Jamison
Three and a half years later…
I sat quietlyand watched my son, Flynn, sleep on the white leather bench of my parents’ private jet. He was sweetly snoring before the plane even took off, his insanely long eyelashes fanning across his cheeks. Something about airplanes knocked him out. In his two and a half years, we’d flown a bunch of times and within minutes of closing the cabin door, he was out cold. Sometimes, I made the joke that I should have spent the first nine months of his life living on an airplane because I might have gotten a full night’s sleep, but not today. Today, I was too nervous to make jokes.
Maggie—Flynn’s nanny and maybe the first real friend I’d ever had—strolled back from the bathroom, her shiny chocolate ponytail swinging behind her. Maggie was girl-next-door cute. She made you think of words like pert and bubbly and most likely, if you dressed her up for prom, the boy waiting downstairs would gape as she descended. But, on an average day with me, she was casual, all about jeans, a fitted concert t-shirt, and Keds. Honestly, did anyone other than Maggie still own Keds?
She ran her hands over the backs of the seats as she moved, and when she reached me, she flopped down on the seat across from me, her knee hanging over the armrest and her classic sneaker bobbing in the aisle. “I’m never gonna get used to that bathroom. It’s cray-cray. Like who expects French linens, expensive soaps, marble countertops, and chrome fixtures in an airplane bathroom? Or room for a massage chair? I mean, there is no complexity to becoming part of the mile-high club in that situation.”
I smirked and then pointed out the obvious. “Why go in the bathroom? You have the whole plane.”
“So true,” she said, rolling her eyes at herself. “See, we peons cannot think beyond our lowly status.”
I shook my head at her. Maggie was not even close to a peon. She grew up in an upper-middle-class home and was an ivy league graduate with a degree in early childhood education. She also knew I hated it when she used the word peon. It made me feel like I was some kind of rich overlord doling out scraps. But honestly, she was right, my parents’ money afforded me a ton of privileges, including but most certainly not limited to employing Maggie. Without my parents’ help, there was no way I could afford her.
My father hired her the day after I confessed to my parents that I was pregnant. I was totally against her. I wanted to move out of their house and raise Flynn on my own. I acted like a real bitch when I met her, but at lunch the following afternoon, she told my parents that raising my son in their house was not an option. She sounded super professional and used a whole lot of educational jargon. Halfway through the conversation, she secretly winked at me. The next thing I knew, I had my own house. When I asked her if any of what she said to them was true, she made a show of looking around to be sure the coast was clear and then questioned me. “Did you want to live with them?”
Stunned, I shook my head.
She shrugged. “Me neither.” And that was that.
Now, sprawled over the two seats with both knees hooked over the armrest, she looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “Oh my God, it has just occurred to me that you have probably never used a normal airplane toilet.”
She was right. I had no firsthand knowledge of the cramped toilets she was referencing in her assessment of the toilet on our plane. I’d seen them in movies but considering the snarky spite in her voice, I assumed that avoiding the physical experience of traditional airplane toilets was another example of my excessive privilege.
Her face flooded with joy. “You realize that you're a Disney princess, right?” She swung to face me, leaning her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. “Did you play with dolls of yourself as a child?” she teased.
I smiled at her but didn’t engage. I was too busy freaking out. By private jet, it was just over three hours from my front door to the little airport in Conway, Montana. I was going to see Cody. Well, sort of. I hadn’t told him I was coming. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him since I left him on the curb of his hotel almost three and a half years ago.
I thought about him quite a bit though. I thought about him every day for six weeks after our night at the quarry. I thought about him every time a friend invited me out and I just didn’t feel like going. I thought about him when I went anyway because I hated that I was still thinking about him. I thought about him when a guy asked me to dance and I wanted to say no because they weren’t him. I thought about him when each dude proved lackluster in comparison, so I had to come up with a way to bow out gracefully. I thought of him on the drive home when I was in my car alone, wishing my heart was racing as I watched him handle all its horsepower. I thought about him lying in my bed, wondering if I would ever want to orgasm with another man again.
I thought about him when I realized I hadn’t gotten my period. I thought about him counting my pills trying to figure out if I missed any. Sometimes, I did. And then, I thought about him as I stood crying in a drugstore bathroom stall, staring at two parallel pink lines on a pregnancy test. Nine months later, I thought about him when I looked at Flynn’s little face and saw Cody’s eyes.
Since then, I always thought about him. I wondered if I should have told him that I was pregnant. I told myself that I didn’t really know him. For me, that night was special, a once in a lifetime experience. I felt more connected to him than any man I’d ever known. And that was true before I found out about Flynn. At least, I think that was true. Once Flynn was born, it got harder to know whether my connection to Cody would have lasted all these years or if it would have dissipated and disappeared.
I wondered if that night was the same for Cody. How could I know? What happened between us was more than sex for me. I’ve always liked sex. I started messing around with boys when I was a teenager. Before that night, sex was a game that I loved to play. But after connecting with Cody, I didn’t want empty admiration or the high of objectification. It was like I forgot the rules of my own life. Our night together cracked open something inside my chest, like when the curtain pulls back and Dorothy sees the wizard is just a man. Suddenly, being a rich party girl wasn’t enough. After Cody, I couldn't play the game anymore. I wanted more. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to love.
That day, when I figured out I was pregnant, I passed through the initial scare of the surprise, the unplanned nature of it all, the ‘Jamison is a freaking mess, knocked up with no baby daddy’ moment, and I left the drugstore and stopped crying. I walked three storefronts down to an ice cream shop and got a scoop of mint chocolate. I sat on the little wrought iron bench outside the strip mall ice creamery, licking the sugary green treat, looking out at the sea of cars, and it dawned on me that I absolutely wanted to keep my baby. I wanted to start over, to know what it meant to have a family filled with love—like Cody did—even if I had a new and more demanding role.
So, while Flynn was genetically Cody’s son, having him wasn’t really about Cody. It was about me. And now, Flynn was my entire world. I would do anything to protect him and everything to make him happy. Being his mother was my gift. It was something I was so good at and something that made me so fucking happy that I couldn’t imagine life any other way. I literally owed Cody my life because the goodness of that night created the only living thing that had ever truly mattered to me. And once you open that box—let the love in—well, you learn to trust and love other people too, like Maggie.
I knew I should have told him. There were so many moments when I could have reached out. I was rich, so getting Cody’s number wasn’t an issue for me. I could have called just to let him know. But I didn’t want my parents to drag him into their ugliness, so I made excuses like the fact that he told me he didn’t want kids until he was way older. Or maybe he wasn’t as into me, didn’t feel what I felt that night at the quarry. Or he was the playboy counter to my party girl and just wouldn’t be a good father. I was protecting Flynn; that’s what I told myself. But that was all bullshit. Particularly because Flynn wanted to know.
“Who is my daddy, Mama?” he would ask when we read books or watched shows about families.
I would say smart things like, “Not all families are made up of mommies and daddies. Some kids have two mommies or two daddies and others, like you, have one mommy who loves them so much.” He was little, so my words were enough, but I felt like a sham, like I was lying to him because there was a man—a good one—who fathered him, and I never gave that man the option to decide if he wanted to love Flynn. So, I decided that while Flynn was still young enough to not really get it, I had to find out. I had to approach Cody and tell him the whole truth.
Hence, the plane to Conway.
Once again, sprawled on the seat across from me, Maggie shifted her weight to face me and changed her tone completely, when she asked, “Did you decide what you're going to say... or if you're going to say anything?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. What can I say?”
Maggie mimicked what she would say, “Umm… how about hi, I don’t know if you remember me but we got down and dirty about three and a half years ago and, well, would you like to meet your son?”
“Tactful,” I quipped.
“Can you be?”
“Good point.” I looked down at my hands and then back up at her. “What if he’s like a rowdy partying cowboy who is only going to bring strife into Flynn’s life? Or what if he’s married and has other kids and I’m like ruining his life?”
“Okay, first of all, that sweet sleeping cherub over there is not a life-ruiner. And secondly, what if he’s not either of those things? What if he’s the great guy you remember and he’s justifiably a little pissed but willing to shower our little Elf-Flynn with more love?” Elf-Flynn was Maggie’s nickname for Flynn that no one else took to but she insisted on maintaining.
“Then what happens? We become co-parents and Flynn spends the summers and every other holiday in Montana?”
Maggie sat straight up and scowled at me. “Stop it. This is what’s right. I’m proud of you. Also, if he tries to take our baby, I’ll castrate him with a spoon, a tiny plastic toddler spoon that I’ve sharpened with a nail file.”
I laughed around my words. “You’re ridiculous.”
She flopped back down on the seat and draped her arm across her face dramatically. “You love me.”
I did. She was the best, and most of the time, I trusted her moral compass more than my own, but when the pilot announced that we were starting our descent, I still couldn’t decide if I should have done this two years ago or if I should tell the pilot to turn the plane around.