Tag
Two months later
I hold Julia’s hand with one of mine and wipe her brow with a cold wet washcloth. “I hate you!” she screams at me. She’s been doing this for about an hour, and I’m pretty used to it by now. “I’m glad I never have to see you again after today.”
The delivery nurse shoots me a glance. They know about our crazy situation. But I keep hoping that Julia is going to change her mind, that she’ll want to have something to do with our son after today. Our time together is over, but theirs doesn’t have to be.
Another contraction wracks her body, and she squeezes my hand so tightly that I wince and pry her fingers away.
“We don’t have long now,” the nurse says.
Julia relaxes into the bed when the contraction is over and blinks her green eyes at me.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “Just be sure they don’t lay him on me when he comes out, okay? I don’t want to see him.”
I brush her sweaty hair back from her face. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she says quietly. “It’ll be too hard.”
“We can still do this,” I say to her. “We can do it together.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not what I want, Tag. I want him to have the best of everything and I can’t give him that.”
Neither can I, I think. If not for my sister’s money, I wouldn’t be able to do anything for him at all.
Julia came to me when she found out she was pregnant. I was over-the-moon excited, but she wasn’t. Not at all.
“They can give him everything, Tag,” she’d said. “We can’t give him anything.”
“We can do this,” I’d told her. I put my hands together like I was praying. “Please. Just say you’ll try.”
“The adoptive family said they’d give me enough money to go to college,” she rushed to explain. “I can get out of here.”
I looked around her dad’s tiny little cottage. As the pastor of the church, he was allowed a small house. That was how we’d met. Her dad was counseling me on responsibility.
Julia sniffed. “I want him to have so much more than this. The adoptive family…they want him so bad.”
I was away on a mission trip when Julia first found out she was pregnant. She’d sent word to Mexico, but it had taken a few weeks for me to gather enough airfare money to get home. My mission trip wasn’t supposed to be over for quite some time, but I’d come home straightaway after hearing the news.
I never should have left in the first place.
“I want him,” I said. I pounded my fist into my chest. “You can’t give him away without my permission.”
“I could have just had an abortion and you never would have known,” she said quietly.
“But you didn’t. And now I do know. And now I want him. You can’t give him up for adoption when he has a father who wants him.”
She started to cry. “But I have dreams. And they’re going to pay for me to go to school. They like me. And they said we can visit him, that we can check up on him.” She was pleading with me.
“How much money?”
“You’re broke, Tag. Does it matter? Anything they can give him is better than what we can. Can’t you see that?”
She was wrong. I could love him. “I want him,” I repeated.
“And I want to go to school. I want to be better than…this.” She motioned to the room around her. My baby was no bigger than an apple at that point. And she wanted to give him away.
“What if I gave you the same amount of money?” I asked.
She scoffed. “Where would you get that much money?”
My sisters. Jenny and Jessica. They’re loaded. “I’ll get it.”
“Why do you have to make this so difficult?” She heaved a sigh. “Just let him have a good life.”
“I will.” With me.
Her eyes got big and wide. “You’ll sign the papers?”
“No. I’ll get you the money.”
Her face fell. I hated disappointing her, but I wasn’t going to let him go.
“This doesn’t feel right,” she said.
I crossed the room to stand in front of her and tipped her face up to mine. “None of this feels right. We should be a family.”
She stepped back, creating a wide chasm between us. “You left.”
“You told me to go!”
“You said you needed it.”
“It was for the church,” I rushed to say.
“Sometimes I think you love your religion more than you love me.”
“I can change,” I tried.
She shook her head. “It’s too late.”
Julia jerks me out of my reverie when she screams and bears down on my fingers. Her belly ripples and moves and the nurse tells me I can look down. I haven’t seen any parts of Julia in months, so I don’t feel quite right about looking at her vagina, but the draw is too strong. Her legs are parted and I watch him as he slides into the world. The nurse catches him and they lift him to lay him on her belly.
“No,” Julia says. She closes her eyes and looks away. A tear runs down her cheek.
“Julia, please,” I say. If she sees him just once, she’ll change her mind. I’m sure of it.
“Take him away.”
He’s crying now, and the sound is music to my ears. I walk over to the bassinette where they’re cleaning him and look down into his perfect little face. He has my coloring and my hair. “You want to hold him, Dad?” the nurse asks. She looks askance at Julia. But Julia is still staring in the other direction.
“Yes, please,” I say. I take him from her and pull him into my chest. “Hello, Benji.” He’s only minutes old and I’m already in love with him. I can’t imagine how Julia could give this up. “Are you sure, Julia?” I ask her.
“I’m sure,” she says definitely. She’s still refusing to look.
They move us to a different room, one away from Julia. Apparently, it’s what they do in adoption situations and that’s how they’re treating this.
I spend the night with my son in his own room, and I have no idea where Julia is. A nurse comes into the room and says, “The baby’s mother would like to see you. She’s about to be discharged.” I look toward Benji’s crib. “I’ll watch him. Go ahead,” she says gently. She pats my shoulder.
She gives me Julia’s room number and I go there. She’s dressed in some baggy pants and a loose-fitting top and she has a bag over her shoulder. “Are you leaving?” I ask.
She nods, and a tear slides down her cheek.
“Julia…” I want to hold her, but I don’t know if I have the right.
“Don’t make it any harder,” she says quietly. “Do you have the money?”
I reach into my pocket and take out the cashier’s check for forty thousand dollars. I used the rest of the original fifty thousand to buy some baby stuff, and I paid an attorney to take care of the legal stuff so Julia could sign over her rights and I could get custody.
And to finalize the divorce.
“Thank you,” she says as she takes the check.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“It would have been easier if he’d gone to a different family,” she says. “This way, I’ll always know he’s with you and that he’s not with me, and he’ll know it too.”
“I’ll make sure he knows you love him.” My heart is breaking.
She nods. “I did this because I do love him. I can’t give him anything he needs. And I’m not one hundred percent sure you can either.” She looks at me. “Are you going back to your sisters?”
“I doubt they’d have me at this point. I kind of closed that door.”
She nods. “Take care of him, okay?” Her voice cracks and I can’t stand it anymore. I go to her and pull her into my arms. She falls into me and lets me hold her for a minute, until her sobs quiet.
“When you’re ready to see him, call me?”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know how you’ll feel a few years from now.”
She nods. “Be good, Tag.”
Then I see her new boyfriend standing outside the door. She’s leaving with him. She’s leaving me with a brand new baby, and she’s going to go to college like none of this ever happened. She’s going on with her life, and I get to keep the beauty we created together.
I go back to Benji’s room and the nurse passes him to me like’s a tightly wrapped football.
My phone rings in my pocket and I shift Benji over so I can pull it out. My heart beats faster thinking it might be Julia. Maybe she changed her mind. “Hello?”
“Tag?” a male voice says.
“Yes?”
“This is Josh, and I’m going to marry your sister Star in a few days. We’d love it if you could be here.”
“Y-yes,” I blurt out quickly. I clear my throat. “Yes,” I say again. Then my heart falls. “Wait. I don’t have any money to get there.”
He laughs. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.”
“I’ll need a bus ticket.”
“When can you leave?”
“Today?”
“I’ll take care of the tickets. Give me your full name…”
I give him all the information. “I’ll be traveling with my son,” I tell him, wincing inwardly.
A pause. “Your son?”
“Yes. Is that okay?”
“Hell yeah it’s okay,” he says on a laugh. “Star will be so happy to see you.”
“Is she mad at me?” I ask him. I did just leave with fifty thousand dollars of Wren’s money.
“Not that I know of. But she has a vagina, so that might change in about ten minutes,” he says with a chuckle.
Something tells me my sister would slap him if she heard him say that. And something else tells me he wouldn’t care.
“We’ll see you when you get here, man,” Josh says.
“Okay,” I reply, finally releasing the heavy breath I’ve been holding.
I shove my phone back into my pocket. It only has a couple of days of service left on it, so I’m glad he caught me now.
I look down at Benji. “We’re going to New York, little dude.”
We’re going to New York to face my family, to face the past, and to run from the future.