What We Leave Behind (25 page)

Ari quickly followed his lead. “I’ll take this,” he said with confidence and handed me the lone Pokemon toy.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” I asked.

He nodded. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the one I want.”

Later, after I had dropped Ari off and was heading east toward the office buildings of Century City, I was reminded of my son’s struggle.

My mother once told me that decisions are difficult because by making a choice, we’re forced to give up something. How lucky for my child that a little boy with a few more years on him could help him make a decision, could free him from being responsible for the death of Hans Solo.

“But that’s life,” my mother would say. “Life is about making choices.”

How could I have known it would all lead to a choice? And the thing about choices is that they can be influenced by things we aren’t even aware of, things stuck in our subconscious that have a louder voice than our gut instinct. How could some decisions be so clear, and others so unmistakably ambiguous, like the cryptic imprint that loved ones, whether present or absent, leave on our souls, charting the course of our lives?

Yes, my mother was right, as she often proved to be. Life is about making choices. But it’s also about re-embracing the things you gave up. And it’s learning that there are some things, and some people, you can’t live without.

I had made choices before, but none more important than this one. And even though something is lost, there is a spirit that moves me and encircles me and leads me to a clearer path.

I know this now because I understood that fated day when my phone rang that there are some things that never leave you at all.

It was a rainy morning when Marty was at the office and I was home alone in the house. My mother had flown in from Arizona and had taken Ari to the library, and I had nothing I was working on, except dawdling. I had become good at dawdling. Kind of like my mother and her flitting. I lay on the bed where Marty and I had just made love a few hours before and wrapped the sheets around me. In some ways, I had become his wife again. I smiled when it was required. I talked to him when it was necessary. I got dressed and went to dinner with him when it was mandatory, and we raised Ari together, however stiff and contentious. Having sex with him was merely going through another obligatory set of motions.

Essentially, I had fulfilled his basic needs—wife, companion, mother, but he wanted more and I wanted less, and the disparity kept us from recognizing the darkness brewing around us.

It was similar to the man who jumps to his death, leaving a trail of shock and betrayal behind. Weeks later, days even, you hear the ripples, the slow-moving chatter disguised in whispers and hushed sounds, how random strands of odd behavior suddenly come together and make sense. No one wants to see something that he doesn’t want to believe is there. It was a lot easier for those closest to me to pretend that everything was going to be okay.

The phone rang, plucking me out of my head.

“Ms. Parker?”

I was not used to being called by my former name while lying naked in my husband’s bed. “Yes?”

She said, “Please hold for Mr. David Stevens.” I wrapped the sheet around me. I had no idea who David Stevens was.

“Ms. Parker? David Stevens here. I’m an attorney in Manhattan.”

“Yes?” I pulled the sheet tighter.

“Ms. Parker, it’s not customary for me to make a phone call like this. Ordinarily, I would insist we speak in person, but under the circumstances…”

“How can I help you?” I grumbled at him, all his niceties annoying me.

“I’m representing a husband and wife, the Sammlers.”

“I don’t know any Sammlers.”

“But I think you do. Your daughter, they are her…”

“I don’t have a daughter, Mr. Stevens. Are you sure you have the right Jessica Parker?”

“Birth date June fifteenth, nineteen seventy-two, resides in Los Angeles, California?”

“That’s me,” I sighed, “but I don’t have a daughter.”

“Yes, I know that. Excuse me, let me clarify. I know that
legally
you don’t have a daughter, not anymore, but the Sammlers, the adoptive parents of your little girl, they’ve been desperate to find you.”

I could barely make out his next words.

“Ms. Parker, are you there?”

I hesitated for a moment, remembering the shattered glass.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“The adoptive parents, they’ve been desperate to find you. Michelle, their little girl, has leukemia.”

I stood up from the bed, latching onto the name. “She was diagnosed a few years ago and underwent an aggressive chemotherapy treatment, but recently relapsed. Ordinarily, patients with this type of leukemia recover with chemotherapy, and I apologize in advance as I’m not a medical doctor and don’t have specific details to give you, but the relapse is serious. In all likelihood, Michelle’s going to need a transplant in order to survive. Finding a match is of the utmost importance.”

My voice couldn’t be found. It was somewhere stuck in the restricted up and down motion of my chest.

“Ms. Parker, I understand this is upsetting for you.”

“Yes,” I whispered, and then he continued in his fixed professional manner. “Her adoptive parents realize that you might be paramount for her survival. I know this is difficult for you. It’s difficult for everyone involved.”

There had been no one else to contact. I had told them that day that there was no father, that he had died, because he had, at least to me.

“The parents are here with me now, and they’d like to speak with you. You can understand, Ms. Parker, they are desperate to save their daughter’s life. I know there are provisions regarding your anonymity and laws protecting your privacy. We can discuss that later. Until now, they’ve been very respectful of your rights.”

The forms I had signed long, long ago did not prepare nor protect me from this type of call. “What will I need to do?” I asked.

“Just talk to them.”

Nothing was making any sense. “My husband doesn’t know about her.” I wasn’t sure if I voluntarily spoke it aloud or if it jumped from my mouth.

“Ms. Parker, I understand the delicate nature of this matter. Protecting your privacy is of the utmost concern to all of us. The parents would never have contacted you if it weren’t a life-threatening situation. You must know that and do what you think is best.”

I’d already lost enough. I said her name out loud,
Michelle
.

“What do you mean you’re leaving?” Marty asked, the thought occurring to him that maybe the charade we called a marriage had busted wide open.

“I’m going to New York for some work. My mother will stay here with Ari. It’s important.”

“Last time I checked, wasn’t I your boss?”

“It’s a consulting gig.”

“And it’s so important you need to leave your family again?”

The reference to San Francisco released a slew of hurt I thought I had buried with other human emotions. “I have to start somewhere; sitting in this house is killing me.”

“Are you ready to travel, physically ready?”

“The doctors say it’s fine, as long as I’m emotionally up to it.”

He sized me up and down, my own personal barometer.

“Are you sure you’re not just running away from something?”

I said, “You mean you?”

“If that’s the first thing that comes to your mind.”

“It’s not always about you, Marty. This is something I need to do for me.”

“Why so cryptic?”

I turned to him, thinking back to the four mysterious nights we never discussed. “Can’t you just leave it alone? Can’t you just give me the space to figure things out?”

He was angry. “My wife tells me she’s leaving for New York, and I can’t ask questions? When did our life together become solely about you? When did you decide that I shouldn’t be included in major decisions?”

“Since when is a business trip a major decision?”

“Since I had no idea you were even going back to work.”

I had thought of telling him about the phone call, but was afraid our weakened relationship didn’t have the emotional muscle to withstand more damage. He would understand my wanting to go to New York, yes, but the dishonesty of what I’ve withheld all these years, never. And to part with this information now was too hard for me. At sixteen, I held onto it because it was all I had left. At almost twenty-nine, I wanted to keep it in my heart, where it had lived for so many years, untouched, a chapter in my life that was mine alone, a song in my soul that belonged to memory. I could not, not now, give that up.

The plane ride to New York was nerve-racking, marked by a ruthless turbulence that bobbed the plane up and down in a hysterical frenzy. The man next to me appeared not to notice while my fingernails dug into the armrest that divided us.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a little turbulence,” he said to me.

“I don’t really like to fly,” I replied, unsettled by the movements.

“This plane isn’t going down,” he assured me, although the captain had already asked the flight attendants to return to their seats and resume beverage service after the pocket of wicked air was behind us.

I said, “How can you be so sure?”

“Planes don’t go down because of turbulence. It’s nothing more than a bump in the road, like when you’re driving your car down a potholed street.”

“Well, it feels like a lot more than a bump in the road.”

“It’s an analogy,” he said. “If it brings you any consolation, and at the risk of being cliché, lightning doesn’t strike twice. My mother died in a plane crash. God wouldn’t do that to my family again.”

In a prophetic way of looking at fate, I drew some comfort from this, and for the first time in minutes, I permitted myself the freedom to relax between the diving motion of the plane’s insulated walls. Until a thought occurred to me and I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, really, that’s awful. I’m surprised you’d get on a plane.”

“I told you, lightning doesn’t strike twice.”

“Don’t you think the reason lightning won’t strike twice is that the same place isn’t there anymore? The plane your mother was on is gone.”  The insensitivity of my comment was glaring.

“Lady, I was just trying to make you feel better,” he said, clearly perturbed and turning to the book he was reading to signal the end of our conversation.

After twenty more minutes of terrifying dips and bumps, the pilot came on and told us we would be making our initial descent into Kennedy Airport and landing in about thirty minutes.

With the receding miles of air space, the plane decided to calm its queasy stomach. The skies were full and gray, like the way they look before a snowfall. I had read that the weather in the city was freezing, and I wasn’t looking forward to the chill. The magazine I had planned on reading was still strewn on my lap with Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell on the cover. Did anybody really care about their sham of a marriage, or was what bothered me that it reminded me too much of my own?

I counted the years in my head. She would be approximately twelve now.

Did she have his eyes? His smile? She was an enigma to me, this child, having passed in and out of my life like the coupling that had brought her to me.

You hear stories about kids who try drugs for the first time, only to find that the first, innocent taste would be the last. These poor souls had grappled all their lives with the idea of experimentation, patiently waiting, only to find that their one experience would cost them everything. That’s what happened to me that fateful summer night. We live in a world defined by instant gratification. The consequences of my actions never crossed my mind.

After having read
Forever
one hundred and sixteen times, being able to recite the back cover in my sleep, and resisting the gnawing desire to feel what Katherine had felt for Michael, I gave myself to Jonas Levy. It was as pure and sweet and perplexing as page eighty-five with one added component: I got pregnant. Where was
that
chapter in Judy’s book?

Jonas never knew he had a child.

I found out I was pregnant after he’d gone back to Boston, and by then, I didn’t want him to know. The last thing I needed was for him to think I was trapping him. Remember, he was practically engaged to another girl. As for me, I was as equally unprepared for a child. I was
sixteen
, in high school, with little to no understanding of how children operated. Besides, I had hoped that one day I could do it in the order that has always been of tradition: meet the man, get married, enjoy a few good years, and
then
have a baby. On the other hand, there was absolutely no possible way that I would have aborted Jonas’s baby. With two diametrically opposed scenarios tugging at me, I did what I thought was best. Mind you, this was a time of great strife and sadness for me. If my decisions were faulty, they were on account of the heavy load of grief I was lugging around with me. As much as I wanted to let go of that boy and that life, this child was all I had left of him. I could not destroy that too.

Jonas and I kissed Tuesday night on that mountaintop, but that’s not all we did. He took me in, all of me, devouring my mouth, exploring my lips with his tongue, probing deeper and deeper until I did, at some point, tell him to slow down.

Jonas was unnerved by this. What he wanted from me, I could feel in my fingers and toes. He didn’t slow down nor did he stop the rush that was exploding inside me. I couldn’t think of right or wrong. He might not have been mine to kiss, but when our lips found each other, there were no two people who belonged together more than we did.

“Jonas, stop. Look at me,” I said, pulling back, not too much, needing to stay close. “What do you want?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Yes, you can. Just say it.”

He was shaking. His hands were reaching for me.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I don’t want to stop.”

“Then don’t…”

“But…”

“No buts,” I said, stepping closer, until he had no choice but to take me into his arms. And that’s when I permitted myself to give into everything I’d fought so hard to keep under control: Jonas’s arms around me, Jonas’s lips kissing my hair, then my face, Jonas touching places I’d saved just for him, places that when he finally explored would let him know how badly I’d always wanted him. And it wasn’t like I was the only one who couldn’t hide what they were feeling. He was holding me so close, I could feel every inch of him against me. Now that I could finally have him, I wasn’t about to have him stop.