At once, your eyes got bright and you pulled a photo from the pile. You found the one you wanted and you held it out with pride.
It was a picture of me and your father, our faces big and smiling, pressed together and up close to the camera.
I remembered exactly when the photo was taken. The three of us were out for an early dinner. It was summer and it was still bright as midday along the coast. You must have been only three years old and we were teaching you how to use the camera. You were standing on your chair and leaning across the whole table and holding the camera up close to our faces.
You told us to smile and your father and I obliged and pressed our faces closer together for the photo.
You asked if we were ready to cut the figures out and your father told you where you could find the scissors, in the top drawer to the right on the kitchen cabinets. You stood up and skipped out of the room toward the kitchen, your pigtails flopping as you bounded.
I looked up at your father and smiled warmly, feeling nostalgic among all the wonderful family photos.
Your father looked straight into my eyes but didn’t smile back. He touched the tip of his finger to the space labeled Dad on the tree.
And then he asked the question I thought would never come. He asked if his face belonged there on that family tree in the space where the father was supposed to go.
His tone wasn’t challenging. It wasn’t angry or fierce or argumentative. Just calm and measured. Matter-of-fact.
It was as if that question had long, stretching arms that reached inside me and squeezed my insides and rattled them around.
I felt the air drain from my lungs. My heart bulge. My vision blur.
I thought perhaps I misheard, so I asked him to ask again. And he did. He asked if his photo belonged in that spot for the father. He didn’t ask more loudly or more firmly. No more challenging or angry or argumentative.
I stared back into your father’s eyes. A pressure emerged in my throat and behind my eyes. I knew he knew the answer to his own question.
I opened my mouth to respond but there were no words to say. I lifted my arm to touch him, but there was so much space between us. Your father’s gaze was still unwavering.
Before I could muster anything, you came skipping back into the room, still bouncing, your smile still stretched across your face. You rushed over to your father and handed him the scissors, which he accepted with a shockingly natural-looking smile.
Stunned, I kept my eyes locked on your father, who was now focused on moving the scissors along the contour of our faces in the photo. All at once, I interpreted my own life as hinging on this single fact that your father was not your biological father. A single fact that I had twisted into a single lie. A single lie that I had wrapped everything in our lives around.
I had surrounded the lie with a home built for three. With photos of a mom, a dad and their daughter outside on a summer evening tucked in a shoebox in their living room. With introductions to your new teachers with Parker as your father. With nodding along with my girlfriends as they said, “She has Parker’s nose,” or “That’s such a Parker thing,” while they watched you play. The more I wrapped and wound things around the lie, the further from the surface they were. But with that one question, that one look, your father had cut right to the center of it and unwound it all.
I felt afraid to move. I was afraid that any sudden motion would send the whole thing crashing down. Our whole life crashing down. I felt a tear form. Determined not to let it fall, I closed my eyes and inhaled. When I reopened them, you had his face at your cheek, kissing you. The image of my cut-out face next to your father’s cut-out face looked so strange decoupled from their necks and bodies. They looked so out of place floating there like that on the wood floor. The images were overlapping slightly, but it was so clear that they were separate. So clear that they were disjointed, detached, parted. I couldn’t bear to look at our faces like that and closed my eyes again.
Your father suggested that you go upstairs and wash up for dinner, like nothing had happened.
I opened my eyes again to your father organizing the pile of photos and replacing them into the shoebox. You were out of sight now.
All I could muster was an “I don’t know.”
Your father stayed silent without lifting his eyes from the pile of photos.
I asked how long he had known for. My voice was quivering.
Your father’s hands stopped moving now. He sighed and looked up at me.
He told me he had always known. He reminded me how many times he had been tested and of the medical impossibility of his fathering a child.
He looked back down at the photos and started rustling them around, apparently now too frazzled to make sense or order out of them.
I asked why he hadn’t said something sooner. I still needed to gasp to find the oxygen required to make words. He said there wouldn’t have been any point. And he assured me that he loved our life and that he loved you. He paused and swallowed. I thought he might say that he was leaving me, leaving us, but he just kept saying that he loved us.
He was always so gentle. So understanding. At times I had found it annoying, but it felt so perfect now.
I felt the tear fall down my cheek. When I brought my fingertips to my face to wipe it away, I noticed that everything was already wet and salty.
I apologized as many times as I could. As many times as he had said I love you, plus some more. It was now a deluge of tears down my face. They rippled down my cheeks and chin and dripped onto the floor in front of me. My hands were shaking and my insides were vibrating.
He reassured me again that he loved us. That was the truest truth of all. And that he would never leave us.
I reached my hand out for your father’s. He placed his hand on top of mine tenderly enough. His face remained stoic. Unemotional. I scooted up close next to your father and rested my head on his shoulder.
He told me that he had made peace with the circumstances on his own, but that he wanted you to know the real story someday. He wanted you to have a chance to make peace with it, too.
When he said that, everything paused. I don’t know why I expected a different outcome for this conversation. I looked up at your father, preparing to protest. I didn’t want your life to unravel. I didn’t want to rob you of your reality. Your history. Your identity.
And then your adorable, piercing voice rang out from the upstairs.
Your father straightened his back and I lifted my head up. Your father looked confident. He looked sure of what he wanted. What he needed. And I wasn’t in any position to set the terms.
I can’t forget what he said to me then. He said that the lie was worse than the facts. And he didn’t want lies in this house. He didn’t want lies mixed up with love. And I believed him to be correct about this.
I had truly never envisioned this conversation with your father. I had resolved so long ago not to tell him. And so many years after that decision, I was still sure I would never have to have it. But if I had pictured this conversation, it wouldn’t have gone like this. It wouldn’t have been so short. It wouldn’t have been so measured. So clarifying. It was rare that your father so firmly stood up for something he believed in.