23. Maren #2
“It’s fine, Maren.” He gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sorry for making this your problem. It’s not fair, and you don’t deserve it.”
He turns and walks away.
I sit there, alone in the courtyard, surrounded by measuring tape and blueprints and the ruins of a conversation I don’t know how to process.
For once, I leave work early.
I pick up Rowan from Little Sprouts at four, earlier than usual. His face lights up when he sees me through the classroom window, and something in my chest unclenches.
“Mama!” He runs to me, arms outstretched.
I scoop him up, pressing my face into his hair. He smells like finger paint and apple juice and the particular sweetness of toddler sweat.
“Hey, baby. Good day?”
“We did aliens.” He pulls back to show me his hands, still faintly green. “I was a space monster.”
“A space monster?”
“He eats trees.”
“I think you mean an alien, actually.”
“No.” He shakes his head firmly. “Space monster.”
“Okay. Space monster.”
I carry him to the car, buckling him into his car seat while he chatters about the various merits of space monsters. The drive home is short, our apartment is only ten minutes from the preschool, and by the time we get there, Rowan has moved on to demanding goldfish crackers.
“After dinner,” I tell him.
“Goldfish are dinner.”
“Goldfish aren’t dinner.”
“They have protein.”
“Where did you learn that word?”
He shrugs, already wiggling out of his shoes. “Ms. Linda said.”
I make actual dinner, chicken nuggets and steamed broccoli, which Rowan picks at suspiciously before eating all the nuggets and two pieces of broccoli.
Bath time is a minor catastrophe involving a rubber duck that somehow ends up in the toilet, which I fish out with a plastic bag and approximately zero dignity.
By seven, he’s in pajamas. By seven-thirty, he’s supposed to be in bed.
He’s not in bed.
“One more story,” he negotiates.
“You’ve had three stories.”
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Four is more than three.”
“That’s not how this works.”
He gives me a look that’s pure Rhodes, stubborn, unimpressed, absolutely certain of his own correctness.
“Please, Mama?”
I sigh. “One more, then bed. Final offer.”
“Deal.”
I read him Where the Wild Things Are for approximately the eight hundredth time. He mouths the words along with me, his eyes getting heavier with each page. By the time we reach the hot supper waiting for Max, he’s barely awake.
I kiss his forehead. “Goodnight, space monster.”
“Night, Mama.”
I turn off the light and close the door most of the way, leaving it cracked so the hallway light spills in. He’s been afraid of the dark lately, another phase, the pediatrician says, perfectly normal for his age.
I go to the kitchen, pour a glass of wine, sit on the couch and stare at the ceiling and try not to think about Rhodes kneeling in the dirt, telling me he never stopped loving me.
It doesn’t work.
An hour later, I hear a noise from Rowan’s room.
Not crying, just shuffling, the sound of small feet on carpet. I set down my wine glass and pad down the hallway, expecting to find him out of bed and looking for water or another story or whatever excuse he’s invented this time.
What I find is worse.
He’s sitting on the floor of my bedroom, not his. The closet door is open. Around him is a scatter of items from the box I keep on the top shelf, the box I never look at, the one filled with artifacts from my old life that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.
There are ticket stubs. A pressed, dried ranunculus. A restaurant receipt from our first anniversary.
And in Rowan’s lap, a photograph.
“Rowan.” My voice comes out strangled. “Baby, what are you doing?”
He looks up at me, and in his hands is a picture I haven’t seen in three years.
Me and Rhodes at The Sinclair, years ago, before everything fell apart.
We’re standing in front of the old theater he was restoring, both of us laughing at something off-camera.
I’m wearing a yellow sundress. Rhodes has his arm around my waist. We look happy.
We look like people who have no idea what’s coming.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Rowan says. “I wanted to find the box with the stars.”
The glow-in-the-dark stars. They’re in a different box, one I keep in the hall closet. He must have gone looking and found this instead.
“That’s okay, baby.” I crouch down next to him, my heart pounding. “Let’s put this stuff back, okay? It’s Mama’s private things.”
But he’s not listening. He’s staring at the photograph, his small forehead creased in concentration.
His finger touches Rhodes’s face.
“Mama,” he says. “Who’s that?”
My throat closes.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for three and a half years.
Dreading it. Planning what I’d say when he was old enough to ask.
I had scripts in my head, careful explanations about how sometimes mamas and daddies don’t live together, about how people can love you even if they’re not around, about how some questions don’t have easy answers.
But now that it’s here, now that Rowan is sitting on my bedroom floor, pointing at Rhodes’s face with his tiny finger, asking the question I’ve been running from, all my scripts evaporate.
“That’s-” My voice cracks. I try again. “That’s someone Mama knew. A long time ago.”
Rowan looks at the photo, then at me, then back at the photo.
“He looks like me,” he says.
I can’t breathe.
“He has my eyes,” Rowan continues, matter-of-fact, the way children are when they’re stating something obvious. “And this thing.” He touches his own chin, right where his dimple is.
I’m going to cry. I can feel it building, the pressure behind my eyes, the way my chest is getting tight.
“Baby-”
“Is he my daddy?”
The question is quiet. Simple. Devastating.
I don’t have an answer.
No, I have an answer. I’ve always had an answer. The problem is that the answer is complicated and painful and too big for a three-year-old on a Tuesday night.
“Let’s get you back to bed,” I manage. “We can talk about this tomorrow, okay?”
“But Mama-”
“Tomorrow.” I gather the scattered items, shoving them back into the box, trying to keep my hands from shaking. “I promise we’ll talk about it tomorrow. But right now you need to sleep, and Mama needs to-”
“Mama.” His voice is smaller now, and when I look at him, he’s clutching the photograph to his chest. “Can I keep this? Just for tonight?”
The picture of me and Rhodes, laughing, happy, oblivious.
The picture of his father.
“Just for tonight,” I whisper.
I carry him back to his room, tuck him in with the photograph still in his hands, kiss his forehead and pull the covers up to his chin, and stand in the doorway, watching him curl around that image like it’s something precious.
“Mama?” His voice is sleepy now, already drifting.
“Yeah, baby?”
“What’s his name?”
My heart breaks.
“Rhodes,” I say. “His name is Rhodes.”
I close the door and press my back against the wall of the hallway, then slide down until I’m sitting on the floor, knees pulled to my chest.
Rowan doesn’t know what he’s started.
But Rhodes still doesn’t know Rowan exists.
And I have no idea how much longer I can keep them apart.