14. Anders
Anders
The envelope is on the kitchen counter for two days before I open it.
It came on Wednesday. Becca finally went in the Thursday after the party, because I drove her there and sat in the waiting room and didn't leave. The lab said three to five business days, another thing Becca lied about.
Here it is, the results. White. Windowed. My name through the plastic.
I don't open it. I go upstairs.
The nursery is done. I finished it. I don't know why.
Curtains, the gray ones she'd bookmarked on the laptop and never ordered.
The changing pad. The stroller out of its box and standing in the corner.
I put the mobile up, the one with the felt clouds.
I did it at two in the morning the night I came back from the hospital, and I stood there with it turning and I cried like a kid.
I sit in the glider. It's the fourth night I've sat here.
And I do the thing I've been circling for four nights.
I put Milo in this room. In my head. I put him in the crib with his dark hair and his brown eyes and the lip that looks like mine, and I make him mine. Full stop. No test. Blood, all the way down.
And then I look at what I did.
Four thousand dollars without asking her.
The highchair, Margot’s food given to Milo.
The bracelet and money missing. Comforting the woman who'd just put a handprint on my wife's face while my wife stood there with her hands on her stomach, and looking at her over Becca's head, and saying give me a minute.
Standing at a bounce house with a phone against my ear doing arithmetic while she breathed through a contraction.
Coming through a hospital door at 4:43, twenty-six minutes after my daughter was born.
If Milo is mine, every one of those was still wrong.
Every one.
If he isn’t? It’s even worse.
I sit in the glider with that for a long time.
It doesn't get lighter. That's how I know it's true.
There's no version of the envelope that makes what I did to Margot okay, and I understand, finally, four nights into it, that I've been waiting for the envelope to tell me who I am, and it can't. I already know.
I go downstairs and open it. I have to face the truth of the kind of husband I’ve been.
In the case of MILO LINDQVIST, the alleged father, ANDERS Stenburg, is EXCLUDED as the biological father. Probability of paternity: 0%.
I read it standing up. I read it sitting on the kitchen floor with my back against the island where the highchair used to be, because I took that out yesterday with a drill, and I read it a third time to be sure, and then I put my head down on my knees and I don't cry.
I thought I would. I don't. There's nothing there to cry with.
Becca knows before I've said a word.
I see it when she opens the door. I've got the envelope in my hand and she looks at it and her face does something quick and then settles into the wet, frightened look I've seen fifty times, and I think: you practiced that. You've been practicing that for two months.
"Can I come in?”
Milo's on the floor with a plastic dump truck. Just like Daddy. He looks up and grins at me and my chest does what it always does and I let it, because none of this is his.
"Zero percent," I say.
"That can't be right. Those tests, they get things wrong all the time, we should do another."
"Becca."
"Travis was around the same week, I told you that, I never said I was absolutely sure."
"You were sure enough to put Daddy on a text in September."
She sits down on the beige couch. The one from the photograph.
"How long?” I say.
"I don't know what you."
"You had a test on Travis. Didn't you? Before you ever called me. What did it say?”
She looks at the wall.
"He wasn't excluded," she says finally. "It was an at-home test. Travis said those things aren't reliable."
"What was the probability?" I ask.
She says nothing.
"Becca."
"Ninety-nine point nine."
"So you knew who his father was and you picked the man you thought had a big house and a high paying career.”
"That's not it at all.”
"You stalled the test several times. I’m so stupid, my wife knew this, she knew.” I hear myself say my wife and something in me steadies. "You stalled because as long as it was maybe, I kept coming. The money kept coming. Tell me I'm wrong."
She doesn't say I'm wrong.
"The bracelet," I say. “You took it, didn’t you?”
"I didn’t,” she replied, but she’s not very convincing.
"The six hundred dollars out of the desk."
“She flaunted that drawer in front of me, practically inviting me to help myself,” Becca snaps back with a sneer.
“She wasn’t flaunting anything,” I reply, keeping my voice calm and steady.
I need to quell the anger that’s beginning to rise in my chest, not because it will be directed at her, but because it will all be directed at me.
How could I have been so stupid? “She was simply paying for pizza and you decided to help yourself, just like you helped yourself to everything else you wanted that is hers.”
Things change in an instant. She moves fast, like a cornered animal, and I see it now, the thing Margot saw the first day. The switch. The crying face folding up and the dark one coming out.
"So what now? You're going to walk out on him? He's a year old and he calls you Da, he doesn't know what a test says. You're going to let a piece of paper decide if you’re his father or not?” she snarls with derision, looking directly into my eyes.
"I'm not walking out on him. He's got a mother. He's got a father, Travis, remember? He's got a whole life that's got nothing to do with me."
"And her? She left you. She's gone. You've got nobody, Anders, you've got a big empty house."
I look at her.
"It's not my house."
She blinks.
"Margot bought it two years before I met her.
It's in her name. It was in her name at the wedding and it's in her name now.
There's a prenup, Becca. Her lawyer wrote it and I signed it in about four minutes because I didn't care. The accounts are hers. The joint one I was pulling from, the one you kept asking me about? She funds it. Every month. My company does fine. It does about a tenth of what hers does, and its biggest client, the one that keeps forty-one people working, is Margot’s firm. You thought you had a rich baby Daddy, but you ended up pissing off the wife who has the money.”
Her face twists further into anger, rage even, then she drops it into an expressionless mask of stone. This is a woman who realizes she’s already lost, her dream of bagging some rich man is
"So the four thousand was hers. The rent was hers. The co-pay, the coat, the brakes. The bounce house and the cake with the excavator on it. Every dollar you thought you were getting off me, you were getting off the woman you slapped and stole from.”
"I didn’t…” her voice trails off as the impact of everything hits her all at once.
She knows I don’t believe her, she knows she failed.
She deflates and gives up the fight. Part of me feels sorry for Milo, a little boy I still love and have no ill wishes for.
I hope Becca is able to get her life together for his sake.
But he’s not my problem, as hard as that hurts, he never was. Margot knew it, and I know it now.
"I'm going to pay her back every cent. All of it. And if I was a vindictive bastard I’d make you pay, but consider yourself off the hook for Milo. I don’t want to hurt him in any way.”
She sits back down, her shoulders sagging.
“I destroyed your marriage and you still are being nice to me?” she asks, as if not understanding her good luck.
"You didn't destroy my marriage," I say.
"She left because of me."
"No. You lied to me, that’s on you. But her leaving is on me.
I believed you because I wanted to. I betrayed my wife because it was easy to want Milo to be mine.
But her leaving? She left me, not you or your lies and stealing.
She left me because I destroyed her trust in me, and I will spend the rest of my life making it up to her. ”
Milo bangs the dump truck on the floor. I crouch and put my hand on his head, once. His hair stands up in the back. It always did. He looks up at me and a wave of emotion rolls over me, but I have to cut ties. For Margot. For Nora.
"Don't call me," I tell her. "Don't text. Don't come to the office. If you need something for him, there's all kinds of information for a bunch of family services on this paper. Margot's the one who found it, in case you want to know who's still thinking about your son.”
She picks him up, holding him tightly in her arms. With that, I turn and I leave. I mentally wish them well, and again hope that Becca does the right thing for Milo.
In the truck I photograph the lab report and send it to Margot’s assistant, Vanessa. Not to Margot. I have no right to put my name on her screen and ask her to feel sorry for me.
I type a message with the report: Give this to her when she's ready. It changes nothing about what I did but I want her to know.
Then I open Becca's birthday post. It is still there. My boys. Almost fifty people at the party and more than two hundred people online were invited to believe my wife was the obstacle between me and my real family. I let them believe it. Taking the photograph down will not correct that.
I write the truth beneath my own name.
Two photographs of me with Becca and Milo were posted with captions that suggested we were a couple and a family.
We were not. The birthday photograph was taken while my wife was in labor.
I knew she was in labor and stayed for the cake.
I missed the birth of our daughter. Margot did not keep me from any child and she did nothing to cause this. The failure was mine.
I read it twice. There is no explanation in it. No excuses made, nothing to let me off the hook.
The first reply to my comment appears before I lock the screen. I do not read it. Public shame is not payment. I only did it for public correction of the narrative, not to alleviate my own guilt.
In the truck, on the drive home, I think about everything I’ve done and it hits me all at once.
I missed my daughter's birth for a boy who isn't mine. I stood cutting a birthday cake for a boy who isn’t mine, I let my wife go through labor without me. I let her down, she begged for me when she was afraid for her life and I let her down.
And then I have to face the final set of facts.
The zero percent chance doesn't change anything.
Not one thing on Margot's list is answered by it.
She didn't leave because Milo was or wasn’t mine.
She left because I chose Becca over her, in public, in her own kitchen, over and over, with her watching.
If the envelope had said ninety-nine point nine percent he was mine, she'd have been just as right to walk up those stairs and put her ring on the dresser.
So I don't get to bring the DNA results to her like a gift. I don't get to say see, it was all a lie. The lie was Becca's.
The choices were mine.
I've got a list of my own to make, and it's going to be longer than hers.