“So how’s this,” he says instead. “I can’t tell you some things, but—you can ask me whatever you want.”
“Why didn’t she want me?”
The words come out of me faster than I can think them, so unflinching and so immediate that it feels like they’ve been coiled in me for years.
“Oh.” My dad blinks, momentarily stunned. It occurs to me that Heather probably walked him through everything I might ask, and that this wasn’t one that she prepared him for.
“I think, uh. She did want you. In the sense that she had you.” My dad is choosing what to say so carefully that I can tell he knows what it means to me. How it’ll slide under my skin and stay there, an invisible part that I’ll always feel even if I can’t see. “From what I understand, she didn’t necessarily want to be a mom.”
But even with the words settling in the air between us, they don’t quite land. I keep waiting for them to make me feel something—anger, maybe, or relief. Some way I can frame this, spin my own story to myself so I can finally have some concrete feeling about it. But I’m nearly seventeen years on the other side of her choice, and even knowing this, it feels like it’s too far back for me to reach.
“You knew her well?” I ask.
My dad’s throat bobs. “Yeah. I did.”
I try to imagine it: my dad and this woman as friends. Try to imagine the world the way it was before I existed, a world where my dad had his nose buried in a comp sci textbook but his heart tangled up in a world’s worth of drama. Try to imagine this girl who maybe loved to sing and had a soft spot for a boy with his own personalized goblet from the Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings. A time where one thing led to another that led to another that led to—well. Me.
But in my head, she can never really take shape. She’s Beth and she’s Farrah and she’s Steph, all of them and none of them at the same time. She’s like smoke, and I can’t hold on to her, even in my imagination.
“And she never wondered about me?” I can’t help but ask.
This, I can tell, Heather did prep him for. I can see it in the way his eyes go up and to the left like he’s trying to remember how he’s supposed to answer. But a few moments later he lets out another breath, and it’s clear that he’s just going to say it however best he can.
“She actually … for quite a few years … we were in touch about you.”
It takes every fiber in my overly talkative being not to interrupt. There’s so much I want to ask, but I’m afraid if I start asking that he’ll get overwhelmed and hold back.
“I sent her pictures. I emailed her about what you were up to. And—and you were right. She is a theater person. She loved that you were, too. We didn’t talk much about anything other than you, but I think it—I think it made her happy.”
It feels like I’m wringing my heart out, but I have to know. “And then what?”
“And then she—I suppose she asked me to stop.” He purses his lips, and I wonder who he’s thinking of in that moment—if he’s trying to explain it just for my sake, or hers, too. “I think it was painful for her. You’re—a lot like her, in some ways. And I think that became clear when you started to grow up.”
“In what ways?”
My dad smiles. “You sure didn’t get any of that gutsiness from me.”
That’s one truth I’ve always known. My dad may be a homebody, but I was born loud and I’ve stayed that way. And there were so many moments this summer I looked for that gutsiness outside of myself, tried to find it in someone else. In Beth’s way of bringing people together. In Farrah’s confidence. In Steph’s drive. But the gutsiness has never been the mystery; it’s just the surface of so many things about myself that I don’t fully understand.
It’s what is under it, what sets everything in motion—the tides of me that can become tidal waves in the blink of an eye. The way it feels sometimes like I’m holding myself so tight that I splinter like glass. The Millie Moods that get the better of me far more often than I can get the better of them, so fast and so full that I can’t explain where they come from, let alone how to stop them from coming.
And it’s only now, on the other side of everything I’ve done, that I understand what Teddy was getting at when he said he thought there was something else behind this, some reason I felt so compelled to find her in the first place. I wanted her to be able to explain this to me. I wanted someone to understand. Because for all the times my dad has tried, for all the times he’s forgiven me for it—for all the times like this moment right now—I don’t know if he ever will.
Or maybe he does. If he really did know my mom as well as he says he did. I want to ask, trying to figure out how, but my dad speaks before I can.
“In case it wasn’t clear—I wanted you.” He says it very slowly, like he wants this to be the part of the conversation I remember most. “I didn’t know about you until you were already here, but—I did.”
What my dad doesn’t understand is that I don’t need to remember this, because I’ve always known it. It goes back further than I do. I can’t remember the first time he told me about my mom, but I do remember the feeling of it, because it’s never changed—a feeling that I was supposed to be exactly where I was. That I’ve always been ridiculously, unequivocally, infinitely loved.
I smile so he knows I’m teasing. “You were twenty years old, Dad. You didn’t want a kid.”
“’Course not. I didn’t want any old kid,” he says, knocking his shoulder into mine. “But you, yeah. You, I did.”
This time the asking doesn’t seem as scary. “Because you loved my mom?”
“I still do. I always will,” he says. “She gave me you.”
I want to pull a face and tweak him the way I usually do when he gets overly sentimental. But it catches me by surprise. Not the sentiment, but how unhesitatingly he says it.
He shakes his head. “But that’s not why I wanted you. I wish I could explain it. Maybe one day if you have kids of your own, it’ll make sense. But she handed you over to me and you just scrunched your face at me and screamed, and I knew you were mine.”
I laugh out loud, making him jump. “That’s—that’s a terrible story, Dad.”
He scratches the back of his neck, sheepish. “Is it? I don’t know. You’re the storyteller, not me.” He backpedals, then smiles ruefully to himself like he’s there again. A kid with a kid. “It’s just—I heard that little wail and it was like you were mad at me for taking so long. Like we’d both been waiting to meet each other and you were giving me a piece of your mind.”
Something catches in my throat, then, because I know that feeling. That crying-in-the-car-seat-after-kindergarten, choking-up-after-a-long-business-trip kind of feeling. There are some things, maybe, he does understand. Things he understood long before I did myself.
And just like that, there’s a little voice in my head saying not to go to Madison. It’s not my dad’s. It’s not Oliver’s, or Teddy’s, or even Georgie Check’s. It sounds an awful lot like mine.