A Room Stained with Shadow

She waited until Jake had a scheduled day off. He spent the morning, followed by an afternoon of drinking, smoking, and gaming with Eric. When she casually dropped the information that her dad was coming to town to take them out to dinner, he blew her off and told her to go without him. The plan worked.

Leo did not want Jake with her tonight. She wanted to celebrate earning her graduate equivalent degree, tantamount to a high school diploma, without him. There was a disconnect here, one she felt on a cellular level. Why could she share this accomplishment with her father but not her husband?

In the marriage’s infancy, Leo tried to express what she was feeling and what she wanted. She had learned from her sessions with Dr. Baker that she had a right to be heard and validated. And after all, she thought, sharing was what married people were supposed to do. But Jake had neither been willing, nor was he empathetic. He accused her of being ungrateful. He took her words as a personal attack. And he responded to the perceived criticism with impatient vitriol. He whined, “I don’t want an overly sensitive, emotionally immature wife. No wonder your mama left you. You ain’t nothing but a crybaby.” So, Leo stopped. She internalized thought and emotion and soldiered on doing the best she could in her marriage, trying to ignore the rising anxiety caused by Jake’s constant interrupting, put-downs, and reprimands when she failed to get things right. That was why Leo told her dad to pick her up in the parking lot and not at the apartment. She would tell him Jake wasn’t feeling well and was in bed sleeping.

She waited by the window, looking for her dad’s arrival through a broken blind. A new Call of Duty, The World at War, had just come out. This time, Jake and Eric were American soldiers fighting the Japanese. They were animatedly talking through headsets to the rest of their team, part of a thriving multiplayer community, a fantasy world Leo had known nothing about but had been introduced to the day she moved in with Jake. She could see Jake sight an enemy climbing over a wall; he rapidly sorted through his available flame throwers, rocket launchers, and an assortment of guns before he settled on a hand grenade and hurled the weapon across the flat screen. When Jake and Eric saw the impact, the profusion of blood from a severed limb, they shrieked with delight. And when Leo saw the lights of her father’s patched and battered black Honda pull into the complex, she didn’t say a word as she slipped away.

****

“I’m sorry Jake had to miss this celebration.” He took a bite of his limoncello cream torte and smiled. “It’s an accomplishment, Leo. I am proud of you.”

At the sound of Jake’s name, she no longer felt like finishing her piece of chocolate tower truffle cake. Since the wedding, Leo had become adept at keeping all other aspects of her life separate from the time she spent at the apartment with Jake. Compartmentalizing had become easy until reminders were injected, puncturing nails snagged in tires. She shrugged.

Her father looked at her across the linen tablecloth. “Your determination reminds me of your mother.”

Leo couldn’t help herself; she let her fork drop, clattering onto the china. “You’ve got to be joking. Does Emily have determination? I don’t think so. The only thing she was determined to do was to walk away from her kid and a man who wanted to marry her.”

Joseph took a deliberate pause before pushing back his empty dessert plate and responding in a low, measured, but sympathetic voice, “That’s not fair, Leo. You don’t know what she went through. There’s more to the story.”

****

After dinner, as they strolled along the paved Riverwalk, which hugged the swiftly moving Arkansas River, Joseph’s voice rose and fell with the night air. “Your mother was determined. At first, Emily was determined to keep her parents from finding out about you and determined to keep you alive. Then after you were born, she was determined to keep the two of us, you and me, together.”

As he told Leo the story, he was transported to an exact moment seared into memory, a heart imprint that happened the second night he slipped into his nascent family’s room on the postpartum ward. Long after her parents left, he crept in. He could see Emily’s tear-streaked, pale face, almost translucent from the blood loss of childbirth. And he could hear absolute despair in her voice.

“They are forcing me to give her up for adoption, a closed adoption so that I can never know where she is, never ask questions or see pictures of her growing up. My parents promised a huge sum of money to the adoption agency to expedite the process.”

Joseph could feel the panic rising as he held his daughter closer to him. Tomorrow, Emily was scheduled for discharge. Was this the last night they would be together as a family? The room started to turn. Orientation was difficult.

“Joseph?” Her voice sounded faint, distant, a diminishing form of echolocation. Emily touched his cheek, then placed her hands on the side of his face, bringing the floating, hazy pieces back into focus. She grazed him gently on his lips before bending to kiss their daughter. “I’m not going to let this happen.” Her voice was resolute. Her eyes steadied him, and he exhaled. She pulled out the half-filled birth certificate worksheet. “I have a plan.” Then she explained.

When the adoption agency representative met with her the following day, Emily sent her parents to the cafeteria, stating this was hard enough for her that she didn’t want them hovering around as she signed the papers. They agreed, all too eager to put this horrid chapter behind them and to have their daughter back on her life’s projected course.

“It’s a closed adoption, which means my parents can never find out where she went, right?”

The agent pleasantly nodded, smoothed down her pencil skirt, reached into her briefcase for her gold-coated rollerball pen, and flatly stated, “That also means you will never know who adopted her or what state or country she is in. Now let’s get the paperwork started.”

Standing up to authority figures was not something Emily had ever done. She swallowed, then unwaveringly stood before the bassinet where her daughter was sleeping. “For the adoption to take place, I have to indicate on the birth certificate that the father is unknown.” The director nodded impatiently, and Emily continued, “But that would be a lie. As far as my parents are concerned, I never found the name of the boy I slept with. They think our encounter was a lapse of judgment at a party where alcohol was involved. They thought I never saw him again, that maybe he was from another town. What they do not know, and will never know, is twofold. One, is his name. And two, I am in love with this boy.”

The smug look on the representative’s face disintegrated and was replaced by incredulity. She stammered and was about to speak when Emily interjected, “Do you want your organization to get the donation my parents guaranteed once this adoption happens?” Afraid of losing ground, the representative blinked her eyes. “I thought so. Let me tell you how we’ll do this. The signed birth certificate will be completed after I am discharged. Joseph Lightfoot will be listed as the father of my baby, and I am granting him full custody. Your agency will facilitate this and do whatever is necessary to ensure the documentation is legally binding. My parents will never know Joseph’s name, our daughter’s name, or the details of this transaction. After all, as you have assured us countless times, this is the basis of a closed adoption. We do everything this way, and your agency gets the donation. If my parents find out what I have done, they will be so mad that you can kiss the money goodbye. But know this, no matter what, Joseph is keeping his daughter. Understood?”

When Emily’s parents returned, with coffee mugs in hand, the adoption broker indicated the paperwork was complete, the closed adoption was in progress, and the adoptive family would come to the hospital to retrieve the infant sometime over the next few days. That afternoon, Emily was discharged, and twenty-four hours later, after Joseph and Paul scrambled to ready their house for a newborn, Joseph took his daughter, Leotie Rose Lightfoot, home.

Joseph looked at his daughter as they walked. The path’s nighttime light illuminated tears. “But, Dad, why? Why, after she did all that for us in the hospital and kept us carefully guarded, why, after three years, would she just up and leave? Do you think there was another man?”

He looked toward the river as if answers might arise from its fluid depths. “No. At least, I don’t think so. I only know for sure what the letter said. Emily was worn down by her parents, who had been pressuring her to go to college out of state for years. They feared she would run into me again and return to me. Little did they know she never left. Emily loved her parents and always wanted to please them, but they made her life difficult with constant pressure and high expectations. She could never assert herself or stand up to them. It’s not a character flaw. It’s just part of who she was. Leo, please forgive her for this.”

What Joseph knew, which he didn’t share with his daughter, was that somewhere along the way, Emily’s intense passion for him, the luminous light that had brought the two of them together, encompassed them, insulated them, had dimmed. After Leo’s birth, they both were so focused on their shared infant and the need to maintain secrecy that, at first, Joseph did not notice.

One late winter afternoon, Leo had fallen asleep early. Emily kissed her forehead and moved toward the back door, though she wouldn’t be expected home for another hour. As threadbare sunlight struggled to infiltrate filmy curtains, he reached for her to pull her into an embrace. The room was stained with shadow. She looked at him sadly and gently pulled away. At that moment, he knew. He realized the life force of Emily, the shooting star that had streaked across the night sky of his life with blinding brilliance, was already moving on, the trail of phosphorescence in her wake, vaporizing high in the earth’s upper atmosphere.

When Joseph pulled in front of Leo and Jake’s apartment, he got out of the car to hug his daughter. “It’s a lot to unpack, I know. But there’s something else I want to tell you.”

Leo looked at him. Exhaustion etched around her eyes, a dark liner of charcoal. “Don't tell me you know where she is? That she was my high school English teacher, that she’s living in the apartment above me?” She gave a contrived laugh.

Joseph looked bemused. “No, nothing like that. Emily left, I never heard from her again, and to this date, I don’t know where she is.”

Leo nodded. “Okay then, does what you want to share with me have anything to do with Emily?” He shook his head. “Then, Dad,”—she sighed—“can it wait?”

“Of course.” He gave her a quick kiss. “Tell Jake I hope he’s feeling better.” Joseph watched her walk through the door. He would not leave until he was sure she was safely inside until she was with her husband.