Chapter Sixteen
Ryan had brought a DNA test home from the hospital and taken swabs from Aria and Steven. The lab told him it should only take a couple of days for the results to come back. Maybe even just one day, unless the lab was really busy. Which, of course, they were when he took the test back.
Aria had done everything she could to pretend she didn’t care about the results, but Ryan knew better. What he didn’t know was whether she wanted Steven to be her father or not.
Two days after he sent the lab the test, he got the call that the test was back. Since it wasn’t his, he took the envelope back to Aria’s after work. He pulled the envelope out of his pocket. When Aria saw it she asked, “Is that what I think it is?”
“It is. Did you want to call Steven or wait until you’ve seen the results?”
“I’ll wait. But I have a feeling it’s true. You don’t know?”
“The results aren’t mine to open.” But he was almost certain Steven was her father.
Aria handed him Sophie and took the envelope from him. She drew in a deep breath and tore it open. She pulled out the paper and looked at it. Then she handed it to Ryan. “Ninety-nine point nine percent probability. Steven is your father.”
He watched her pace and waited for her to say something. “I knew he was after we talked about the plant. But to have it confirmed by science … I don’t know how I feel.”
“When are you going to tell him?”
“Tonight. I’ll call him and tell him and arrange to see him tomorrow. You’re working, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I should be able to come over around five thirty or six if you want to wait.”
“I do want to wait. Do you mind?”
“Of course not. Are you going to hear him out?”
“I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?”
Not necessarily, but he hoped she would. It would be hard, if not impossible, for Aria to keep an open mind about whatever Steven told her. Given that it had been so long since she’d seen her father, he wondered if anything the man said would change the way she felt.
*
Aria wasn’t at all sure she wanted to hear her father’s story.
But she’d told him she’d listen after she called him last night to tell him the results of the DNA test. Obviously, he hadn’t been surprised at the results.
He’d said several times that he didn’t expect forgiveness, that he simply wanted to tell her what had happened.
Then, if she never wanted to see him again, he would respect her wishes.
Ryan showed up about five thirty and gave Sophie a bath and put her in her jammies. She’d fed her before he got there and her clothes showed it. “We started cereal,” she said.
“So I see,” Ryan said with a laugh. “Did any go in her mouth?”
“Ha-ha. Next time you can try it.”
“I’d love to. We’ll be back.” He carried Sophie off, and she heard him talking to her. “What did you think about cereal? Oh, really? You like it, huh?”
He was so cute when he talked to Sophie like that, her heart simply melted.
Ryan had just returned with Sophie, all clean and sweet-smelling and wearing her jammies when the doorbell rang. Aria froze, then sucked in a breath and started toward the front door to answer it. “Why don’t you take Sophie into the den? I think we’ll all be more comfortable in there.”
“You’re sure you want me here? Sophie and I can go to her room.”
She paused. “Don’t you dare leave.”
Her father looked much as he had the first time she’d seen him. It was obvious he’d tried to look his best, and equally clear the he didn’t have a lot of money to do it with. “Come in.”
He came in and she led him into the den. She and Ryan and Sophie sat on the couch and her father sat in a side chair. He didn’t seem to know what to say so she said, “Start at the beginning. Why did you leave?”
“I left because I had post-traumatic stress and it was getting worse. I was afraid of what would happen if I stayed. I think your mother realized that’s what happened; that was why I left.”
“If she did she never told me.” But she remembered her father acting differently than usual. Mostly that he stopped talking to her.
He closed his eyes. “I-I hoped she knew. Maybe she didn’t.”
“She never said a bad word about you. So she must have suspected something.”
“I lost my job right before I left, but she didn’t know that. She wanted me to go to the VA and see if they could help me. But that didn’t happen.”
“You didn’t go?”
“I went but I never saw anyone. I waited for hours. They were busy, told me to come back the next day. But I didn’t.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I just … couldn’t. I tried to make myself but every time I tried I would remember sitting there for hours, watching, waiting. The few people I talked to were as messed up as I was.”
“So what did you do then?”
“I had no money, couldn’t hold down a job, so I lived on the street for several years.
Sometimes I’d stay in a shelter but I never lasted long there.
I wandered from town to town. Never staying in one place for long.
That went on for a long, long time. Then I ran into someone I knew in the army.
Someone who wasn’t messed up. He took me to the VA and wouldn’t leave me until I got some help.
Eventually I wound up in a VA psychiatric hospital. ”
“There’s a lot more to that story, isn’t there?” Ryan asked.
He shrugged. “Not really. More of the same.”
“I was a battlefield surgeon in Afghanistan,” Ryan said. “Years after you served, I did too.”
“Then you understand.”
“Yeah. I get it.”
That’s all Ryan said but she had the feeling there was a whole lot behind it that he wasn’t saying. “What about your PTSD?” Aria asked. “How are you now?”
“I’m coping. I don’t know that you’re ever considered cured.
But I had a lot of intensive treatment and it helped.
Once I finally got out of the psychiatric hospital I went to a group home where I could get outpatient treatment.
A few months ago I started looking for you and your mother, but it took me a long time to find you.
I traced you to Denver and then to Marietta.
And then I had to work up the nerve to see you. To see your mother.”
Who had died. She wondered what her mom’s reaction would have been. “You were gone for over twenty years. Why even bother after all that time? Why now?”
He was quiet for a long time. She didn’t think he was going to answer. But when he did it was the saddest, most tortured tone she’d ever heard.
“I never stopped loving your mother and you. I never stopped wanting to see you. But it had been so long and I thought you were better off without me coming back into your lives.” He laughed without humor. “I don’t have much to offer other than to tell you how sorry I am.”
“What changed your mind?”
He drew in a deep breath. “I’m dying.”
Aria stared at him. “Dying? You’re dying?”
He nodded. “I have cancer. Pancreatic.”
*
Pancreatic cancer. Ryan knew the odds of survival were damn low, even with early detection and treatment. And he seriously doubted Steven had been diagnosed early on. “How advanced is it?”
“It’s everywhere. They said it’s metastatic. At most I have a few months.” He looked at Aria. “I know nothing can make up for what happened. For what I did. For deserting you and your mother. But I thought if I could just see you and your mother one last time I could die at peace. Or almost.”
“Except my mother died several years ago.”
“And you want nothing to do with me.”
“At first I didn’t. I don’t know what I feel now. I don’t know much about post-traumatic stress.”
“But you do,” he said, turning to Ryan.
“Yes.” Both as a physician and personally, although he’d never been certain he could claim to have had it.
Certainly not as bad as Steven clearly had.
In fact, it was amazing that the man had managed to pull out of it at all.
As for Ryan, he just thought the war, and falling for his best friend’s girl, not to mention her death, had screwed him up.
But he certainly knew enough veterans who had post-traumatic stress.
Not all of them had made it through to the other side.
Ryan exchanged a look with Aria. She didn’t look like she was completely buying Steven’s story, but Ryan did.
Was twenty years a hell of a long time? Sure it was.
But who knew how long the man had lived in a fog on the streets?
How long he’d spent in the VA psychiatric hospital?
Or how many different VA hospitals he’d been in?
When you were that fucked up, time didn’t have a lot of meaning.
Besides, he’d admitted he hadn’t even looked for Aria and her mother until recently. Until his cancer diagnosis.
But Ryan was a veteran and a doctor who had experience with such things. Steven’s story wasn’t that different from many veterans. Maybe the time frame was longer, but the fact that he’d apparently come out on the other side was a real triumph.
Steven got up. “I’ll leave you now. Like I said, I don’t expect anything from you. I felt I owed it to you to tell you what had happened. I’m so glad I got to meet your little girl. She’s beautiful.”
“She is.” Aria looked down at her. “Ryan, could you show Steven out? I’m going to put Sophie down.”
They watched her leave the room with the baby. “Do you think she’ll see me again?” Steven asked.
“I don’t know. But I wouldn’t leave town if that’s what you’re asking.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
“It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been there to understand.”
Ryan opened the door and Steven stepped out, turning back to him before he left. “Thank you.”
“Give her some time. Don’t leave town.”
“I won’t. Yet.”
*
“Do you believe him?” Aria asked when she came back from putting the baby down.
Ryan tilted his head, considering her. “Do you?”
“I want to know what you think.”
“I believe him. That might not have been exactly how it happened, but he was awfully messed up for a long time.”
“It doesn’t seem reasonable to me.”
“What? That he has post-traumatic stress? Or that he waited so long to see you?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe he has it. But why decide now that he needed to see me?”
“He told you. He’s dying.”
“Unless he isn’t dying and wants to con me.”
“He hasn’t asked you for anything, has he?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Why are you so suspicious of him?” And why was he defending the man instead of being the impartial observer he should be? He knew the answer to that question.
Because Steven was a veteran who had PTSD. Who’d been treated in a psychiatric facility and who had managed to come out on the other side. Being diagnosed with cancer after all that was adding insult to injury.
“Why shouldn’t I be? He’s my father. I accepted that. He’s the man who left my mother and me high and dry when I was a young child. It’s not inconceivable that he’d come back to hit me up for money.”
He’d better tread very carefully. Unless he was ready to tell Aria his history. All of it. And he wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe never.
“I think you need some time to think about what you’ve learned. It’s a lot to understand.”
“Why do I get the feeling you think I should take him at his word and forgive him?”
“I never said that. But I think you should give him a chance. Not for his sake but for your own. You’ve wondered about him all your life. You wanted to know why he left and why he never came back. Here’s your chance to know him again, but if you don’t take the chance now you never will.”
“Because he has cancer.”
“Because he has metastatic pancreatic cancer. He’s going to die, Aria. From what he said he doesn’t have long.”
She paced away and with her back to him she said, “I don’t know if I can forgive him.”
“No one is saying you have to, least of all him.”
“Does it make me a terrible person if I can’t forgive him?”
If he were in her position, could he? How was he to know?
His mother had passed away, then later, his father had gotten remarried.
Though he didn’t see him often he did have a relationship with him.
He couldn’t conceive of his father doing something like Steven had.
But his father had never had PTSD either.
He went to her and put his arms around her, her back to his front. “No. It makes you human.”