What Came First (32 page)

I shove my credit card in my front pocket, and he hands me a photograph of Ian at three or four wearing overalls, sitting on a curb. My initial reaction is confusion—and fear. What is he doing with an old picture of Ian? And why is it in black and white?

And then it hits me. “This is you?”

He shakes his head. “My father.”

“Oh my God.”

“This is me.” He hands me another picture, in color this time, of a preschool-aged blond boy on a tricycle. It is not Ian, but the resemblance is uncanny.

I say, “I have a picture of Ian that looks just like this. Even the posture and the expression. Only he’s not in a driveway, he’s in a park. Oh! Of course. You got the pictures I sent.”

He nods. “Vanessa wasn’t too—you know. When I told her I was coming here. But . . . I guess I wanted to see your reaction. If you thought Ian looked as much like my dad as I do.”

I nod. “It’s eerie.”

I don’t mean to stare so intently at Eric, to examine the line of his jaw, the shape of his eyebrows, the color of his hair, but I can’t help it. This is what Ian is going to look like someday. And if I have another child—if Eric has come to tell me he will donate despite his girlfriend’s objections—he or she might look like him as well.

He reaches into a pocket and hands me a third photo, this one of four children on a beach. “This is me later, when I was about Ian’s age. I’m the one on the end.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. Eric is the child in the photo who looks most like Ian, though by then he could no longer pass for his almost-twin. I feel a weird stab of disappointment.

“Your brothers and sister?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.”

I search the faces for hints of my son. Maybe there’s something around the eyes over here, maybe something around the mouth there.

A car, as small and beat up as Eric’s, parks behind the Ford Focus. A guy in a red shirt climbs out, balancing an insulated square.

“Have you eaten?” I ask Eric.

In the kitchen, I place the pizza box on the stove and rummage in a cabinet for paper plates. “Sorry the house is such a mess. My nanny is away for a few weeks, and everything pretty much falls apart without her.”

My brain whirs as I try to find the words to explain Eric’s presence to Ian—and, perhaps more importantly, the best way to revisit the donation issue. On the first count, I am too slow.

“Are you going to help my mom try to have a baby again?”

At the sound of Ian’s voice, I spin around and begin to blabber. “Ian! Buddy. Eric’s here. Say hi to Eric.”

Eric opens his mouth and looks from Ian to me. He looks at my stomach. “So, I guess that means . . . it didn’t . . . you’re not . . .”

It hits me, right in the gut: his fiancée didn’t tell him that the insemination failed. Which means he has not come to offer another donation.

“It didn’t,” I say. “I’m not.”

He bites his lip. “I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I fumble with the pizza box, annoyed to note that my hands are shaking. “Who wants pepperoni pizza?” I chirp, my voice sounding like a stranger’s.

“I do!” Ian says.

Eric says nothing, and I remember, too late, that he is a vegetarian. If he tells Ian that pepperoni comes from an animal, I’ll . . .

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” he says.

I flash him a smile filled with gratitude just as he adds, “Plus, I don’t eat meat.”

While I boil water for macaroni and cheese and set the table (taking clean dishes straight from the dishwasher), Ian takes Eric out back to see the chickens. The initial shock having passed, I feel anxious about his presence and its implications for the future. If he didn’t come to talk about a donation, why is he here? Is he looking to have some kind of role in Ian’s life? And if so, is that a bad thing?

With shocking regularity, people—some I hardly know—will ask me why I don’t date. I tell them that my son is my number one priority: I have neither the time nor the desire to have a man in my life. The time part is true, and desire is something I rarely contemplate, at least during my waking hours. But the primary reason I have avoided a relationship is because the odds are so high that it wouldn’t work out. I’d encourage Ian to form an attachment to a man, only to watch him walk away. Or—and this is just as bad—to have me send him away.

Better to have loved and lost? I think not.

Still, when I look out the window and see Ian next to the man who contributed half his DNA, both bent forward next to the coop, gazing at the chickens with wonder, I can actually feel my chest loosen and fill with warmth. Eric Fergus came over here on his own accord. Maybe there’s room in his life and in his heart for a little boy—within limits, of course. A supervised visit every few months. An exchange of photographs.

I stir the macaroni. When I look out the window again, Ian appears upset—angry, even. I rush out of the kitchen and into the backyard.

“Just not fair!” Ian says, hands clenched into fists at his side.

Oh my God. Is he talking about my failed pregnancy attempts?

“That’s a stupid law,” Eric says, with equal ferocity. At least they seem to be on the same side of . . . whatever.

“It’s retarded,” Ian says.

“Don’t say ‘retarded,’” I call out. It’s awful how kids throw that word around.

Eric and Ian look surprised to see me.

“But it is retarded that we can have chickens but not roosters,” Ian says. “It’s sexist and discrimination.”

It’s really, really hard not to laugh. “Roosters crow,” I say. “No one wants to listen to them.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Ian says.

“The neighbors would.”

“You might be surprised,” Eric says. “They might actually like it. Shades of the country and all that.”

“Well, it’s against city regulations, so we won’t have a chance to find out.”

“That’s retarded,” Eric says. He catches himself. “Sorry.”

Ian laughs. And then, before I’ve had a chance to decide whether or not to chastise him again, he says, “My mom wouldn’t let us have roosters anyway because they’d have sex with the chickens.”

“No. I said we couldn’t have them because they’re noisy and aggressive. And also because we don’t want—or at least need—the eggs fertilized.”

“Same thing.” Ian grins at me, though clearly his performance is intended for Eric’s benefit.

I consider pulling Ian aside, but sometimes the best way to extinguish bad behavior is to ignore it.

“I’ll go check on the mac and cheese,” I say.

Eric, having apparently forgotten that he is not hungry, puts away two big bowls of Annie’s organic macaroni and cheese. Ian, having digested the idea that pepperoni is not just meat but mystery meat, downs one bowl. They both drink milk and nibble baby carrots, which they slip under their gums to make orange fangs.

So this is what it feels like to have two children.

I eat two slices of pepperoni pizza, sip a small glass of Chardonnay, and feel like I am three thousand years old.

After dinner, Ian asks Eric if he likes video games. I fully expect Eric to say video games are fun but he really has to be heading home. Instead, the two boys—that is how I’m thinking of them—scurry off to the den. Soon I hear battle sounds and laughter.

When I became pregnant for the first time all those years ago, back when I was married, I felt certain Rob would be a good father, despite his misgivings. He was solid. A good provider. Responsible. I imagined him teaching our child things: skiing, maybe, or how to use a hammer. (Was Rob good with tools? I can’t even remember.) I pictured family vacations and holiday mornings.

Never, though, did I imagine Rob just hanging out with our child. Laughing. It’s not that Rob was humorless—he had a dry wit—but he wasn’t . . . fun. Of course, I’m not a barrel of laughs either, so it’s not surprising we seemed so well matched.

I wonder if parenthood has taught Rob to live in the moment the way it has me. Somehow, I doubt it, though I hope for his children’s sake it has.

There is whooping down the hall. “I creamed you!” Eric shouts.

Clearly, Eric does not need any assistance on the carpe diem front, though his goal-setting skills could use a little work.

When I go in at nine o’clock to tell Ian to get his pajamas on, he begs for more time, but Eric takes the cue. “I gotta hit the road,” he says, standing up. He holds his hand out sideways, and he and Ian do that front-slap, backslap, knuckle-bump thing peculiar to the male sex.

“Later, dude,” he tells my son.

“Later,” Ian says, wondering, I am sure, just how much later that means. In a month? A year? Never?

I walk him to his car. “Thanks for coming out.”

He jingles his car keys. “I hope it’s . . . I didn’t mean to . . . was this okay?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Cool.” He turns toward the car.

“Eric?”

He turns back.

“Would you consider donating more of your sperm?”

He blinks once. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Okay, then.”

Nothing says “first day of summer camp” like a hundred and five degrees in the shade and a seven-foot-long gopher snake in the backyard.

“How many weeks is camp?” My mother has called to wish the kids good luck. I haven’t told her about the snake, which we’ve sighted four times in the past week.

“Three,” I say. “And then they’ll be back in school.”

Harrison and Sydney take turns talking to Gammie. Sydney says, “My pink dress . . . no . . . no . . . I dunno, for my birthday.”

“Have you bought their back-to-school clothes yet?” my mother asks when I get back on.

“There’s no summer-weight stuff left in the stores,” I say. “I bought a bunch of sale stuff at Target in May, but it’s already kind of small.”

“You want me to check the stores here?” she offers, as I knew she would.

“That would be great,” I reply, as she knew I would. She grabs a pencil, and I rattle off current sizes.

“If you lived here, we could shop together,” she says, as if for the first time. “When your sister and Jade were here last month, we had such a lovely time at the stores. We even went out for high tea, did I tell you that? Jade looked so adorable.”

“Mm.” I thought I was done hearing about all the lovely and adorable things my adorable four-year-old niece did on her last lovely visit.

When Harrison yanks open the slider, I tell my mother I’ll call her after I drop off the kids.

I chase my son into the already-hot yard. “Inside! Inside!”

He ignores me. Or maybe he takes that as a challenge. In any event, he sprints for the wash, which was a stream for about twenty minutes following yesterday’s monsoon but is now back to being a dry, rock-lined drainage ditch. My pulse quickens when a shadow twitches against the rocks, but it’s just a branch of the mesquite tree, quivering in the wind.

I scan the concrete, gravel, and wash for the snake, but there is no sign of him. Her. It. Ever since Harrison heard Darren say that gopher snakes are not dangerous—in fact, by claiming the territory and depleting the rodent population, they help keep rattlesnakes away—Harrison has been intent on seeing the reptile up close and personal. I, in turn, have been even more uptight than usual, and that’s saying something.

“I’m going to count to ten!” I yell. I saw another mother do this recently, and I couldn’t believe it worked.

“One . . . two . . . three . . .”

I get all the way to nine and eleven-sixteenths before Harrison gives up on the snake and trots back into the kitchen, where Sydney is nibbling on a cookie. (Not the most nutritious breakfast in the world, but are Fruit Loops any better?)

Five minutes later, they are buckled into their car seats. Two brand-new beach bags (one pink, one green), stuffed with sunscreen, swimsuits, towels and lunch boxes (one Disney princesses, one a medley of hideous sci-fi action heroes), snuggle on the chair next to me.