5. Tess
Tess
Mitch takes the tenth message and he’s lovely about it. He says of course, sweetheart. Then he asks me to spell Broderick, which he has known how to spell for a year, and tells me Shane’s got a lot on his plate but he’ll be sure it gets in front of him.
I call again a week and a half later and he’s finished being lovely.
“He knows, Tess.”
“He knows what? Because I gave you a specific thing to tell him.”
“He knows you called. That’s all I’ve got for you.” A chair creaks somewhere in Los Angeles. “Can I say something to you as a person and not as anybody’s manager?”
“No.”
He says it anyway.
“You’re a smart girl. There’s a sad version of this that stays private and a sad version that doesn’t, and I’ve watched a lot of women pick wrong.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
“It’s early, honey.” Papers move on his end, unhurried, a man doing something else with his hands. “A lot can happen before early becomes a baby.”
I hang up on him. Then I throw up, and it is not the conversation, it is simply the pregnancy. After that I stop being able to tell the attempts apart.
There’s an email, and then two more, and I write the least dramatic four sentences of my life and keep the sent folder open in a tab for a month like a woman watching a phone that isn’t going to ring.
There’s a number for the band’s attorney that I find on a filing.
There’s a call to Monica that goes to an assistant, a pleasant thorough woman who takes my name and my callback and my relationship to Ms. Danner, and I never hear another thing.
The morning of the anatomy scan is the last good morning.
They hand me the little strip of pictures, four frames, the profile with the hand up beside the face.
The tech turns the screen toward me and says everything looks great and I say the stupidest sentence of my life, which is, “She needs her father.” Then I drive straight from the clinic to the post office on Guadalupe.
The woman at the counter tells me certified mail with return receipt runs nine dollars and change and asks if I want tracking on top of that, and I say yes. Yes to all of it. Give me every possible proof that this left my hands.
The delivery receipt comes back eleven days later. The little green card, in my own mailbox, in my own hand, with a signature scrawled across the line that I can’t read.
Somebody in that building put their name on a line to say they received an ultrasound picture of my daughter, and that’s all I have as proof that it happened. I stand at my kitchen counter holding it and I’m so relieved my knees go.
Surely this will get through to him. This has to waken some primal urge to know his own blood. I’m certain of it, for a short while.
It’s hard to explain that part afterward. For a day and a half I’m fine. For a day and a half I walk around thinking, he has it, it’s in a room with him, and whatever he does now he does knowing. And I catch myself planning what I’ll say when he calls. I get as far as deciding I won’t cry.
The cease and desist letter comes at the end of the summer.
Three names on the door, Los Angeles. It’s short.
It refers to my communications, plural, which is the first evidence I have that anybody has been counting.
There’s a reminder that continued unsolicited contact may constitute harassment, and a line about all available legal remedies should I make any public claim regarding their client’s personal life.
The words baby and pregnant don’t appear anywhere in it. Not once. Somebody worked on that.
I read it four times standing up, and then I sit down on my kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and I understand that I’m not going to reach him.
The last letter I write by hand late in September, after another night of not sleeping.
I’m not going to describe most of it. There are pages in it I’d have burned if the lawyers hadn’t made copies.
But I know the last lines, because I wrote them again and again before I let it stand.
You can decide you never loved me. You don’t get to decide she isn’t yours.
I mail it. And then I stop. Later, I will ask myself why I did not keep trying. The answer is simple: I ran out. Not of love or nerve, but of ways to be humiliated that I could survive while growing a person.
And then she comes five weeks early, in October, in a bathroom stall at a wedding venue in Wimberley, in the middle of the bridal party’s first look.
I feel the gush and think for one whole second that I’ve knocked over a drink.
Then I finish the roll of film. I actually finish the roll, because there’s a bride out there in a field and my second shooter is twenty-three years old, and I hand her my other camera body and tell her to shoot the ceremony wide and not to let the mother of the bride reorganize the family formals.
Kendra drives me to the hospital. She runs two red lights on Broadway and doesn’t notice either of them.
They take Sadie out of me after midnight and she doesn’t cry. A room full of people moves very fast and very quietly, and somebody says how long it has been in a tone that isn’t meant for me. Then somebody else says, “There she is.” It’s the smallest sound I’ve ever heard in my life.
They take her upstairs and I don’t get to hold her for nineteen hours.
I lie in a room down the hall with a cuff inflating on my arm every fifteen minutes, and through the wall there’s a television going at the nurses’ station.
Somebody’s got his Tulsa show on. Live, on the music channel, at that hour, with the volume up because everyone’s dead on their feet.
I lie there in a paper gown with my body ravaged and limp, and my daughter four doors away with a tube in her nose, and I listen to twenty thousand people scream her father’s name for two solid hours.
I’ve never told anybody that. Not Kendra. Not my mother.
After that, we survived on our own. We were okay, until Kendra decided we weren’t and she sold those photos. So here we are now, in the middle of a shitstorm just trying to live our lives.
The courier comes to my studio the Thursday after the brick is thrown through the window. He’s about twenty and he won’t look at me and he practically jogs back to his car. The envelope has the same three Los Angeles names on it as the cease and desist letter previously.
Inside there’s a demand for immediate genetic testing, an appointment already made at a facility on Lamar, and thirty-one pages of a confidentiality agreement. I read all thirty-one with Sadie asleep on my chest. The test I want. I have wanted the test for fourteen months.
The rest of it says I will never discuss the relationship, the pregnancy, my attempts at contact, the broadcast, or the existence of the agreement itself. It says I’ll make no statement correcting any characterization of me, past or future. There’s a paragraph about my mother.
I find a pen. I sit at my kitchen table and go through it line by line and cross out every place where they’ve asked me to agree that I imagined my own life, and I initial each one in the margin, small and neat, the way you’d correct a student.
On the signature page, in the space under my name, I write one sentence.
I’ll take your test. I’m keeping my truth.
Thursday I put her in the good sweater, because I’m not walking into that building with a baby in a stained onesie, and I hate myself for the thought the whole drive.
There are two vans in the lot. Somebody’s already told them. And a black SUV parked crooked across two spaces near the doors, with a man leaning against the back of it. No hat. No glasses. Nobody with him. His hands are empty and he’s been standing there a while.
I don’t know if Shane is there for me or the baby or somebody else, but at that moment I don’t care.
I’m there to prove that I’m not a liar.
I’m there for my daughter.
Everybody else can go straight to hell.