Authors: Kerry Reichs
W
yatt’s situation with Webb Garner smarted on many levels.
The most obvious was that he didn’t want to give up the baby he thought of as his. Wyatt wasn’t a New Age type of man who wore open-toed sandals and cried about things. Wyatt was Minnesota farm stock and he didn’t cry. He was in touch with his feelings but he was neither sensitive nor frail. Wyatt didn’t wear clothes made out of hemp, and he wasn’t saddened because he longed to give birth and could not. But a gaping hole was wrenched open in him at the thought that he might never run alongside a bike in his old Adidas before letting go, heart in his mouth as his child took a first wobbledy pedal.
Second, Wyatt didn’t like being bullied, and he didn’t like it when bullies won. He wanted to set an example for his students, even if they’d never learn of it. He also wanted to punch Webb Garner’s smug face, but that was not a good example.
Underdog victories only happened in youth-oriented hockey movies. Real life high school could be a tormenting place. He needed his students to know that if they avoided the Webb Garners, memorized their French past imperfect and Pythagorean theorem, and scribbled doodles of Mr. Kelly with devil horns and a forked tongue to vent steam, they’d make it through. If his charges saw a lifetime of bullying spiraling before them, it could shatter their fledgling self-assurance that it would get better. The truth was, life got messier as you got older. Here was Wyatt, almost fifty years old and dealing with a bully. He wanted to protect his students from the fury of inequality that was adulthood as long as possible.
A tap on the door frame drew him from his reverie.
Linda was wearing a dove grey sweater dress with a circle pin, hair gathered into a knot with complicated-looking sticks. She was a powdery iris, and when Wyatt’s mind slipped her into a slim vase, she looked good there.
“You seem lost in thought, and not good ones.”
“I’m a terrible poker player because my hand falls into the eyes of everyone playing.”
“Can I help?”
Linda soothed Wyatt. Like water pooling upward, his story seeped from him and he told her everything.
“Stop my adoption or lose my job,” he concluded. “As if I’d burned a Koran, a Bible, and a copy of
Huck Finn
wrapped in the American flag on school grounds.”
Linda gave Wyatt a look of limitless compassion. “I had no idea.”
“That adoption was an act of unforgivable sedition?”
“That you were adopting at all.”
“The secrets harbored outside these walls,” he joked.
“I’m getting a divorce.” She spoke quietly. It was an offering not to be fussed over, and Wyatt accepted it as such.
“So what happens?” Linda asked.
“Paley and Lang are threatening to claim I’m sexually inappropriate with students. I’m ill at the thought that anyone believes Chris Hansen waits in my bushes to catch a predator.”
“No one would believe that for a second. Lang was fired for being a terrible teacher and a generally irritating person. His accusations are petty revenge. The strength of your character supports the school solar system in its orbit.”
“Even the reputation of Abe Lincoln could be eradicated in a one-hour newscast with discordant sound effects and grainy footage.”
“Do you really think Garner would do that?”
“He’d step on a baby seal in a spiked boot to boost his career.”
“As long as you’re still here, bad hasn’t won.”
“There’s bad, and there’s the appalling silence of good. I keep my job, and live with my inaction. I’m trying to teach the kids not to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge just because everybody else is doing it, and I’m drawing the arrases over injustice to save my job.”
“I might jump off the Golden Gate Bridge if everyone else was doing it, because if I was the only one left, the world would seem a very lonely place.” She smiled. For a moment sunlight swept though Wyatt’s clouds.
“I would do everything in my power to prevent that,” Wyatt said.
Linda continued. “You’re being unnecessarily hard on yourself. You can plug your finger in a crack in the dyke. You can’t stave off a rogue wave with one brick. Keeping your job isn’t a selfish act. The school needs you. If the other end of the rack was a public rather than a personal concern, you’d stand nose to pointy chin with Webb Garner for what you thought was right. The measure of your character is that you’d surrender your own dreams for service.”
“It’s the only answer, I suppose.” A part of him had hoped Linda would tell him to flout the threats, keep the baby, even knowing it was an impossibility. How could he have a child with no job, worse, an unemployable reputation? Worst, a child who would grow to comprehend the whispers about her father.
“Wait out the election, then see what’s what. Everything happens for a reason. I was disappointed when children didn’t work out for us, but considering . . . it turns out it was best there were no kids.”
“Linda, if there’s anything . . .”
She shook him off. “It will just take time. I’ll be as right as rain.”
“You have a classroom full of kids who think you’re the bee’s knees,” Wyatt said.
“I think you’re the bee’s knees,” she said. They shared a momentary mind meld, and Wyatt knew her regard for him had inalterably shifted. It was not an unpleasant thought.
Wyatt went to see Katherine Feely Jones with a heavy heart. He’d put it off as long as he could, riding the brakes on ordinary acts in hopes that the divide between adoption and not-adoption could be somehow reversed. He didn’t worry about Deborah. She’d shift smoothly to whichever new able-bodied adult Katherine provided, as she’d done before. They’d be good parents and the child would be fine. Only Wyatt would suffer. He worried the ache would swallow him whole.
In the anteroom to Katherine’s office, Wyatt studied the pictures of smiling children. They were white, black, Asian, fair-haired, dark curled, wearing glasses, missing teeth, a cornucopia of children. The one thing they had in common was a smiling parent. The message was
Get your kids here, we’ve got kids of all sizes, kids for everyone.
But not, it seemed, for Wyatt. That’s not my story, he thought. That’s not my happy ending.
After he’d explained to Katherine, she asked him, “Will you be okay?” He appreciated that she kept it simple.
“Eventually.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “The loss of an adoption can feel like a death, Wyatt, or a miscarriage at the very least. Give yourself space to grieve.”
Miscarriage didn’t cover everything. How long before he stopped scrutinizing babies he passed on the street? Part of him had splintered into a future that wouldn’t materialize, a phantom parenthood. He’d been confused by a movie in the nineties where every decision resulted in two realities, both alternatives fracturing in different directions, though the character followed only one. He hadn’t understood how an unelected choice could live on its own. He did now.
When he left Katherine, he was adrift. He wanted to anchor in someone else’s life for a time. He thought of Maryn’s easy understanding, and reached for his phone.
An hour later he was at the French Market. It wasn’t his favorite because the patio only got direct sun for about an hour at high noon, but Maryn loved the Mediterranean Croque.
She arrived in a scatter of haste and flurry, hair and trench coat swirling. “I’m sorry I’m late.” Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling.
“There’s no such thing as late when I have grade reports to review. I get more peace out of the office than in it.”
They took turns ordering lunch to secure the table. Once they both had food, Maryn said, “I sense something rather dramatic going on in that brain of yours.”
“I’ve given up on my adoption.” He kept it simple. “The chair of the School Board thought it was inappropriate for an unmarried high school principal to adopt.”
“Inappropriate how?”
“I’m not gay,” Wyatt explained.
“Really,” Maryn snorted. “Because my gaydar just put its hand on its forehead and passed the hell out all dramatic like.”
Wyatt hadn’t thought he could laugh, but he did. Maryn patted his hand. “If I had a sister, I’d set you up, and not because she needed new window treatments.”
“God no. I’m the go-to single guy for most of my friends’ wives. I’m set up all I can handle.”
“How does not being gay affect your adoption?”
“Apparently, straight men only want babies to make stew, skin crème, or pornography. I ended my adoption to save my job.”
“I imagine that would angry up the blood,” Maryn said. “If you really wanted baby stew.” She handed him a plastic knife. “Hold this for a second.”
She captured a leaf of arugula escaping from her plate to create new life on her linen pants. Wyatt was a little nonplussed that Maryn was making light of what he’d shared. She shook open his newspaper, holding the page taut between them.
“Now stab it.” Her voice was muffled behind the newspaper.
“What?” He was bewildered.
She peeked around the page with a little smile. “When I first lost my breast, I went to an anger therapy class. They told us to punch pillows to get rid of our anger. When we’d done that, they asked if it was satisfying. Of course it wasn’t, but that was their point—a big loss goes beyond punchin’ rage. It’s
stabbin’
rage. They handed us pointy knives and told us to stab the pillows, as if our lost breast was there and we were eviscerating it for leaving us.”
Wyatt, feeling like a fool, held the plastic knife. “Did it work?”
“I was distinctly uncomfortable.”
“Sit back.”
Her head disappeared and Wyatt stabbed the paper. After a few thrusts, it tore down the middle and he was looking at Maryn’s face, like an unwrapped present.
“You stab like you’re cutting newsprint pie.” She laughed.
“I grew up a farm boy. I know pies, not serial killing.”
“Feel better?”
“Did you?”
“I was the first to say, ‘My goodness how cathartic that was,’ because the sooner you said how cathartic it was, the sooner you could say, ‘I think you’ve helped me as much as you can help me,’ and never go back. Nothing is more profitless than going back over what interventions might have changed your current reality.”
“I keep thinking that if I think hard enough, I can come up with a solution, but I can’t. This guy isn’t fooling around. He’s never forgiven me for publicly exposing what we’ll politely call ‘gaps in his understanding’ during a math curriculum reform debate. I doubt this is the end.”
She looked thoughtful. “Is the School Board president that douche bag Webb Garner?”
Wyatt nodded.
“Now I need something to stab.” Maryn made a face, but there was merriment beneath. The gaunt, pale Maryn of weeks ago was gone, replaced by this playful version.
“You seem happy.” It made him happy too.
Maryn erased her mirth.
“Stop,” Wyatt protested. “Don’t be dour on my account. What’s up?”
She fiddled with her napkin.
“What could be worse than what I told you?” he nudged.
“I’m pregnant.” The pent-up words flung themselves at him as if they’d been ricocheting around her mouth looking for an exit.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you today. I hate feeling jubilant during your loss.” She looked miserable, but glowy. Her concern for him when she had such news was like being fed and in a bath at the same time.
“I can promise you,” Wyatt said, “nothing could bring me more joy than this.”
“Andy had a change of heart, and the implantation worked. I’m twelve weeks’ pregnant.” She was radiant. “I’ve been dying to tell you, but I was so nervous, I mean, the odds are totally against me. But it worked! It was the super smelling, that’s how I knew. God, I’m glad I can finally share —I’ve been dying to talk.” She babbled all the words no one had been there to receive.
“I thought this morning that nothing would make me happy today, but I was wrong. Maryn, this is wonderful.”
“Maybe . . .” She hesitated.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“It’s too much to ask, Wyatt.”
“Out with it.”
Hesitation. “Maybe you’d like to be my pregnancy buddy?”
“I’d love to.” Wyatt didn’t pause. “We’ve given birth together before. We’re a good team.”
“Good lord, I hope you won’t have to pull her out by the forelegs!” Maryn seemed elated and relieved. Wyatt could, at least, be her village.
“I promise to drive to the hospital very, very fast and avoid the 405,” Wyatt vowed. “If you promise to get an epidural so I don’t have to go to any classes where we hug yoga balls and practice breathing.”
Maryn shot him a look he could wield to hit a baseball. “Number one instruction on my birth plan.” She glanced at her watch. “Darn. I’ve got to run. I’m going to Buy Buy Baby.” She made a face. “Registering.”
Wyatt had been to Buy Buy Baby, a cavernous store filled with mind-boggling car seat towers, a labyrinth of layettes, and a bewildering array of things for your breasts. He recalled his Target experience with alarm.