? Certainly no
t the truth.

  At the three-hour mark, my back was stiff and the car, even with the window cracked open, was hot and humid. Still, I waited.

  Then, she walked out, dressed in the red and white store employee uniform. She wore a name badge, but I was too far away to read it. Still, I knew from the picture, that it was her.

  I got out of the car and shut the door. She walked toward me but without really seeing me, her gaze somewhere over my shoulder, down the street. Perhaps, she was waiting for a ride home. Maybe, from her mother. My brain raced.

  “Excuse me, Miss.”

  Her gaze shifted from far off to me. A beautiful gaze. A gaze I wished I could hold forever.

  Since we were standing in front of the store, she probably thought I was a customer. I guess she didn’t feel threatened by a stranger asking her question on a busy street in the middle of the day.

  “Yes,” she said. “Can I help you?” Her voice was higher pitched than I expected. I don’t know why, I imagined her to have a more throaty voice, like the one I remembered from her mother.

  I was without a thought in my head. I couldn’t seem to say anything.

  “Do you work here?” I blurted.

  “Yes.”

  “Is the manager in? I need to speak to him or her.”

  “Yes, Mr. Jackson is on duty today. You can find him at the Service Desk.”

  I wanted to keep talking to her more than anything else in the world. “Kathryn,” I said. “That’s a pretty name.”

  “How, how did you know my….?

  She looked down at her name badge and smiled. “Oh.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “No problem.” She studied me for a few moments. “Do I know you?”

  I wanted to embrace her, hold onto her, but my arms were paralyzed, pinned to my side. She waited for my answer.

  “No,” I said. “We’ve never met.”

  Kathryn nodded. “ Well, have a nice day.”

  She walked past me, five feet, ten, then twenty. Away forever.

  “And a good life,” I whispered.

  I watched her until she turned the corner. I wondered if she thought I was some sort of nut case, maybe even a pervert. It pained me to think that she might have her cell phone out, ready to call 911 if she thought I was following her.

  I got back in my car and put my forehead against the steering wheel, sobbing. She was gone, forever. I knew now I would never able to have real contact with her. This would have to suffice a lifetime. It would have to be enough to tie up all those loose ends. I thought of Sarah and the girls back in Atlanta. Would they be there when I got home? I wanted to call them but didn’t have the nerve.

  No, I needed to talk to Sarah one- on- one, try to make her understand why this trip was necessary, so important that I jeopardized my marriage for one minute with a daughter I would never see again.

  I needed to admit that this part of my life would never be resolved, a loose string that I would never be able to pick up.

  I prayed that just this one time the Zeigarnik Effect could find its way to leave me alone.