Forever Right Now

My voice was strong despite my trembling jaw, and the voices that answered were just as strong, lifting me up and carrying me on a simple, two-word current of acceptance.

“Hi, Darlene.”

Sawyer

I soothed Olivia back to sleep. The thunder quieted so that she was nodding off on my shoulder within minutes. I held her for a long time, my eyes closed, feeling her little weight and warmth against my chest.

Is this one of the last times?

I fortified myself against the thought, but hope was draining out of me, minute by minute. It didn’t matter how much I loved her and that I thought of her as my own. The paternity test would read 0% probability, in black and white, and the judge’s ruling would be final.

The impassivity of the law I’d taken such great comfort in was now a faceless stranger turning its back on me, uncaring that my heart was breaking.

I set Olivia gently down in her bed and went out. Outside the living room window, rain was still falling in sheets and Darlene was out in it.

Her heart was broken too, and I’d broken it. Shattered it into tiny pieces when I’d taken Olivia out of her arms.

“Fucking asshole,” I muttered, but my voice cracked at the end, my throat thick.

I’d been holding on to anger at the revelation of her past; using it to keep the pain at bay, but it hit me hard like a heavy fist to the chest. Darlene wasn’t why I was going to lose Olivia, but—Jesus Christ—my life was infused with addictions. My mother, Molly, and now Darlene? Was I destined to lose her too?

The fear, anger, confusion all swirled in me like a tornado, and at its center, in the calm eye, was what I felt for her.

“What the fuck do I do now?”

I sank into the chair at my desk and pulled out my phone for the hundredth time. No messages or texts, but why would there be?

“There won’t be. Because I broke her heart,” I muttered and felt each syllable stab me.

I typed a text.

Tell me you’re okay.

I backspaced it away. She didn’t owe it to me to make me feel better.

Are you okay?

I deleted that too. Of course she wasn’t okay. I’d seen to that.

I’m sorry.

My thumb hovered over the send button but I was too chickenshit to push it. And too ashamed.

Another voice whispered in my ear, like the proverbial devil on my shoulder. What if she was doing hard stuff? What if she associated with felons or owed money? Maybe she moved clear across the country to escape bad people? You want that kind of stuff around Olivia?

My excuses about what I didn’t know about Darlene fell apart under the sheer weight of all that I did know about her.

And what I felt about her.

I hit ‘send.’

I sat at the desk, listening to the rainfall and waiting to see if she’d read the message. Waiting for her to answer. Waiting for her to tell me that she was okay. The thought flitted into my head that she might be doing something to herself that she shouldn’t, but I swatted it dead.

You know nothing about her situation because you didn’t ask. You shut down on her.

That was one truth. The other was that the image of Darlene, standing in a doorway, being held by another man, was an added layer of misery. Another crack in my stony heart that was already on the verge of shattering, and the emotions that seeped out weren’t any I recognized.

“That’s because you’re a fucking asshole,” I said, dully.