Woke up today at my parents' house, the day after Christmas, ready to drive home, ready to be alone again. J and I drove down the coast to Mom and Dad's house on Sunday evening for the holiday. We haven't spent any time together since I moved to the other side of the world/Bay, so it was a nice drive down, catching up. He's doing well at the G-Plex and I'm really proud of him, but he's frustrated with dating. He says he knows the Bay isn't a permanent place for him because he's been here over two years now and still hasn't met anyone he really clicks with. He has tons of hook-ups, and even though he is the hook-up kind of guy, he's also craving something deeper. He wants some guy to sweep him off his feet; he wants it to have a soundtrack.On Christmas Eve, Mom cooked our big dinner and we exchanged gifts. There was talk of midnight mass but after an enormous dinner, my parents couldn't even get it up for Jesus. They went the next morning instead. While they were at mass, I was fast asleep until the phone in the backroom began ringing and was so headsplitting I had to jump up to grab it and make it stop. In the fog, a voice I hadn't heard in years rang through the other end. "Merry Christmas!" It was K; I'd know that voice anywhere and for as long as I live. "You don't even know who this is, do you?" I told her I did, but that I was just out of it because I was sleeping.
K is the only person I've ever truly hated. Her secret was unforgivable. When my brother was a junior in high school, he met K. He worked with her dad at a fish and tackle supply place. It was up on 5 Mile Rd. and overwhelmingly smelled like the rubber they use to make fishing lures. My brother was K's dad's boss. K's dad (B) was a father of 5, my brother was 17. B had secrets too. He set them up on a date - my brother and K. My brother was, is, and always has been in love with fishing and hunting and everything woodsy. Since he could walk and grip a pole, he's been at the edge of a lake, pond, or stream with undivided focus and adoration. Teenage girls don't really dig a guy in waist-high waterproof boots. He was always a great guy, but he was just so focused on something that had nothing to do with anything most girls were into, that he just didn't really have much luck with the ladies. In fact, as far as I can remember, K was the only girlfriend he ever had in high school. She dug him, and he dug the fact that she dug him.
My brother and K dated for about 6 or 8 months before I eavesdropped outside his bedroom door one day and overheard a conversation that would change our lives forever. I was 15, a sophomore in high school, and a complete nuisance. I kept thinking I wasn't really hearing what I was really hearing. My stomach turned, my throat began to close up and I was paralyzed. When I heard him hang up the phone, I knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for him to answer. He was sitting on his bed with a completely blank face. I asked him what was happening and he told me. K was pregnant. I never saw him cry until now, not since we were little and he stepped on the yellow jacket nest in Hines Park and he was screaming and I ran towards him to see what was wrong and then they attacked me too. He got it worse. He screamed and cried all night long that he was gonna die. He was 7 and I was 4. I'd only got one sting in the head and one on my arm, but ended up with a debilitating fear of bees. He's never been scared of anything in nature. Respectful, but never scared.
He didn't know how to tell Mom and Dad so he didn't, for awhile. Eventually he told a couple friends, I told a couple friends, and word spread through his all-boys school and my all-girls school until it became clear that he had to say something before someone else did. Our parents were and are still extremely religious, of the Roman Catholic variety, and although the Romans left behind one of the most sexually deviant histories known to mankind, Roman Catholics loathe and shame nothing more than anything sex-related. Telling them their teenage son, who himself was adopted and the product of a teenage pregnancy, had knocked up his teenage girlfriend, was an understandably daunting task for my brother to undergo. Nonetheless, it had to happen.
He told me when they were going to do it and I made sure I was out of the house. I went across the street to my neighbor R's house and sat up in her bedroom and waited. I honestly never wanted to go back. He still hadn't told me what they were planning to do with it. I mean, on one hand she was already 18, a year older than him so it's not like she was super young. But he was still in high school and had just gotten into the Wildlife Biology program at Lake Superior State for next year - he can't be a father. I don't think he believes in abortion which is what I wish they would do. It seems like the only thing that makes sense at this point. If it was me I woulda had that taken care of weeks ago, but he was different. Our parents were hard core pro-lifers. They were Catholic and parents of two adopted kids, abandoned by their teenage mothers, who out of wed-lock, gave them the gift of life. We were the poster children for pro-life - look what can happen if you make the right decision - life! Really aborted fetuses (who i always thought looked more like burn victims staged to look like fetuses) were the poster children for pro-life, but that's because pro-life isn't about life. We were made to feel like it though. Your mothers could have made the wrong decision and you wouldn't be here, can't you see? Yes, well we saw, but we saw things differently. My brother always toed the line a little more than I did, though I think his rebellion was just more underground, while I was obvious and needed to draw attention to myself. Sitting in R's room in the upstairs of her two-story house I was always so jealous of, I imagined my brother and K giving their kid up for adoption, continuing the cycle, the tradition of catch and release in our families and our lives. It just wasn't going to happen. I knew it. If they kept it though, that fucking ugly bitch K would be around forever. God, what if they got married. I never liked her from jump. She was fake. She was always comin around being sugary sweet to me one minute, sometimes even buying me something, and then she'd turn around and be a complete cuntrag in the same breath. There wasn't room for both our nasty attitudes in my house and so we played nice on the surface but shit was always hostile underneath. I started seething as I sat there thinking about her being in my family forever. I gave them a few hours, but once it got dark and I got tired, I went back across the street to my house.
That night they had told my parents K was pregnant and that they'd decided to have and keep the baby. I remember an empty Kleenex box and that the living room felt like someone had just died in it. For whatever reason, and I still don't know if this is true or not, they told my parents that they'd never actually technically had intercourse, but somehow, she'd ended up pregnant anyways. Miraculous. So they decided to keep the baby and eventually my brother did "the right thing" and proposed to her. I knew he wasn't in love with her, I think he knew, and she was stupid if she didn't know. I never saw any spark, but maybe I was just 15 and didn't know what spark was, but my parents had spark, I knew what spark was and they didn't have it.
The pregnancy seemed to last forever and everyone talked about it in school. Eventually this became a problem because we went to very strict Catholic schools who did not look favorably on any student engaging in pre-marital sex. A teacher at my brother's school overheard some students gossiping about his situation and immediately called my parents in for a conference. He informed them that he really liked my brother and didn't want anything else unfortunate to befall him, but that they should know the school had policy against anyone known to have impregnated anyone, and that if anyone in the administration found out, my brother would be kicked out of school. He was 4 months from graduation, but apparently that wouldn't matter. And so began, Operation: Hide the Baby. My brother laid low, didn't talk about it, didn't go to prom because she was showing too much, didn't get into trouble, and just generally tried to blend into the background. My parents tried to get us family counseling. May came and went, he graduated and on June 4th, A was born. She was beautiful, everyone was healthy. My parents traded in their mantra of being failed parents for being proud grandparents, I was an aunt, and I still have a picture of my brother that day in the hospital looking like he'd barely reached puberty and with the wildest look on his face and in his eyes as if he was acting out what a crazy person would look like for a game of charades. He looked like a cartoon.
K and Baby A came to live with us for awhile. I'm not sure why but it may have had to do with her parents' neighborhood and her sister who was in a gang and still lived at the house. There were definitely guns in and around that house and there were definitely other things that might make a mom not want to bring her newborn there. Like her Dad, B, who used to call my house on the phone and ask me to giggle for him and make up nicknames for me, and whose penchant for young girls was allegedly nothing new and who eventually ended up leaving K's mom and their family right around the time he quit the fish and tackle shop, got arrested for tax fraud, and came out as a transvestite. B had secrets and made me nauseous. K had plenty of reasons not to be at her house, but maybe she just wanted to live with her baby's dad, I don't know. True to form, my parents would not allow my brother and K and the baby to sleep in the same room. K and Baby A slept on a pop-up bed and in a crib in the breezeway and my brother was in his room because it wouldn't be appropriate for anyone unmarried to sleep in a room together. Obviously.
Things eventually went sour with my brother and K - no spark plus baby equals nightmare. They broke up, moved out, my brother started paying child support and more child support. He wasn't able to accept his offer from the college up north to go away to study and he had to get another job to be able to financially take care of A. We still had A at our house 3ish days a week. At some point my brother had become close friends with K's best girlfriend, also a K, we'll call her K2, and K and K2 had "drifted apart." K2 and my brother started dating and continued to do so for a couple years. At some point K2 sat my brother down and said something to the effect of: I was K's best friend when ya'll were dating and I know for a fact she cheated on you and that baby is started not to look so much like you anymore, so you might wanna get that checked out. It was true; she didn't look like him anymore, at all. So my brother confronted K and asked her about the cheating allegations. K admitted to sleeping with 5 other guys and claimed she was raped at a party by a 6th. My brother didn't want to tell anyone until he knew for sure, so while he continued to pay child support, he saved money to get a paternity test. He told me what was going on shortly before the results were due, again my parents and everyone else were kept in the dark.
The day the results came in the mail, I was waiting for the postman in the living room and immediately ran out to grab it as I heard him shut the box on the deliverables. We knew it was coming. My parents weren't home and my brother was in his room with the door shut. I flipped through the mail quickly, picked it out, threw the rest of the mail on the floor and took it to his room. I gave it to him, walked out and shut the door, but I couldn't move away from it. I just stood there, waiting. He did it quickly, wasn't but 30 or 45 seconds before I heard something big crash into the wall and I knew he'd thrown something. I backed away from the door as he opened it and stormed out of the room down the hall into the kitchen and out the side door. I waited a few minutes, grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from my room and headed outside. We sat in a couple of lawn chairs on the grass right next to the side door underneath the crab apple tree, didn't talk really, chain smoked and cried until my parents pulled up in the driveway. I remember sitting there thinking about how not one single person in our family shared a drop of blood now. We were just a bunch of bastards. Baby A was 2 1/2.
After the results were in, K said she'd make sure my brother never saw A again if he told anyone he wasn't the father, or about her numerous indiscretions, but considering my brother had never been anything but an exemplary parent, I don't think he was too worried she'd be able to follow through on her threats. My parents were crushed, but since their own children weren't biological, they rebounded pretty quickly using the blood-isn't-love rally cry as a crutch. I was angry. I was seething. I spent months and months doing nothing in school but scribbling half-baked plots for revenge on K in my notebooks and journals. How could she do this to my brother? To us? To A? She knew the whole time. She knew it was a one out of seven shot my brother was the dad, but she choose him. She knew he'd step up, do the right thing, move her out of the hood, take care of them; and he did. He sacrificed his plans, his life, his future, everything that was supposed to be, only to get completely blindsided, used and set up in the worst way. That baby was never gonna know who her father is and it was all K's fault. I was so angry at the time when my parents didn't immediately admonish her. They weren't just civil, they were nice to her, like nothing had happened. I thought they were pulling some turn-the-other-cheek Christian bull shit, but I see now they were sacrificing the satisfaction of stewing in their anger, in order to keep their relationship with A. After everything, K still looked to them and trusted them and would bring A over to their house at least 2 or 3 days a week for a long time. I didn't see that though at the time; I was so angry. As I was prone to do, I focused on my anger so intently, the sadness never had the time to sneak in.
I don't remember a whole lot after that. I remember my parents, sadly and shamefully sharing the news with other close family members and people not know how to react or act. I remember everything being really awkward as they tried to transition a toddler from calling my brother Daddy to calling him Chris. What could she possibly understand about what was happening? What would her Mom tell her? Who's place was it to dictate these things? I left home shortly there after, but when I would occasionally come back through town I would still see A for a few years as she grew up. As she grew though, she looked more and more like her mom each time I saw her, and I hated it. The more she looked like her, the more I found myself not wanting to be around her. I felt terrible. I knew it wasn't her fault, nothing was her fault. People have babies, they make choices, and then the babies grow into live-action reminders of those choices, indiscretions, mistakes. Sometimes it's hard to look at them.
K and A lived with a man that K hooked up with shortly after her and my brother broke up. He seemed like a decent man and from what I could tell was a good father figure to A. She called him Dad. My brother had wrestled for a long time with what to do and in the end decided to take K to court to get his name off the birth certificate, so he wouldn't be financially responsible for A any longer. I wasn't living in the area for years so I don't really know what the gradual separation looked like and he doesn't talk about it. He moved on with his life. He went to college, didn't have to work multiple jobs, traveled, fell in love, and did all the things he wanted to do. He eventually moved to Alaska, K and A moved to Illinois, and my parents, and then later I, moved to California.
The last time I saw or talked to A, she was probably 6 or 7. Until I answered the phone yesterday and K was on the other end. I asked if they were having a nice Holiday, if they were in Detroit, etc. Then she put A on. I felt bad because I had to ask her how old she was, but she just sounded so different. She is 13. She sounded like she coulda been 18. I mean, she just sounded like a teenager, almost like a grown up. Her tone, inflection, everything was different. I was in awe. She seemed happy to be talking to me, but in the back of my mind the whole time I kept thinking that I should apologize for missing her entire life or something. I didn't, instead I may have tried a little too hard to push forward. She told me she was gonna be starting high school soon and that she was thinking she wanted to come to California to go to art school after that for Photography. I asked her if she liked taking pictures of people or places. She said animals. I immediately thought of my brother. I told her she should come out and visit us and we could look at schools for her some day. She was really excited by this. She said she'd never been to California yet but she wanted to. She said it'd be great to come out and go to the beach, maybe meet guys there. I laughed. I asked her for her email and told her I'd send her some pictures of California.
A bumper sticker from BastardNation.com: "Honk If You Might Be My Daddy!"
