“Yes,” she piped up quickly. “No problem.”
I followed Marc outside. It was another beautiful, balmy, fall Florida day. Without discussing it, we wandered across the street to the park. The place of our reunion. The place where he’d met his son for the first time.
I hadn’t even let him hold him. I hadn’t asked him if he wanted to.
By default, we sat on the same park bench. There were a hundred things I wanted to ask him. But I didn’t know how to start. Maybe the first one was the most obvious.
“You changed your hair back,” he said finally, to break the silence.
“I wanted to look like me again,” I replied. Then I cut to the chase. “Why are you here?”
“Do you want me to go?” he asked, his hands clasped together, his elbows on his knees.
“Not my place, really, to tell you.”
“Daniel, Danny, he’s good?” he asked.
“He’s great.” I beamed. That was always an easy question to answer. “Teething, which hurts my heart because I know it’s uncomfortable, but other than that, he’s a happy baby.”
Marc dropped his head and I had this crazy urge to run my hand over his back and tell him it was going to be okay. Only I didn’t know whatokaylooked like.
“Ash, I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how to quantify how fucked up our situation is, but he’s my son. I can’t walk away from that.”
It both thrilled and hurt me to hear him say that. That he was here, that he wasn’t going to walk away from us completely. For Daniel, though. Not for me.
“Okay,” I said slowly. Not sure how to navigate this, either. “What does that mean?”
“It means I want to know him. I want him to know me. It means I want to take responsibility for him.”
“He’s my responsibility,” I snapped. Then I had to take a deep breath, and release it. “Sorry, I get a little defensive when it comes to him because it’s only been me from the beginning. I had a hard time even letting Sandra hold him at first.”
“That makes sense. You were on the run, you were trying to protect him. Your instincts are probably not to let me in. I get that, too. You said we were poisoned and you didn’t want that to affect him. I don’t want that, either.”
I closed my eyes and I felt a little ashamed. “That wasn’t fair to you. I was freaked out. For obvious reasons. You knew what I’d done. I had this huge secret to tell you—”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked. “That last time you visited me in jail, after Evan had hit you. You said you had to protect yourself. You knew then, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “I’d just found out. I went to Evan to see if maybe we could reach some kind of deal. That he might consider letting me go if he knew I was carrying your baby. I ran into two teenagers leaving his apartment, talking about how much money they’d gotten for a blow job. That’s when I understood what he was hiding. I confronted him on it, he hit me, and I knew there would be no deal. I also knew I had a limited amount of time before he knew I was pregnant. I came to see you that last time, and, honestly, I didn’t know if I was going to tell you everything. That I was pregnant, what I was planning, what I’d been planning, but then I asked you…”
“You asked me if I loved you. And I said nothing.” he said.
“In that moment, I decided I couldn’t saddle you with one more burden,” I told him, trying to find a way to be as honest in this as I could. Because he deserved at least that much from me. “I was sitting there across from you in prison, knowing you were there because of me, and I couldn’t tell you I’d gotten pregnant because I hadn’t realized how long it took before the pill became fully effective. I couldn’t tell you, because of me, there was this other massive thing that was going to happen to change your life without you having any say in it. Again. I’d always planned to tell you what I was going to do to get free, but after that visit, I decided I was doing a more noble thing by not telling you.”
He nodded as he processed what I told him. “I want to know him, Ash.”
“Okay. Let’s do this. The bakery is closed on Mondays. I’ll give you my address. You can come by in the morning. Around nine is best, as he’s fully awake but not yet cranky. You can meet him and then we’ll talk about next steps.”
He nodded and handed over his phone. I plugged in my number and home address. With nothing left to say, I stood, and was about to walk away when his hand caught me around the wrist.
“You said we never had it easy or simple. But everything preventing us from having that, is gone now.”
I smiled sadly. “Except our memories. All the things we did to each other. Even when we thought we were doing it for each other. I don’t think that’s something we can erase.”
I tugged on my wrist, and, reluctantly, he let me go.
