33. Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mom got a room with two queens and an ocean view, but I stare out the window without seeing anything. She perches on the side of the bed furthest from the window. I climb onto the other bed and pull my knees against my chest, needing the warmth and comfort of folding myself up small.
“Why did you tell me he was my sperm donor?” I start with the most pressing question on my mind.
“I didn’t.”
I’m about to argue with her when I realize she’s right. She didn’t. But she let me assume.
“I know it’s splitting hairs at this point,” she says. “But it’s important to me that you know I didn’t lie to you about that.”
“But you did lie about knowing who my dad was.” I say it with a calm I’m not sure I understand, but it’s true and deep.
She gives a slow nod. “Yeah. Yes. I did.”
“This is where you tell me why,” I prompt her when she falls quiet.
She’s looked and acted exhausted since she got here, but now she gets up, bristling with the restless energy I’m so used to and crosses to the window. “Tell you why,” she repeats. Her eyes and voice are far away. She twitches the gauzy curtain back and studies the water. “The answer is simple, but it’s not easy.”
“I’ve driven three thousand miles looking for information when it sounds like you had what I wanted this whole time.” My words are quiet. The anger has drained out of me. After David’s cold words in the conference room, the one thing I realize for sure is that Mom would never try to hurt me. “You can tell me, Mom. I think I’m going to be okay with whatever you have to say after meeting him.”
“I met David in grad school.”
“Grad school?” That’s a surprise. She has her college diploma on the wall in her home office, a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from CU Boulder. But she never mentioned grad school. My whole life she’s been in real estate, and that doesn’t require a degree.
“Grad school,” she repeats. “Yeah. That was a lifetime ago.” She lets the curtain drop and drifts over to perch on the armchair in the corner. “I was going for a master’s in public administration. I wanted to work in city planning.”
Gobsmacked. An English lady used that term on Leila’s Truth or Dare to describe how she felt after going into labor when she didn’t know she was pregnant. It’s the only word I can think of to describe the utter disconnect between the life Mom lives now and this former life plan.
“Anyway, he was doing his master’s in clinical psych at the University of Denver, and we met at a friend’s apartment. We’d been dating for about a year when I got pregnant. I was on birth control, but I’d been taking an herbal supplement to help manage some grad school stress. Turns out that in rare cases, it can cause birth control to fail.”
Weirdly, the one thing I’d really liked about believing she’d used a sperm donor is that it took away the part of my origin story where I was an accident, like in the one-night-stand version. Now it’s back. I’m surprised it hurts me when it’s the story I’ve lived my whole life.
“Kendall.” Her voice is quiet. “Look at me. You were unplanned but always wanted.”
“Only by you,” I say. David Lombard’s attitude in the conference room made it clear that this is where the story is going.
“By me,” she says firmly, then, “but not David. I’m sure every girl who gets pregnant by a guy who doesn’t want the baby feels rejection, but it was definitely worse because I knew he was selling his sperm to the fertility center. So there was this stark contrast between a guy who would help all kinds of other families. But not his own.”
“Why not?”
She sighs. “He had ambitions. Didn’t want the distraction of fatherhood while he finished his coursework. He made it clear that he wouldn’t be involved. Then he gave me money and the number to a clinic.” Mom reaches for my hand and holds it, running her thumb over my knuckles, back and forth while she disappears into a memory. Finally, she picks up the thread of the story again. “I broke it off with him, told him I was getting an abortion and leaving my grad program because I was out of money anyway. I moved in with your aunt Nora until I had you.”
“Why not tell me all this when I started asking more questions about him?”
“Would you rather have grown up believing you had a father who never knew about you or knowing you had one who knew about you but wanted nothing to do with you?” She says the words so softly I almost can’t hear her, but there’s no way to cushion a blow like that. “I chose to tell you a story where you were never rejected. Just a happy surprise.”
I collapse on my back and stare at the ceiling. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had so many questions if I’d known he didn’t want me.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But I doubt it. You’re both driven to understand people. I knew when the DNA tests came out a few years ago that someday you would take one. I thought I had a few more years before you did it. A few more years to break the news. Find the words to ease you in.”
I lay for a long time, staring at the ceiling, turning this over and over. Finally, I drag myself upright. “There’s no way to ease someone into this.”
She sighs. “I know. But honey, I grew up with a drunk father, and when he and my mom split, she worked herself to an early death. He never came around, never did right by us. And I always felt the weight of what he was supposed to do if he cared. Every birthday he missed, every child support payment he didn’t make, it always underlined how little I mattered. I couldn’t do that to you.”
I’d always known the broad outlines of this story. Mom said I never met her father, and he died in a car accident when I was three. I had a couple of vague memories of my grandma, but she’d died of diabetes complications when I was seven.
Mom stands and walks to my bed, sitting gingerly on the side of it, like she’s not sure of her welcome. “I tried to give you so much more than I had. I wanted to save you from feeling as unwanted as I always did. I moved you out of Denver so there would never be a chance we’d run into him, and I tried to build a life that put you in the center of it. And somehow—” A crack runs through her voice and she stops, waiting for the emotion to subside. She’s always hated crying as much as I do. “Somehow you’re still sitting here, feeling like you were never wanted.”
I hear sorrow. For me, not herself. And that’s when the truth dawns, clear as the California blue sky through the window.
Mom has been trying to protect me this whole time, not her secrets.
I scoot over to her edge of the bed and swing my legs down beside hers. “I don’t feel unwanted. I was wanted by the parent who matters.”
She turns her head to meet my eyes, hers warring between hope and fear. “From the moment I found out about you, you were loved.”
“I know.” I slide my arms around her, and she nestles her head into my shoulder. I wouldn’t have imagined during the long drive through the night that this is where I’d be: comforting my mother after finally meeting my father. But this is exactly where I want to be.
The warm splash of a tear hits my collarbone and she sniffs. And then I do too.
We sit and hold each other and cry.