“Holy Christ,” I say. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough.”
“Nice fucking rock. I take it the world’s perfect couple is back together again?”
“That’s not why I came here,” Laura says. “I saw the story about your uncle on the news, and I had to find you.” She looks over my shoulder and waves. “Hi, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”
Mom waves back. “Good to see you, Laura. Your parents doing well?”
“Yes, thanks. They send their regards.”
“Tell them I—”
“Can we cut the crap?” I interject. “They’re fine, you’re fine, Ian’s fine, we’re all fucking fine. Laura, why the hell are you here? And since when did you and my mom get so chummy?”
“Since forever,” Laura says.
“Perfect,” I say.
“Laura,” Mom says. “It’s time.”
“I know it is, Debbie.”
“Time for what?” I ask.
Laura pulls up a chair, offering it to me. “Hank, with all due respect, I’m going to need you to sit down and shut up for a few minutes.”
I sit down. My hold on the shut up part of the equation is precarious at best.
“You remember the day I told you I had decided to get an abortion?”
“How could I not? You said that—”
“It was a rhetorical question. Please, let me talk.”
I grind my teeth, nodding.
Laura continues. “You said, in no uncertain terms, that you were opposed to the abortion. I never felt so alone. My parents would’ve disowned me if they found out. I turned to the one person who I knew would listen to me with an open mind and an open heart.”
“You didn’t,” I say, running my fingers through my hair and pulling it straight up in two big horns. Debbie and Laura conspiring to just cook a fucking omelet scares me. This level of collusion and subterfuge is beyond comprehension.
“I did.” Laura looks at my mother. “I called my high school guidance counselor.”
“What the fuck?”
Mom reaches over and touches my knee. “Let her talk, Hank.”
“Your Mom and I met for lunch,” Laura says. “It was the day after you left for Hoosier Boys State. We talked for three hours. We talked about everything—you, me, us, motherhood, fatherhood, life. Debbie talked about her struggles to get pregnant, about her miscarriages, about her hopes for your future. As we talked, I saw in Debbie someone whose desperation to be a mother was matched by my desperation to not be one. It affirmed all the reasons I didn’t want to have this baby, and your mom agreed to help me out with my situation.”
I stand up, shaking my head. I turn in a half-sprint toward the door.
Mom’s voice chases me down. “Henry David, where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not.”
I turn to face the room again. “What are you going to do if I leave, Mom? Abort another one of my kids behind my back?”
“Son, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t?”
“No, you don’t. I didn’t pay for any abortion. I paid to help Laura carry the baby to term.”
“Excuse me?” I say.
“It’s true,” Laura says. “I never got the abortion.”
I turn from my mother to Laura. This isn’t a fair fight. “So you lied to me?”
“Your mother talked me out of it. When I got to Bucknell, she set up a checking account that helped me pay for some of my medical expenses, for which I’ve since paid her back plus interest. Between Debbie’s help and an assistantship Ian got me, I managed to keep my head above water until the baby was born in February.”
“When in February?”
“The fourteenth, on Valentine’s Day.”
“So the baby was born a year after we told each other we loved—”
“Yes.” Laura brushes the memory under the rug like an unsightly pile of dust.
The puzzle pieces start coming together. “Ian was there for the birth.”
“Yes,” Laura says.
“And that’s how you two became so close?”
“Obviously.”
“Laura, nothing is fucking obvious with you.”
“You had to have suspected, Hank. What about all those photos I sent you? I wasn’t exactly wasting away. I didn’t even wear padding when I dressed up as Santa Claus.”
“I just thought you were eating a lot of turkey Manhattan.”
“Turkey Manhattan?”
“You know, starchy foods, the freshman fifteen. Oh fuck it, never mind.” I pull on my hair again. I clasp my hands behind my head, bending my elbows toward my face. “So let me see if I got this all straight. My mother, my girlfriend, and my girlfriend’s future husband conspired to fake an abortion, hide my pregnant girlfriend in Pennsylvania, and give my child up for adoption without telling me about it. Is that about it in a nutshell?”
Laura shakes her head. “There’s more.”
“What?”
She looks at my mother. “Debbie?”
Mom nods. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Holy crap, Mom,” I say. “Who knows what’s going to come out of your mouth. Are you comfortable? Can I get you some narcotics?”
“Just listen, son. Just listen.”
“Oh, I’m all ears.”
“You remember what happened after my second miscarriage?”
“I remember it being better than your first one.”
“Better? How so?”
“Dad was better about it. You were in bed for a long time—almost four weeks if I remember right—but Dad was a good nurse the second time around.”
“Yes, your father was a good nurse, and yes, I was in bed for a while. I was in a lot of physical pain after the emergency hysterectomy.”
“Come again?”
“Hysterectomy,” Mom says. “The doctors removed my uterus right after I miscarried the twins. You and Jeanine just assumed I was recovering from the miscarriage, and your father and I didn’t go out of our way to correct you. When we were trying to decide when and how to break the news to all of you, Laura called me. We had our talk, and I offered to help her.”
“Help her?” I say.
“As Laura said, it was decided she would carry the baby to term, with me helping to pick up her medical and living expenses.”
“Help her?”
“The twenty-year reunion at Notre Dame was a convenient excuse. Dad went up to South Bend, while I picked up the baby in Pennsylvania. We handled everything through a private adoption agency. It was all very discreet.”
This is the type of revelation reserved for Shakespearian tragedies or bad Mexican soap operas. This is the implausible twist in our hero’s story. This is the zinger Maury Povich keeps in his pocket just so everybody can watch two tattooed bald dudes with multiple piercings throw haymakers at one another. Only I can’t punch my mother.
“No, Mom.” I bury my hands in my face. “No, no, no.”
Jack isn’t my brother.
Jack is my fucking son.
Laura pulls her chair close to mine. She puts her arm around me. “Please, Hank. You have to believe this was the best decision for all of us.”
“But you were as big as a house,” I say to my mother. “You looked…”
“Pregnant?” Mom says.
“Well, yeah.”
“Chalk it up to some conscious overeating and a prosthetic stomach.”
I raise my head from my hands, teary-eyed and red-faced. “And Dad, he was in on this the whole time?”
“Not the whole time. Your father had to be convinced. He and I had a bit of a falling out after my second miscarriage.”
“But I thought you two seemed to deal with the second one better than the first.”
“We were very good liars, Hank. When my milk came in after the second miscarriage, I started pumping it without telling your father. I couldn’t let go of my baby.”
“And that’s how you could still breastfeed, Jack?”
“Yes.”
“Mom, that is sick.”
“That was your father’s initial reaction when he caught me in the nursery at three a.m. two weeks after my miscarriage singing nursery rhymes to myself with suction cups hanging off my lactating breasts.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“Hank, wet nurses provide their breast milk to total strangers. Jack is our flesh and blood.”
“You mean my flesh and blood.”
“No, I mean ours,” Mom says. “Once I convinced your father we were sustaining Jack’s life as a memorial to the twins, he was all in. Like me, like Laura, he felt we were doing the right thing. He felt as long as Jack was happy and healthy under our roof, there was plenty of time to set the record straight once you had a job and a life of your own.”
“Dad was all in?”
“Yes, all in.”
“So in the end, Dad wasn’t a reluctant accomplice at all?”
“Hardly,” Mom says, hesitation in her voice. “The prosthetic stomach was…well, it was his idea. He gave me his own empathy belly from our childbirth classes.”
“Isn’t that an ironic fist up the ass?” I look up at the ceiling, my right hand pointing to the sky as if I’m trying to start a fight with my father, if not the Almighty Himself. “Here I’ve been heartbroken for the last goddamn year about Jack living his life without you, Pops, and it turns out his dad is still fucking alive!”
I glance at Laura. “And Ian, he knows about all of this?”
“He knows my high school sweetheart got me pregnant. He knows I put the baby up for adoption and that I never told the father about the baby.”
“But he doesn’t know the part about the baby being adopted by his grandmother who faked a pregnancy with her husband’s empathy belly and is now posing as the baby’s mother, or the part about the baby’s brother being his unsuspecting father?”
“He will.”
“When?”
“Someday, Hank. And as Ian’s fiancée, it’s my responsibility to tell him.”
I raise my hand, mocking her. “Can someone buzz the nurse for an extra bedpan, because I’m about to fucking throw up. I assume you haven’t told Ian about our romp in the sheets this spring, either.”
Mom looks at Laura, curious.
“You didn’t tell him, did you?” I say.
“Hank, I…” Laura trails off, flustered.
In truth, my allusion is half-hearted, if that. Our assignation now seems a hundred years away, displaced from this moment, innocent when juxtaposed with the actions of the two women in this world who’ve simultaneously loved and hurt me the most.
“Son, I realize this is a lot to take in.”
“You think, Mom?” I jump out of my chair, pulling on my hair. “I’m still your son, right? I’m not like a test tube clone of Dad you’ve raised in an incubator in the hopes I will one day be either the conductor of the New York Philharmonic or the CEO of Oldsmobile?”
“You’re my firstborn, Hank. With John gone, you’re my life now.”
“Cue the tiny motherfucking violins.”
“What’s done is done,” Laura says, “and all we can say is we’re sorry.”
“That doesn’t fix this,” I say.
“Then what else do you want from us?”
“I want nothing from you, absolutely fucking nothing. My mother is my mother. She’s the only parent I got left, so I don’t have any real choice but to forgive her. But you, Laura, can stay out of my way for the next sixty or seventy years.”
“You oblivious fucking asshole!” Laura runs across the room. She grabs a handful of my shirt and shoves me into a wall with her right forearm. Our faces are inches apart. “You think this was easy for me to do? Remember the last night we were together, when you found that picture of me, you, and Jack?”
“Vaguely.”
“Fuck off, Hank. You think I’d really carry a framed picture of you and your brother around just to remind myself about a vacation?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Newsflash, Hank. You’re not that fucking fun.”
“I’m no Ian, obviously.”
“Please, don’t do this.” Laura’s grip on my shirt loosens. She drops to her knees, sobbing. “I’m Jack’s mother, and he can never know. You see him almost every day. You were there when he said his first words, when he took his first steps. In his four years on this earth I have read my son one bedtime story and rocked him to sleep one time.”
My world is in rewind. Like an old reel-to-reel tape player I’m thrown back through the course of time to events once innocent, now portentous. Laura’s weight gain. The almost too-perfect timing of Mom’s pregnancy. The picture on the nightstand.
Disney World.
“That last night of our vacation?” I ask, kneeling down beside Laura.
“Yes, that last night in Disney,” Laura says. “Do you know how many times I’ve replayed that night in my head? How many times I’ve cried myself to sleep because I can’t imagine life without this one particular boy and because picturing him in the arms of another mother breaks my heart…over and over again.”
The tears are now streaming down my face, but I don’t even try to wipe them off. I frame Laura’s face with my hands. I kiss her on the forehead, just as I did the day of Dad’s funeral. “I’m sorry,” I say.
Laura recognizes the moment. She remembers. “I love him, too, Hank.”
I run my hands through her hair. “You were always Jack’s favorite.”