Epilogue
Eric
The only problem that married life presents to me so far is the trouble I've had finding a replacement assistant.
I've gone through at least half a dozen in the three years that I have been married. It seems like there's not a single professional in the entire city who can do what Rebecca once did for me.
“I'm going to have to hire a second one,” I say.
“What?” Rebecca asks, looking up.
She’s topping off my cup of coffee, her long hair glowing in the summer sun that shines through the French doors of our large dining room. At the other end of the table, her beaten-up laptop rests next to her own cup of coffee and a plate of untouched pancakes.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask, nodding to her neglected breakfast.
She grimaces.
“It just…doesn’t seem appetizing this morning,” she replies. “Maybe Loren will eat them.”
Loren.
Our seven year-old daughter, officially adopted last year into our family. The social workers warned us that she’s been through a lot, that there’s a chance Loren would never feel totally at home in our house due to the instability of her life so far.
But Rebecca and I have been working at it hard.
Every single day. When Loren was first placed in our home, Rebecca quit her job and I took a leave of absence for six months, the longest I’ve ever been able to step away from work.
We spent every day with Loren, our soon-to-be adopted daughter, bonding with her and slowly building up her trust in us.
In our home, in our family, in our ability to be dependable, reliable, and routine.
Routine is my middle name.
After those six months, our daughter was a completely different child. No longer fearful and nonverbal. No. She was a thriving, happy little girl. The social worker and her child therapist can hardly believe the progress she made in her first few months, and that progress has only grown since then.
It’s a proud moment for me, Loren’s dad, when we’re at the grocery store and she’s not afraid to let go of my hand, exploring the toy aisle without looking back at me to make sure I’m still there.
It means that she trusts me. That I’ve proven to her that I’ll be the man that she needs me to be, the dad that she needs.
Being a father and a husband means more to me than I ever thought it could. More than work. More than my own life itself. I would do anything for my girls, and they know it.
“I’ve been feeling so awful,” my wife continues, going back to her seat at the table and pushing the plate of pancakes away from herself as though they’re too repulsive to look at. “Tired and nauseated and…what? Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something in my hair?”
She pats her hair, frowning at me.
I shake my head and inhale deeply.
“You don’t think you’re…” I drift off, unwilling to say the word pregnant.
As much as we tried after we got married, the double pink lines on the test never materialized.
It was hard at first, even if we both said we were okay with never having a biological child.
It’s not the sort of pain that you can really prepare yourself for, no matter how ready you believe you are to hear disappointing news.
After a year of trying, we decided to stop. The doctor appointments, the medication…it was wearing us both down. And at the same time, we’d started the adoption process and were introduced to the most special little girl we’d ever met.
When we met Loren, we realized that there was more to parenthood than DNA. And that there are a lot of children out there who don’t have a permanent home, nobody to call their mom and dad.
But even after all of this time, I know it still pains Rebecca to talk about her fertility. We don’t discuss it.
We also don’t use birth control. Knowing that we have greater odds of being struck by lightning three times, we see no need for it. Condoms, the pill…what’s the use? There’s no point…right?
Rebecca looks at me with recognition in her eyes, tinged with sadness.
“Not possible,” she replies.
“But you’ve been sick in the mornings?” I ask.
“Well…yeah,” she says. “Probably a stomach bug. But then the fatigue…tender breasts…”
“When was your period due?”
“It’s irregular,” she replies, shaking her head again as though mentally pushing away the idea of pregnancy. “It’s never really ‘due’ in that way. You know that.”
“Still,” I say, looking beyond her, out the windows of the French doors that lead to our back patio, where Loren is drawing on the concrete with chalk. Recently she’s been obsessed with writing our names. Mama. Daddy. Loren. Mama. Daddy. Loren.
Over and over again, in pastels and fluorescents picked from her mega-box of 64 colors. Her handwriting is getting pretty good, too. Soon it’ll be better than my own sloppy chicken scratch.
“If you’re pregnant, we’ll need to get you to the doctor early for monitoring,” I continue, looking back at Rebecca. “That’s my concern. You’d be high risk. The earlier, the better. That’s what the doctor said.”
“There’s no way I’m pregnant, though,” she says, her voice hardening. “How could I be? We tried and tried, with all of the medicine and…”
My jaw clenches, remembering all of the disappointed hopes, the many months of taking pregnancy tests only for the night to end with my wife crying into my chest, with me holding her tightly, wishing that I could make her pain go away.
Do I really want to ask her to take a pregnancy test, knowing the toll that it takes on her?
“You’re worried,” Rebecca sighs.
“I am.”
“I’ll take a test,” she volunteers, her eyes sad. “But you have to read it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be told it’s negative. I’ll just…pee on a stick and leave it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Two pink lines, bright and clear, appear nearly as fast as my wife flees the bathroom, unwilling to stay a second longer than she has to.
My whole body freezes when I see the positive test. I read the box’s instructions again, even though I know the directions to a pregnancy test very well by now. My wife has taken dozens of them. I could recite the step by step instructions printed on the side of the pink box in my sleep.
Still, I read the directions two more times just to make absolutely sure. Telling Rebecca she’s pregnant only for it to turn out to be a mistake would be an awful thing to put her through, after all that we’ve already been through.
When I exit the bathroom, she’s not in our master bedroom. I find her downstairs on our back patio, drawing with Loren.
Mama. Daddy. Loren.
I swallow hard, imagining a fourth name drawn on the concrete, one year from now. Will it be a girl or a boy?
Rebecca looks up at me, her eyes wary. I come to her, pulling her up to me and embracing her tightly.
“It’s positive?” She whispers against my chest.
“It’s positive,” I reply, kissing her on the head. “Should we tell Loren?”
“Not yet,” she says. “I want to be sure…”
“Those lines are solid pink, Beck,” I say.
“I won’t believe it until I see a heartbeat on the screen,” she says, shaking her head. “I just…I don’t want to…”
I smooth her hair down and kiss her again.
I know what she means. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up.
With the many warnings and caveats that the doctor gave us alongside her diagnosis, we both know that a positive pregnancy test is only the beginning.
The beginning of an adventure, one that holds excitement but also some frightening unknowns.
I know that it’s an adventure we’ll have together, though. And whatever comes next, I’ll be ready to weather the storm with her, to be the rock that she needs to make it through to the other side.
That’s my duty.
Rebecca
“He’s like me.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I say, frowning at my husband. We’re standing outside the door of Luke’s preschool classroom.
The parent-teacher conference went well. Luke knows his letters, his numbers…and the names and characteristics of every single Star Wars character, even the ones from the spin-offs.
I’m a proud mom today.
Eric holds our son outside of the classroom. Luke looks like he’s about to fall asleep any second now, his head of thick brown hair laying on my husband’s shoulder. I love to see them like this. Eric is an incredible father, better than I could have even imagined.
Warm, kind, always ready with a hug or a band-aid whenever needed. Not a robot in the least. He’s also protective and, believe it or not, the big worrier out of the two of us.
A frown creases his brow as we walk out of the school and to our car.
“It’s not a bad thing,” he says at last. “Just…I know what I went through at his age. I don’t want him to deal with all of that.”
“Things are better now than they were when you were growing up,” I remind him. “It’s not treated like a bad thing anymore. It’s a gift, really. Every child is unique. And that’s okay.”
Eric nods but he doesn’t seem convinced.
“He’s happy,” I say to him. “Happy and smart, too.”
“I never questioned that,” he replies quietly. “He’s smart as hell. Terrifyingly smart, actually.”
I grin.
“But I want him to have friends,” he continues. “I want him to be able to bond with people…”
“The teacher says he has friends,” I remind him. “He plays with Julio at recess, remember? With the dinosaurs?”
Eric nods.
“He’s a little quiet in class,” I continue with a shrug. “A little introverted. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“And the eye contact?”
I open the car door and take Luke from Eric’s arms. His eyes flutter open as I get him settled in the booster seat, buckling him in. Rather than looking at us, Luke takes interest in the leaves falling from a nearby tree blowing in the wind, a slight smile on his sleepy face.
“The eye contact is just something for us to be mindful of,” I reply. “Not an emergency, by any means. Just something we can work on when we’re helping him with his social skills.”
I close the door and turn to Eric. My husband’s face is still frowning. He looks lost in thought, about to disappear into his own mental space and slam the door shut. I know this look well on him, and usually I leave him alone and let him be with his thoughts until he’s ready to talk.
But not today.
I stand up on my tip toes, putting my hands on his chest, and kiss him hard.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Overthinking stuff,” I reply. “Luke is fine. He’s a bright, kind, sensitive, creative little boy. He’s just like his daddy.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he says grimly.
“What would be so bad about being like you?” I ask.
He doesn’t reply.
“You know, I prayed for this,” I continue.
“You prayed…for what?”
“That our son would be like you,” I answer.
“I didn’t even know you pray.”
“I don’t, usually,” I say. “But when you have a high risk pregnancy with a baby you never thought you’d be physically capable of conceiving…
you pray. A lot . And my prayers were answered.
Luke is healthy, happy, and thriving. That’s what the teacher said.
And he’s going to be his own person, with his own quirks and challenges in life.
If he’s just like you, then that means he’s got a father who can guide him through those challenges. That’s a good thing. Okay?”
Eric’s eyes finally come into focus, moving across my face.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” he says.
I don’t ask what he’s referring to when he says “this.”
Could be parenting. Could be marriage.
Could be life, and everything in it, that he claims he can’t do without me.
How could a man so strong need me so much? It doesn’t make any sense to me, and yet I know without question that it must be true.
Because Eric doesn’t lie. He doesn’t flatter people. And he doesn’t exaggerate.
“I feel the same way,” I whisper.
He kisses me now, hard, lifting me off my feet and holding me to his body.