NICK
BEFORE
The day that Clara and Felix are released from the hospital, I drive them home and tell Clara I have a few errands to run, and she says to me, “Okay.” Unlike Maisie, who came home from the hospital vociferous and emphatic, making her needs immediately and desperately known with a cry that could go on for hours, Felix is quiet.
“Can you get milk, too?” Clara asks before I leave, rooting around inside the refrigerator to see that we’re in short supply.
“Sure thing.” I kiss her on the lips and then go.
From my cell phone, sitting in the driveway before I pull out onto the street, I place a call to Kat. It isn’t that I’m trying to shirk responsibility. That’s not what I’m doing; that’s not it at all. If it turns out I am Gus’s father as she says I am, then I will welcome Gus into my life. I’ve been thinking about it, sprawled there sleepless beside Clara’s hospital bed, imagining this newcomer Gus sharing our lives. Split custody arrangements and visitation. Every other weekend and school vacations. It’s a strange prospect, envisioning myself playing catch with a boy I don’t even know. I’ve only seen a photo of the boy. I have no idea how tall he is, what he sounds like, smells like, whether or not he can even catch a ball. But if he’s mine, then I’ll do it because this is what decent men do. They take care of their own. They clean up their own messes. I’m not trying to neglect my responsibilities. It’s just the opposite. I’m trying to claim them, to make what’s mine, mine.
But first I have to be sure.
We meet at a DNA diagnostics center, and for the first time in my life, I meet this boy Kat calls Gus. He’s a spindly boy, tall and thin as am I, but his features—the eyes, the hair—are Kat to a T. It’s easy to see they belong together, but the question is: Do I? We greet each other in the waiting room, and Kat introduces me to Gus as her friend. I wonder if he’s heard of me before, if she’s ever mentioned the name Nick. Not around Steve, that’s for sure. But maybe around Gus. Maybe she relayed to Gus memories of her own childhood, how she and her friend Nick did this or did that. There’s wariness to his eyes, a laziness and indifference in the way he reaches a hand out to greet mine.
Kat rises from a chair in the waiting room and says to me, “I hear congratulations are in order.” I never told her I had a new son, but still she knows.
I avert my eyes, staring at Gus instead, on his chair thumbing through a magazine. “Thanks,” I mumble.
I wonder if Gus knows anything about this appointment. Why else would someone meet a stranger at a facility to have the inside of their cheek swabbed? But then again, Gus is twelve, and I’m guessing the notion of sex is just beginning to dawn on him, though thoughts of paternity are still far away. I try to talk to him. “What grade are you in?” I ask, and, “What’s your favorite food?” but his answers are all one-word answers, and any two-way conversation is missing, though whether it’s due to immaturity or timidity or disinterest, I don’t know.
“Sixth,” he tells me, and “Bacon,” and I feel my heart beat hard, knowing that bacon is my favorite food, too. Are these things hereditary? I don’t know. I try another one to be sure, as if my own evaluation might negate the paternity test we’re about to undergo, as if I can tell after a five-minute conversation whether or not this kid is mine.
“Favorite color?”
“Black.”
“Favorite sport?”
He shrugs, though it’s clear to me that he’s thumbing through a sports magazine, staring at a glossy image of LeBron James. “I don’t play any sports,” he says and, as if to prove the point, he tosses the magazine aside and reaches deep into the pocket of his shorts to produce a couple of green army guys, the very same kind I played with when I was a boy.
I nod knowingly, feeling somewhere deep inside like we could forgo this paternity test right here and right now. Steve is big, brawny, an athlete to boot. I’m not. I tried out for the middle school basketball team eons ago and didn’t make it. All but one kid did: me. It was a degrading feeling, being singled out as a loser. I never played sports again, not competitive sports anyway, though I did sometimes just for fun, always with Connor. Racquetball at the gym, running the occasional 5K. I find myself thinking about Connor then, as I sit and wait for Gus and me to be called, wishing I could call him up and tell him about Felix, about all of this, and together we’d both commiserate and celebrate, and he’d laugh about the irony of it in usual Connor candor, how suddenly I had two sons with two women and he had none, sons or women. And we’d chuckle while throwing back a beer.
But that won’t happen.
“I used to have those when I was your age,” I tell Gus, “except that mine were brown. I’d line them up across my bedroom floor and play war games. You have the tanks, too?” I ask, like the whole collection of miniature World War II tanks that used to occupy my bedroom floor. My mother, coming in to make my bed or fold the laundry, would step on them and get mad.
Gus shakes his head no; he doesn’t have the tanks. He motions to his army men. “I’ve never seen ones that were brown,” he says, and then the nurse calls our names.
Gus goes first, and then me.
When I come out of the exam room, Kat and Gus are gone. In his chair, where he sat only moments ago, remains a single green army man. I pick it up and slide it into the pocket of my jeans. Whether he left it on purpose, or if it was unintentional, I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident, or maybe it was a gift.
The results, I’m told, will be posted online in just a couple of days.
In a couple of days I’ll know if Gus is my son.
I have two more stops before I go home. The first is the jewelry store, from which I purchased a necklace months ago for Clara. She eyed it herself just weeks after she became pregnant with Felix—a month max—a silver necklace with a duo of heart-shaped tags. “Would you look at that,” Clara had said, pointing to it through the store’s glass display. We didn’t go to the jewelry store looking for necklaces, but rather to have her wedding band resized. She stood there, ogling the necklace, then smiled at me and said, “Two hearts. One for Maisie, and one for baby,” while rubbing a hand wishfully over the tiny peppercorn in her womb.
The next day, without Clara around, I returned to the store and bought the pendant necklace on the sly. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t give Clara if I could. I hid it away in a dresser drawer for the next eight months, knowing that as soon as the baby had a name, I’d get the heart tags engraved. The time has come. I swing by the jewelry store and leave the necklace for engraving: one heart for Maisie, and one for Felix. And then I show him a picture of my kids because I just can’t stop myself from gloating. It’ll be a week or two before they’re ready, and then I can surprise Clara with the gift. The store owner winks at me and says, “You know we sell the charms individually. You can always add more hearts if need be,” and already I’m thinking that might be something we’ll one day do. One day there may be more kids for Clara and me. Maisie, Felix and baby.
And then I stop at a convenience store to pick up the milk and go home.
I spend the couple of days following Felix’s birth at home, a paternity leave of sorts. It’s not easy to do. Without anyone to fill in my shoes while I’m gone, Stacy and Nancy are left to reschedule dozens of patients. “If anyone calls with an emergency,” I tell them over the phone early in the morning, while sipping my very first mug of caffeinated coffee and staring at the day as it stretches out before me, long and wide, full of opportunity, “call me. I’ll come in. Only for an emergency,” because sometimes there are things that can’t be put off for a week. Melinda Grey is proof enough of this.
I’ve been served with an Emergency Order of Protection from Melinda Grey, a sheet of paper that’s stashed between the pages of an old dictionary we never use, and I’m waiting on a hearing date, just as I’m waiting on a date for mediation in the malpractice suit. I can’t let this bother me. I feel grateful that the emergency order—a restraining order—arrived the day after Felix was born, as I left Clara and Felix at the hospital for a quick breather, just enough time to drive home, shower and change my clothes. He was waiting for me in the driveway when I arrived, a different messenger this time who also pressed the order into my hand and told me I’d been served. I was just so grateful Clara wasn’t around to see, and that Maisie wasn’t here to ask questions. What’s that, Daddy? and, Why was that man here? I found a safe spot for the order, a place where it will never be seen.
We spend the days together, morning, noon and night devoted to holding my baby boy in my arms and watching my daughter spin across the room in delight. “Look at me, Daddy,” she begs. “I can fly, I can fly.” And then she asks if I want to fly, too, and I tell her yes, that there’s nothing in the world I’d rather do. And so, handing Felix to Clara, I stretch my arms out beside Maisie, and together we fly, spinning wildly around the room. The days are warm, stretching out before us like an open country road, full of nothing to do. There’s no better feeling in the world. I spend time catering to my wife’s needs, changing my son’s diaper, holding him while he sleeps, coloring innumerable pictures with my daughter, watching TV. In the afternoons, Maisie and I slip outside and play games of tag and chase until we are both sweating and exhausted. We bike to the playground; we turn on the sprinkler and take turns leaping through the water’s icy spray. I prepare hamburgers on the grill for dinner, and we all four eat on the patio table with the umbrella pressed all the way up to keep the sunlight out of Felix’s dozing eyes. And as I become rapt in this—in my family—the extraneous worries start to slip away, and I’m only even vaguely aware that the Golden State Warriors have won the NBA finals, and that all that money I bet on their team was not for naught, that sitting in a bank account is enough money to cover my debt, to replace Maisie’s college education savings and start contributing to a new life insurance fund.
My gambling days are through.
I go through the ways I will tell Clara about Gus. I practice in the bathroom mirror, confessing to her first about my runins with Kat, and then the declaration that Gus is my son. I don’t know whether or not this is true—I still have yet to hear the results of the paternity test—and yet somewhere deep inside, I know it’s true. Clara will be angry. It will take a while to process the fact. But then she’ll come to realize that what happened between Kat and me was many years ago, long before I first laid eyes on Clara and knew at once that she was the one for me. She’ll grasp that I haven’t kept this knowledge from her for twelve years, but that Kat has kept it from me.
That evening, Clara falls asleep with baby Felix in her arms. They’re on the sofa, Clara’s head lying peacefully on a throw pillow with Felix pressed against her chest, her arms locked tightly around him even in sleep. The peace and tranquility are palpable, and it takes everything I have in me not to force myself onto the sofa beside them and join them in dreamland. The exhaustion of having a newborn around weighs heavily on me, those long, interrupted nights, sleep always just out of reach.
And yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Outside it is evening, just after eight o’clock on a muggy summer night. Even from inside through the cracks of an open window, I can hear the sound of crickets and cicadas. Harriet lies on the floor, pressed against the sofa; she will not leave Clara or the baby’s side. Our guard dog. I pat her head, and whisper to her, “Good girl.”
Maisie comes stampeding down the stairs like a herd of elephants being chased by a lion. She’s loud, laughing hysterically. As always Maisie is dressed in her ballet leotard and tutu, and she asks pretty, pretty please if we can go to ballet. She pliés before me; she attempts a clumsy pirouette and falls.
I laugh, pressing a finger to my lips to quiet her down. “Today is Monday, silly,” I say, taking her by the hand and drawing her away from Clara and Felix, who are sleeping. I heft her into my arms and carry her from the room. “Tomorrow is ballet,” I say, but I have another idea, a way to freeze frame this moment in time. Seven thirty is usually Maisie’s bedtime; somehow or other, in the excitement and delirium that follows childbirth, we forgot to put her to bed. I haul her into the kitchen and set her on a kitchen counter where she sits, little piggies kicking the cabinet while I rummage around for the things I need. A glass jar and a pair of sharp scissors. As I use the pointed end of the scissors to poke holes in the stamped steel lid, Maisie asks, “What are you doing, Daddy?” and, “Why are you doing that?” but I tell her simply that she’ll see. I want it to be a surprise.
We find her pink sandals and step outside. Oftentimes Harriet would follow, but today she has a far greater task to do: protect Clara and the baby, and so her ears don’t budge; nor do her eyes look to Maisie and me as we go. Outside, Maisie and I become enfolded in the heat of the day. Though the humidity has relented somewhat, the evening remains hot. A couple of American goldfinches perch on the birdbath, taking the last few sips of green algae-tinged water. I make a mental note to clean the birdbath soon, to refill the birdseed, and then I hoist Maisie onto my shoulders with the jar in hand, and she asks of me, “Where are we going?” and I say again that she’ll see.
I lead Maisie into the thicket of trees that surround our yard, where the fireflies like to frolic at this time of night, playing with their friends. “What are they doing?” asks Maisie as she points her fingers intermittently at the light as it appears and then disappears, appears and then disappears, and I say to her, “They’re talking. This is how they talk with their friends,” and I see Maisie contemplating that, thinking what fun it would be if some part of her lit up to say hello. Her head or her hands or her toes. I lift her up into the trees and tell her to grab a handful of leaves, and she does—asking, of course, “Why, Daddy, why?”—and together we drop down onto the earth to fill the glass jar with sticks and leaves. The grass doesn’t grow here, where we sit, and is always austere, just a few blades poking out of the parched dirt. The tall trees prevent the sunlight from reaching the grass, preempting it from growing tall and strong. “There are things,” I tell Maisie as she helps me stuff handfuls of leaves into the jar, “that every creature needs to live. Food, shelter and oxygen are a few. We put holes in the jar so that the firefly can breathe, and these leaves are for food.”
“Can we catch one?” she asks, and I ruffle her hair and tell her, “Of course we can,” and then we rise from the earth, and I show her how. Darkness closes in quickly, though the moon is bright, a crescent in the nighttime sky. The black-blue sky abounds with stars, helping us see, as somewhere off on the horizon, the sun fades away, leaving only faint traces of light, which will soon disappear, too.
“Cup your hands together,” I tell her, “like this. But not too tightly,” I caution. “We don’t want to hurt the firefly. We only want to catch him for a little while, and then we’ll set him free.” I spy a light radiating through the air, and I catch it, this beautiful beetle that climbs easily across my hand. I show Maisie, and she giggles as the firefly spreads its forewings and flies, and she chases it through the yard, the skirt of her tutu fluttering in the nighttime air.
“My turn! My turn,” she says, skipping back to me, and again I show her how to cup her hands. She tries, but her movements are too slow, too timid, the firefly always one step ahead of her unwieldy hands. And so I catch it for her, and let it climb onto Maisie’s tiny hand. She laughs. “That tickles,” she says, as six jointed legs creep across her skin. I’m not sure whether or not she likes it, not until she says, “Hi there, Otis,” pressing her face close to the bug’s tiny face to greet him in the eye.
“Who’s Otis?” I ask, and she raises her hand so that I can see.
“This is Otis,” she says. “This is Otis, Daddy. Can we keep him?” she asks, and I nod my head as I help Maisie set Otis in the jar and screw on the lid.
“Just for a little while,” I explain, as Otis clambers on a stick and drops down into our glass house, making himself comfortable in this temporary home. “But then we’ll have to set him free. It’s fun for a little while, but Otis doesn’t want to live in a jar forever.”
“Why not?” Maisie asks, staring curiously at me. This one is an easy one.
“Would you want to live in a jar forever?” I ask, and she shakes her head a firm, decisive no. “Why not?” I ask, and she happily explains, “Because I want to fly!” as she twirls around and around through the yard, arms extended, until she becomes dizzy and falls.
“Daddy, fly with me?” Maisie begs, and I can’t help myself. There’s nothing I’d rather do than fly around the backyard with my girl. I help her rise to her feet and set her on my shoulders, spinning around and around through the lawn. Around us fireflies dot the sky as Maisie calls out, “We’re flying! We’re flying, Daddy,” and I laugh and tell her that we are. We’re flying. For just one minute I imagine our feet leaving the earth, Maisie and me soaring together through space.
“Look at the stars,” I tell Maisie as if she and I are one with them, the stars and us, and Maisie exclaims, “There’s the moon!” and we make believe we’re in a space shuttle of some sort, circumnavigating the moon. We laugh, giddy, silly, happy.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever felt so happy.
How long we fly, I don’t know. Until I’m wobbly on my feet and Maisie has had her fill. “That’s the best thing,” Maisie says, and I ask, “What is?”
“Flying!” she screams.
“Can I bring Otis to my bedroom?” Maisie asks as I return her to the ground and she sits cross-legged on the lawn, leaves in her hair, and I mull this over, thinking Clara wouldn’t like it in the least bit if I let Maisie bring a bug into her bedroom. But Otis is in a jar, completely harmless. And it’s only for one night. If she were awake, I’d ask her. I’d plead Maisie’s case, about how we should let her keep Otis in her bedroom for one single night, and then tomorrow we’d set him free, return him to the trees to play with his friends. But Clara isn’t awake, and I don’t want to wake her. I picture her in my mind’s eye sleeping serenely with Felix in her arms. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Clara so peaceful, so relaxed. The last thing in the world I want to do is wake her, and so I make a judgment call and tell Maisie yes.
“Yes,” I say. “We can keep him for one night,” I tell Maisie, and I hold out a pinkie finger for her to grasp with her own, “but we can’t tell Mommy. Okay? Pinkie promise we won’t tell Mommy about Otis,” and she does.
“Why not, Daddy?”
“Mommy doesn’t like bugs,” I say. “This time tomorrow night, we’ll set Otis free. Deal?” I ask, and she says, “Deal,” as we tiptoe back into the house, up the wooden stairs and into Maisie’s bedroom where we set Otis in his jar on the edge of her dresser, and I tuck her into bed. It’s a compromise; Maisie would like for Otis to sleep under the covers with her, but I smile and say no. “This way,” I say, “he can watch you sleep.” I pull the blanket clear up to Maisie’s chin and say to her, “Snug as a bug in a rug,” and she laughs and reminds me of Otis the bug in a jar, in case I’ve somehow already forgotten about Otis.
“Sweet dreams, my love,” I whisper to her as her eyes drift sleepily closed. “Good night,” I say as I stand in the doorway, watching as a chemical reaction from inside Otis’s abdomen illuminates Maisie’s night.