What You Left Behind (5 page)

“There's Daddy!” my mom says to Hope as I slam the front door. She holds the baby out to me as I pass by the living room on my way to my room. “How was work?”

“It sucked.” I keep walking.

Mom follows me. “Aren't you going to say hi to Hope?”

I stop at the door to my room and slump against the doorjamb. My fingers grip Meg's journal. Hope's happy and babbling in my mom's arms, trying to grab her necklace.

“Can't you keep her in your room tonight? I've had a really shitty day. I need sleep.”

“No, Ryden. I can't.”

“But look at her—she obviously likes you better than me.”

Mom sighs. “No, she doesn't. You're her father. She loves you. I just have more experience handling babies—that's what she's responding to. You'll get it. You just need to keep practicing.”

“I don't want to.” The words are out before I can stop them. I don't even think I really mean them. Or maybe I do. I don't know.

I did everything wrong with Meg, and I really don't want to do everything wrong with Hope too. But there's a part of me that thinks I might as well stop busting my ass trying. Stop trying to get her to respond to me the way she does with my mom, stop trying to get her to stop screaming and crying and fussing whenever she's alone with me, stop trying to get her to sleep through the whole night
one
fucking
time
.

Until I find that missing piece of me, it's hopeless.

Mom frowns. A lot of women her age haven't even had kids yet, and here she is, a single, working grandmother. I know none of this has been easy on her either, but she's so much better at managing it all than I am.

Mom passes me and walks into my room. She puts Hope down in her crib, turns on her mobile with the different colored dragonflies, and then sits on my unmade bed, patting the spot beside her. “Come here.”

I drag my feet across the floor and collapse face-first onto the bed. The mobile serenades us with a tinny, four-note tune.

“Ryden,” Mom says. Her voice has that serious tone that I heard for the first time about a year ago. “We need to talk.”

“Can we talk tomorrow?” I ask into the sheets.

“No. Now.”

The lake, Alan, Joni…and now this, whatever this is. It is so not my day. I sit up and lean my head back against the wall. “What?”

“We need to figure out what we're going to do when school starts up again in September. You're not dropping out,” she says firmly.

“
What?
Why the hell would you think I want to drop out?”

“Don't look at me like that. Do you know how incredibly common it is for teen parents to drop out of high school? It's a hard balance, being there for your child, going to school, keeping up with your homework, and providing financially for your family.”

“Mom, it was
my
idea to go back to school this fall, remember?”

She continues as if I hadn't said anything. “So, you're not dropping out, and you're going to have to keep your job. But we need my job too, which means I won't be able to watch Hope while you're at school
and
while you're at work.”

Don't forget about soccer practice
.

“So we need to work something out.”

“What about day care?” I ask.

Mom raises an eyebrow. “Day care is expensive.”

As if I don't know that. We looked into a few places in our neighborhood back when Hope was first born before we decided I'd do homeschooling for a while. The cheapest one we could find was $425 a week.

“Maybe Grandma and Grandpa could help.”

“You can't drive back and forth to Vermont every day, Ryden. Besides, they're too old to take care of a baby.”

“No, I mean I could ask them for some money. To pay for day care.” After all these weeks of trying to figure out what to do with the baby when soccer starts up again, that's the best option I've managed to come up with.

Mom's expression doesn't change. “You really think that will work.”

I shrug. “It's worth a shot.”

Mom holds up her hands. “Well then, by all means, don't let me stand in your way. Can't wait for the checks to start rolling in.”

I may not know my dad, but there's no question of who I got my sarcastic gene from.

I ignore her. “I'll call them tomorrow.”

Mom gets up. “Great. Then tomorrow night, we'll talk about plan B.” She's about to leave, but Hope starts doing her baby talk thing again, and it sounds a lot like, “Da-da-da-da-da.”

Mom stops in her tracks and blasts me with the most massive, out-of-control grin I've ever seen. “Did you hear that? She's trying to say Daddy! That's right, Hope, daaaa-deeee. Daaaa-deee.”

It suddenly feels like there's some sort of Panic Creature with lots of legs and super sharp claws crawling around my stomach, through my chest, and up to my throat.

There's no way Hope is trying to say “Daddy.” She's too young for that. Right? My fingers twitch with the impulse to grab my computer and look up “average age of baby's first word,” but suddenly there's something even more pressing, something I need to do
right
now
, just in case she really
is
trying to say what Mom thinks she's trying to say.

I can't be Daddy. Not yet. Not before I know what it even
means
.

“Hey, Mom?”

“Daaaa-deeee. Daaa—”

“Mom!”

She snaps out of it. “Yeah, bud?”

“I need to ask you something, and I really hope you won't get upset.”

She lowers herself back onto the bed, and the joy in her eyes melts into worry—the same worry that was in her eyes the day Meg and I told her about the pregnancy. To her credit, she didn't freak out then. I hope she won't now.

“What's going on?”

I wish I didn't have to do this. But I'm desperate.

“I…um…was wondering if you could tell me a little more about my father. Michael.”

I watch Mom carefully. The changes are small, but they're there. A line of confusion between her eyes. A swallow of surprise. The downturn of her mouth as she deliberates. A rise and fall of her shoulders as she understands what I'm asking.

“Do you want to find him?” she asks finally.

I look away, and my gaze lands on the corner of Hope's light green baby blanket sticking out through the slats of the crib. “Da-da-da-da-daaaa,” she sings.

I nod.

“Why now?”

I open my mouth to tell her the truth, but for some reason I can't say it. “I don't know.” It's lame and obviously a lie, but Mom doesn't push it.

“Okay,” she says after watching me for a second or two. Her voice sounds surprisingly steady. “I'll tell you everything I know.”

I look back at her. “You don't mind?”

She sighs. “I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. You know I was never keeping secrets from you, right?”

“I know.”

“But, Ry…” I wait as she seems to work something out in her thoughts. “I really don't have a lot of information. The last time I tried to track him down, I hit a dead end.”

The last time she…
huh?
“You've tried to find him?”

“A couple of times. So I could have the information for you when…well, when this conversation happened. And…I guess I wanted to see what he's been up to all this time. I wouldn't mind some answers too, you know.” She fiddles with the frayed edge of her cutoff shorts, and for the first time, I see it: she was in love with my father. That's why she doesn't talk about him all that much. He broke her heart when he left her.

Suddenly I'm thinking about all the fights with Meg, her insistence on not terminating the pregnancy, her absolute refusal to even
listen
to my side of it. Even though she didn't think she was going to die, and even though it was my fault she was in the position where she had to make that choice…in a way, when she decided not to have the abortion, she was choosing to leave me too.

Mom's not the only one with a broken heart.

I put my arm around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder. “I'm sorry, Mom.”

She pats my knee. “I'd do it all again. It got me you.”

And I guess that's where our similarities end. I wouldn't do it all again. Not even close.

Hope is quiet now, asleep. The mobile continues its song.

After a minute, Mom straightens up. “His name is Michael Taylor.”

Michael Taylor. My father. The picture is becoming clearer already.

“He'd be about thirty-seven or thirty-eight now. When I checked a couple of years ago, he was no longer living in Boston. Or if he is, his information isn't listed anywhere. I actually called every Michael Taylor in Boston—came up with nothing.”

“Mom,” I whisper, “I can't believe you did that.”

She just shrugs. “There are a
lot
of Michael Taylors in the United States. And all I have to go on is his name, his incredibly common name.” She shakes her head to herself.

“You don't know his parents' names? Or what he does for work? Or anything that will help narrow it down?”

“I'm sorry, Ry. I wish I did. He was a concert promoter at the time—the kind of job you do in college, working off the books for cash. He could be doing anything now.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

She gives me a kiss on my forehead. After she leaves the room, I start Googling.

Michael
Taylor.
Approximately 531 million results.

Michael
Taylor
concert
promoter
. 126,000 results, most having to do with lawsuits against Michael Jackson's concert promoter or second-market tickets to Taylor Swift concerts.

Four hours later, I fall onto my bed, smother my face into my pillow, and scream as loud as I can.

Why does
everything
have to be so impossible?

• • •

“Hello?”

“Hi, Grandpa,” I say into the phone. “It's Ryden.”

“Hello?” he says again.

“
It's Ryden
,” I say, louder.

“Ryden! How are you?”

“I'm fine, Grandpa. How are you?”

There's a clicking on the line. “Hello?” my grandmother says from another phone somewhere else in their house.

“It's Ryden, Sylvia,” Grandpa says.

“Ryden!” Grandma says. “How are you?”

I quietly bang my head on my desk. This is never going to work. My grandparents are older than they should be. They had four kids in a row in their twenties and then got pregnant with my mom when they were forty. Unplanned babies: a Brooks family tradition.

“I'm fine, Grandma, how are you?”

“Oh, we're doing fine. How's our great-granddaughter? Is that her crying I hear?”

Clearly Grandma's hearing isn't as bad as Grandpa's. “Yeah, she's teething. Actually, that's what I'm calling about. I'm going back to school for my senior year in a few weeks, and I'm going to have to put Hope in day care. I was wondering if you guys would be willing to help pay for it. I have a part-time job, but it's not enough.”

I cross all my fingers.
Please.

There's a pause.

“Well,” Grandpa says. “How much are we talking here?”

“It's over four hundred dollars a week,” I admit. “I know it's a lot, but—”

“Ryden, I'm sorry,” Grandpa says right away.
Can't he even take some time to think about it first?
“We would help you if we could, but we just don't have that kind of money.”

“I understand,” I mumble.

“How about this—we'll send you a check for a hundred dollars. I know it's not much, but it will help.”

“Yeah. It will.” Not enough though. Not nearly enough. “Thanks.”

“And please bring that little cutie around to visit us soon,” Grandma chimes in.

“I will. I promise.” I pause, debating whether to ask them my next question. Oh, fuck it. “Do you guys remember my father?”

“Your father?” Grandpa repeats.

“Yeah.”

“If I ever meet that bastard, I'm going to wring his neck with my bare hands until he's pleading for mercy.”
Jesus, Grandpa.
He's shouting now; his bald head is probably beet red and shiny with sweat, his veiny, wrinkled hand surely gripping the phone way too tightly.

“Never mind, it's okay,” I say, not wanting Grandpa to rage himself into a heart attack. One death on my hands is more than enough, thank you very much. But then his words sink in. “
If
you ever meet him? You mean see him
again
, right?”

“Never met him, never want to.” The disgust in Grandpa's voice is heavy.

I let all the air out of my lungs. Michael must have been even more elusive than I thought. “So you don't have any information about him?”

“Information? Not a chance. He never even saw fit to grant us the courtesy of an introduction, Ryden. We could see him every day—he could be our
mailman
, for crying out loud—and we wouldn't know it.”

Another dead end.

“Okay, well, thanks anyway. And thanks for the money.”

I hang up the phone. A hundred dollars. I mean, it's a hundred dollars I didn't have yesterday. But that money will only pay for one day of day care.

What
the
fuck
am
I
going
to
do?

Humans should be more like deer: a few minutes after they're born, they start to walk; a week later, they start going to look for food with their mothers; and a year after that, they're on their own. Simple.