Landon and I looked at each other for a brief moment, exchanging smiles.
“Things were pretty messed up back then with my parents,” I said. “Thank you for understanding.”
“No thanks necessary,” she said. “Honestly…I feel that we owe you now for getting Landon back here for a visit.”
I actually felt really bad for Landon’s mother. It was clear that she’d been hurt by his virtual disappearance from their lives.
Landon offered her another embrace. “I’m sorry it’s been so long.”
Marjorie then looked right at me when she said, “We really love our son, and we’ve always just wanted what’s best for him. But you know, you can only hold your kids close for so long. At some point, you just have to let them go, let them discover themselves. I couldn’t keep him here no matter how much I begged, and then I realized that he had to live his life and learn from his experiences. Letting him go to California was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I knew I couldn’t stop him.”
Landon’s situation was proof that even people with two parents and a seemingly perfect upbringing can screw up in life.
“I didn’t always have my head on straight, but I finally landed on my feet, Mom. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. But I do need to apologize for alienating you guys somewhat all these years. The separation was just something I had to go through to get to where I am now. Believe me, you both did everything right. You were the best parents anyone could’ve asked for.”
His mother looked like she was about to cry. “Well, that’s very nice of you to say. And I will take what I can get in terms of visits from my handsome son.”
We ended up sitting down to dinner and over the course of the evening, I actually found myself really enjoying their company. We laughed a lot, in particular when Landon told the story of the first time his parents saw his tattoos.
It was really strange being back in the place where I used to live, although the garage was back to being just that—a place to park cars and store things. An air of nostalgia definitely followed me around the entire night.
After supper, Landon and I took a walk around the old neighborhood. It was surreal to be back on this street, looking at the very same cracks in the sidewalk I used to ride over with my bike.
We strolled and reminisced until an unexpected run-in interrupted our evening.
We’d just made our way around the circle block when we ended up in front of Mrs. Sheen’s house. A female was in the driveway, leaning into a car. She looked up for a moment and saw us approaching.
In an apparent warning, Landon squeezed my hand before he said, “Hey, Kelsie.”
She used her hand as a visor despite the fact that there wasn’t any sun. “Holy crap. Landon? Is that you?”
Even though he’d said her name, it took me a few seconds to realize it was Kelsie, Landon’s ex and my former thirteen-year-old nemesis.
Holy shit.
What timing.
Did she still live at home?
“Wow. I haven’t seen you in years. I barely recognized you,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m here visiting my parents.”
Kelsie had the same dark blonde hair I remembered, although she was definitely a little heavier now.
Landon peeked into the car. “Who’s this little guy?”
“This is Bryce. His dad is in the military and was just deployed, so I’m spending some time with Mom. We actually live on base in Illinois.”
“Wow. Well, thank him for his service.”
She nodded. “How’s California? You find what you were looking for?”
“Yeah.” He looked straight at me. “Yeah, I finally found what I’ve been looking for.”
“Good. Good.” She looked at my face but didn’t acknowledge me or introduce herself. “Well, you guys have a good night.”
“You, too,” I said.
Once we had walked out of her earshot, Landon finally said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know whether you wanted me to introduce you or not. I know you hated her, and I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. I suspected you didn’t want me to say anything.”
“I was praying you didn’t say my name. I’m really glad you didn’t. That’s the beauty of looking different. If I run into someone from my past who I don’t want to see, they don’t know it’s me anyway.”
“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to explain shit to her.”
“Good call.”
Our hands were intertwined as we continued on our walk.
“Aren’t you proud of me?” I chuckled. “We saw Kelsie, and I didn’t even get jealous.”
He dragged me playfully toward him. “That’s because I think you finally know you don’t have anything to be jealous about.”
We stopped in front of his parents’ house, both of us hesitant to go back inside.
Wrapping my arms around his neck, I looked up at him. “I’m really glad we came for this visit.”
“Me, too. There was a part of me that had been ashamed of what I’ve been hiding from my folks. I was avoiding them so I didn’t have to deal with that. Your acceptance of me after everything I told you really helped me to forgive myself. It gave me the courage to face my parents again tonight. I had to forgive myself first, I think.”
Landon was only going to be here a couple more days. Soon I was going to lose the opportunity to tell him my own truth in person. Tonight made me more certain than ever that there couldn’t be any more secrets between us.
I knew there was a good chance that telling him could backfire, that he could turn on me if he took things personally in any way. He could very well lose respect for me.
Telling him the truth was a huge risk but one I needed to take.
NO SURGERY FOR A BROKEN SOUL
Even though I’d told myself I was going to tell him everything on his last night in Michigan, sometimes a secret just eats away at you so much that it can no longer be hidden. The truth will often find its way out on its own terms.
After we’d gotten home from his parents’ house, Landon and I made love several times until we fell asleep. I’d felt so content in his arms, but the shadow of my secret was always lurking, preventing me from fully enjoying our connection.
I woke up sweating and shaking in the middle of the night; my body could no longer sustain the guilt.
Landon woke up and immediately knew something was very wrong with me. “What’s going on?”
“I need to tell you now.”
“I know I said I wasn’t going to pressure you, but I agree. You need to talk to me. Please,” he begged.
It seriously felt like it was now or never, like whatever bubble of protection that had hid my past had somehow burst in that moment.
I just kept looking at him in the darkness, because I wanted to cherish these last seconds of ignorant bliss before I laid it all out on the line. I then turned around and let him spoon me. This story was going to be easier to tell if I wasn’t facing him, better if I didn’t have to bear witness to his disappointment.
He held me tightly in his big arms. “I’m gonna hold you like this. And I’m not letting you go. I want you to tell me everything.”
My body continued to tremble as I forced out the words.
“When my parents and I moved out of your house to live with my grandparents, I just sort of snapped into this horrible, rebellious stage. I had sex for the first time when I was only fourteen. Even though I didn’t feel beautiful the majority of the time, for some reason, I felt desirable…important…when I started to explore my sexuality. Word got around school that I was easy, and I basically let several boys at my high school have their way with me over the course of about a year. They ranged from freshmen to seniors.”
Landon’s breathing became a bit heavier. I knew he wasn’t comfortable hearing that, despite everything he’d confessed about himself. I continued.
“Things were really bad at home. As much as my father tried to keep them apart, my moth
er ran off with her young boyfriend. Papa was trying so hard to control me during that time, because I was all he had left. But it was in vain. I would just sneak off in the middle of the night to meet boys. I couldn’t talk to my father about anything, so no one really taught me how to be responsible.”
Landon seemed to know where this was going as he whispered against the back of my neck, “Oh, fuck.” His body stiffened. He repeated, “Fuck.”
I was starting to feel really nauseous.
Spit it out.
“I was going on fifteen when I found out I was pregnant. It was like the biggest nightmare I could have ever imagined. My father didn’t even know I was leaving the house most nights, let alone having sex. He was totally clueless. He thought he could just forbid me from doing things and that I would listen. Clearly, he underestimated the will of a hormonal teenage girl, especially one who was rebelling against her deadbeat mother.”
Landon was being silent. I just went on with my story.
“I honestly didn’t know what to do. I kept it hidden for as long as was humanly possible. My father just thought I was getting fat. He probably figured I was eating more because I was depressed about Shayla leaving. I stayed in my room as much as possible so no one would notice my body changing. But at six months along, I just couldn’t hide it anymore. My grandmother was the one who finally confronted me about it. I begged her to please not tell my father, but she wouldn’t listen. I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking, asking her to help me hide it. It was going to come out eventually. Needless to say when Papa found out, he was completely devastated. Given how strict he was with me, I was expecting him to be irate, to disown me. But his main reaction was one of just solemn shock—sadness. It was like he couldn’t believe how clueless he had been, and he really beat himself up over it.”
Even though I had originally not wanted to face him, I needed reassurance that Landon was okay. Turning around, I breathed out a sigh of relief when he placed his hand around my cheek.
His voice was low. “Keep going. Please. I need to hear the rest.”
I nodded and took a deep breath in.
“With only a few months left to go, there wasn’t a lot of time to prepare. I was certainly in no way ready to be a mother. My father was out of a job. We were both living off of my grandparents. I just didn’t know what I was going to do.” I closed my eyes then opened them. “One afternoon, I was told to come downstairs. There was a woman sitting in the living room. She was with an adoption agency. My grandmother had contacted her. This person sat me down and explained what the process would be if that was something I wanted to consider. I was fifteen, scared, and looking for a solution. I just needed someone to tell me what to do. The woman seemed to make a lot of good points. All I wanted at that time was to forget it was all happening, so to hear her talk about all of the responsibilities of having a child was overwhelming. She ended by mentioning that there was a great couple in particular who was looking to adopt a newborn, and that she thought the situation might be a good fit for me.”
Landon bit his lip as he stayed silent. There must have been so many emotions running through him because of his own history. I wished I could have somehow changed the story, but I had to tell him the absolute truth.
“I was completely detached from not only my baby, but from the whole situation. I wasn’t thinking about the long-term repercussions of giving my child away. I was thinking like a child myself. I was just not emotionally ready to even think about it, much less experience parenthood. I let everyone convince me that I would be doing my child a favor by giving it up to this nice, loving couple.”
His eyes grew distant. I was terrified I was going to lose him over this. He was never able to truly forgive his birth mother for giving him up. I could only imagine what hearing me say I had made the same mistake was doing to him. He stared off when he asked, “What did you have...a girl or a boy?”
My eyes began to fill with tears. “I gave birth to a baby girl, and the hospital discharged her directly to the adoptive parents. I chose not to hold her because I was too afraid. I didn’t want to risk feeling anything for her, because it wasn’t going to matter. I knew I couldn’t handle being her mother. They made me wait a certain number of days to sign the papers, in case I changed my mind. The required time passed, and I signed my child away.” I swallowed. Those words were really hard to get out.
He blew out a long breath. “Just like that…”
I nodded in shame and whispered, “Just like that.”
“What happened after? I mean, what was your life like after you gave her up?”
“My life after that was very melancholy. I trudged through high school, feeling enormously empty and filled with self-loathing. No longer had an interest in boys. I was too traumatized by the pregnancy to let anyone touch me. In fact, that continued up until you came into my life. But back then, while everyone else was going to prom and looking at colleges, I just stayed isolated. I couldn’t stand myself. This went on for years. You already know that when I turned eighteen, I used money that was supposed to be for college to run away to Detroit to get plastic surgery. Well, now you know that the reason wasn’t entirely just to improve my physical appearance so much as masking the old one. I was just so disappointed in myself that I basically wanted Rana to disappear.” My lip quivered.
Sympathy returned to his eyes, which were now filling with moisture, although he didn’t fully cry. I suspected he was struggling with his emotions, probably unsure of whether to feel disappointed in me or empathetic.
I continued, “When I came home after running away for the surgery, I expected my family to disown me once and for all. But I got the opposite reception. The compassion they showed me during that time was beyond anything I ever expected. When I left, they’d thought they lost me forever. So, it was only upon returning home that I realized that, even though I didn’t have a mother who gave two shits about me, I had a dad and two grandparents who loved me very much. They never questioned why I ran away. They seemed to get it completely. They knew that my surgery had little to do with what was on the surface. Unfortunately, there isn’t a surgery for a broken soul.”
There it was. A teardrop fell from his eyes. He was truly pained to hear me say that. This was the moment that I really needed to try even better to make him understand.
Placing both of my hands around his face and wiping his tears with my thumb, I looked deeply into his eyes. “I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, Landon, that your birth mother may have given you up, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love you. She just truly believed that you were better off without her. And I want you to know that I fully understand if you can’t accept the fact that I made the very same mistake that she did. I don’t want you to look at me and see all of the resentment that you have for her. So, I’m going to ask of you the very same favor you asked of me back in California. If you can’t see past this, if you can’t be with me without being ashamed, then I would rather you not pretend.”
He wiped his eyes. “Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know about you?”
“No.”
“What’s her name?”
Here it comes.
That was the other part of the story. Perhaps, the biggest part.
“Her name is Lilith.”
SAY SOMETHING
It took a while for the name to register in his mind.
“Lilith…isn’t that the name of the—”
“Yes. The girl I visit every week. Yes.”
“It’s her? Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
Landon got up from the bed and walked toward the window.
He paced for a bit before turning to me. “She has no clue?”
“No.”
He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m confused. Explain it to me.”
“Alright.” I stood up from the bed and walked toward him. “You remember how you said you woke up one day an
d realized the life you were living wasn’t the one you wanted? Well, that sort of happened to me around the age of twenty-one. I had worked really hard to turn my life around somewhat, repair my relationship with my father and grandparents. But the one thing I couldn’t seem to get over was the lingering need for the baby I had given away. It was like I finally woke up and saw what I had done. But it was too late. It just hit me that there was a part of me out there somewhere and that I hadn’t so much as seen her once. My giving her away was never about not loving my unborn child. In a sense, I didn’t even allow myself to feel things long enough at the time of the birth to even realize that I loved her. I was in this perpetually numb state the whole time I was pregnant and after. It had nothing to do with a conscious lack of love. It was about hating myself and not wanting her to hate me like I hated my mother. I didn’t want to be the kind of mother mine was. I wanted better for her, but at fifteen I wasn’t smart enough to realize that as long as I loved her, I could’ve made it work somehow. I may not have had money, but I would’ve given her an abundance of love. My mother never had that in her. But I did. I realized my mistake too late. That didn’t change how I felt, though.”
“How did you end up finding her?”
“It wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t a closed adoption per se. I always had the name and the address of the family. The adoptive parents didn’t think I wanted to be involved, so there wasn’t anything put in place to prevent me from going back to find her. Perhaps they never insisted on anonymity because they suspected I might change my mind someday and would want to know her. I always had their names, address, everything. It seemed ironic and a little fateful that they lived not far from where we grew up. It was the reason I moved back to this part of the state.”
“So…what did you do…go to their house?”
“No. I never wanted to drop any kind of bomb on them. I handled it very carefully. When she was about seven, I called her mother privately and asked if there was any way I could get to know Lilith. Beth is a prominent attorney who works a lot. I assured her that I respected the fact that she’s Lilith’s mother. Like it or not, I gave up my rights—as painful as that is. I understand that.”