The Banks of Certain Rivers (20 page)

“I think I’m calmed down,” she says into my chest.

“Why didn’t you call? You should have called.”

“I was scared. I was freaking out.”

“How did this happen?”

“You can’t blame me for it.”

“I’m not. I just want to know how.”

“It happened, okay? It’s not my fault, and it’s not
your fault. It just is. I’m not ready, and I don’t think
you’re ready, but it happened, and here we are. Right?”

“Okay,” I say. “It happened. What do we do? Do you
want to be with me?”

She nods, and sniffs. “Yes. I do. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Lauren wipes her eyes with her fingers.

“All right. Are we going to have the baby?” Lauren gives
me a shocked look, her mouth open, when I ask this, and I shake my
head. “I’m not saying ending it is what I want. At all.
But we need to talk about this. All of this. Do you want—”

“If we end this pregnancy,” Lauren says, “that’s
it. That ends us too. We can’t
be
, anymore, if we end
this.”

“Okay.” I say.

“Okay what?”

“Lauren,” I say, before taking a long breath to keep
myself together. I’m staring straight ahead at a bookshelf I
assembled only days ago. It feels more like an age. “If we
can’t be….” I draw another breath, and reach for
her hand. “I couldn’t take that. It would break me. I
would break. Sometimes I feel like I am barely holding myself
together. Most of the time I’m okay. But other times…If
you weren’t there, that would finish me off. I’d break.”

“It would break me too,” she says, in a voice I can
barely hear.

“Let’s not break.”

She nods, and whispers: “Okay.” She sniffs again, turns
to reach into her bag on the futon and lets out a half laugh when she
straightens back up with a handful of pregnancy tests. “I guess
we should get a second opinion,” she says. “I need to pee
anyway.” She clutches the tests with both hands and crosses the
room, but stops at the entry to her hallway.

“Come on,” she says. “Don’t leave me alone
for this one, okay?”

I follow her and stand outside the door while she goes to the
bathroom; she laughs at me and says I can come in but I wait in the
hall until she flushes. We lean together over the sink to watch the
test. The control line is there, solid and obvious, and we wait and
wait with me looking over her shoulder until, like an old developing
Polaroid, we see the second blue line fill into view.

“There’s our second opinion,” I say.

“I guess we’re having a baby,” Lauren says. She
laughs, and starts to cry at the same time. “I don’t know
if I’m ready! I don’t know what to do with a baby.”

“We’ll be fine.” I wrap my arms around her from
behind. “You love them, and take care of them, and hope they
turn out okay. That’s all you can do.”

“You love them,” Lauren says, and she turns around kisses
me. “And all this time, have you loved me? I’m not just
some secret of yours?”

“I really do. You know I do.”

“Okay. We’ll be fine then. What about Chris?”

I step back from her, and my throat tightens. “I’m going
to tell him.”

“When?”

“Soon. Sometime soon. Tonight, I think. I really should
tonight.”

“Do you want me to be there when you do it?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“I understand. Do you want me to move in?”

“What, you mean now? Today?”

Lauren laughs and sniffs, and gives me a poke in the chest. “No.
But soon.”

“Yes.”

“I can wait, a little, if that would be better for Chris. Oh,
my God, we’re going to have a baby.”

“We are.” My stomach is tight, partially with excitement,
and mostly with terror.

“And the paperwork with Wendy….”

“Stop. Can’t think about it right now,” I say. “I
can’t. Let’s get out of the bathroom.”

I step out and start down the hallway, but Lauren grabs the back of
my shirt.

“Come lie down.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, not for that. Let’s just lie down.”

Lauren tugs me into her room, and I ease myself back on the bed. She
climbs on top of me and presses her face into my shoulder.

“We’re having a baby,” she whispers. “I’m
glad I didn’t drink so much Saturday night. We’ll have to
put all our things together. Will this be our bed? It’s not as
big as yours. Most of my furniture can stay here—”

“Can the paintings stay here?”

“Stop it. I’m being serious. I’m thinking out loud.
We should keep this place. We can rent it out. We should hang onto
it. Can we set up your spare room for the baby?” She lifts her
head to look at me. “I’m sorry, do you want me to shut
up? I’m thinking all over the place.”

“It’s fine,” I say. Like her words, my own thoughts
are jumbled. Lauren’s weight feels nice on me, not suffocating,
and I drag my fingers up and down her back. “We’ll figure
it all out.”

“I should call Kristin,” Lauren says, and I cock an
eyebrow. “She wanted me to let her know that everything was
okay.”

“Is everything okay?”

“I think so,” Lauren says. “It is. Other than some
slight remorse over blowing off my clinical chemistry exam.”
She smiles. “Yes. I think everything is okay. Are you ready to
tell Chris?”

I close my eyes. “I’m ready,” I say. But I’m
not quite certain that I am.

Racing back up my
drive, I curse and smack the steering wheel when I see Christopher’s
station wagon already parked in front of our house. I wanted to be
home first. I wanted to make myself prepared. I also wanted to make
sure the pregnancy test wrapper was gone from the bathroom trash. I
can’t imagine he’d be rooting through the garbage, but
then again, who knows what could happen? I don’t want him to
find out that way.

My son looks up from his homework spread across the kitchen table
when I come through the door. He smiles and says hey, but he also
looks perplexed by my arrival. Can he sense how nervous I am? Is it
obvious to him?

“Had to run an errand,” I say. “Your grandma needed
something.” I hate how easy it is to lie sometimes.

“There was no note,” Chris chides me, reaching up to tap
the blank whiteboard. “I felt abandoned.”

“Stop it. There will be no abandonment.”

“What’s for dinner?” he asks.

“What’s for…you aren’t cooking?”

“Your night, Dad. You don’t remember? Is it old age?”

“Man,” I say, doing my best to act genuinely clueless. “I
totally forgot it was my night.” I consider, just for a moment,
taking the seat across from him at our table so I can tell him
everything. Right now. But he does need to eat, and it dawns on me
that perhaps a neutral setting might be best for the bomb I’m
about to drop on him. “Want to go out?” I ask. “Get
a burger at the brewpub? I’m pretty beat, to tell the truth.
Let’s let someone else cook.”

“Sure, I guess.” He looks over his homework, as if my
dinner suggestion will somehow be confirmed there. “That sounds
okay.”

We take Christopher’s car, and I’m mostly quiet for the
trip into town while my son tells me about his after school
activities. He catches me up on working out, student council, and the
leadership meetings he’s been attending. He’s back and
forth on culinary school, he says. I’m only half able to
listen, because my stomach is in a knot. In the brewpub’s
parking lot I pause with one foot out of the car to check my phone;
there are two texts waiting for me, one from Alan, and one from
Lauren. Both of them want to know how things are going with Chris. I
don’t write anything back.

Inside the restaurant we’re greeted warmly by the hostess;
she’s a former student (whose name I can’t remember at
all) and she seems to know Chris somehow too. She leads us upstairs
to the family seating area, and I’m relieved to see that hardly
any of the other tables are occupied. This is good. This vacancy will
help. A waiter comes and asks if we’d like anything to drink,
suggesting to me a good IPA that they’ve just put on tap.

“I….” It’s been a long time since I’ve
had a beer, but I doubt it would help. “I’m okay,”
I say. “I’ll pass.”

Chris raises his eyebrows when the guy leaves. “Thought you
were about to drink on a school night there, Dad.”

“One beer would not be so significant,” I say. “Maybe
one would help me rest. I didn’t get the best sleep last
night.”

“I didn’t either,” Chris says, and he laughs.
“Maybe I should have gotten one.” I shake my head and try
to act jovial, but the menu is trembling in my hands. Why does this
have to be so hard? Here I am, I am having a fine, happy evening out
with my well-adjusted son, knowing quite
unhappily
that it’s
all going to go to hell in a few minutes when I finally get up the
courage to tell him my not-so-good news.

“Did you hear about those sophomores, Dad?” Chris asks as
he glances over the menu. Our waiter returns with glasses of water
and takes our orders.

“What sophomores?”

“I figured you would have heard about it from Mrs. Mackie
already,” he says. “Some kid sent out pictures of his
girlfriend blowing him or something.” This nearly makes me
choke on the first sip of my water.

“Chris,” I say. My heart, as if it couldn’t sink
any lower, nearly bottoms out at the thought of the Mastersons
getting this news.

“What? I’m just telling you what I heard.”

“No, I don’t know anything about it.” What’s
another lie? “And even if I did, that stuff is confidential and
I couldn’t say anything anyway. You shouldn’t be
spreading stories around. What if it’s not even true?”

“You’re bullshitting, Dad. Everyone knows about it
already. They’re
all over
the place. Sparks said two
different people tried to show him.”

“Jesus. Did he look?”

“No, I don’t think so. He’s not stupid.”

“Good,” I say. “I’ll say something to Peggy.
I have to, now that you’ve told me about it. And if someone
tries to show you—”

“Come on, I’m not stupid either.”

This has thrown me. I don’t know what to say. What the hell, I
think. It’s time. How do I even begin? I take a long swallow of
my water, I ponder it for a moment, and the idea of framing my news
with Christopher’s own experience comes to me. This might serve
as a good way to bring it up. I take another drink, put down my
glass, and rest both my hands flat on the table.

“Chris, I have a question.”

“Yeah?”

“Okay, when you and Jill were together….”

“Dad!” he says, flushing, and I glance to see if any of
the other tables have heard him. “Do you think I’m an
idiot? We never did anything like that. Jill would have kicked my ass
if I ever asked her for pictures like that.”

“That’s not...that’s not what I’m asking.”
Great, Neil. You’re getting off to a
great
start here.
“It’s not what I’m getting at. At all. But, I am
happy to hear the news.”

“God, Dad.” Now Chris looks around to see if anyone has
noticed our conversation. “What are you asking me, then?”

“Okay, so, you and Jill, when you were together. You were
close.”

“We were super close. You know how much I liked her.”

“And you were….”

“We were…?”

I force myself to keep my gaze directed at Chris. “Intimate.”

My son presses his lips together, and snorts a little like he’s
trying to not laugh.

“What?” I say. “I’m trying to be serious
here.”

“I’m sorry.” He covers his mouth and laughs. “I’m
really sorry, Dad. It’s like you’re warming up to give
me”—he makes air quotes—“the talk. Do you
really need to? Didn’t we cover everything pretty well the last
time we had it?” He snickers at me, and I think:
This
conversation is a complete disaster.

We did indeed have “The Talk” before. Twice, actually.
Once, when he was in the sixth grade, Wendy and I sat Christopher
down at the kitchen table and calmly asked him if he knew how babies
were made. It was a very clinical discussion then, using words like
ova and zygote. The technical aspects of conception were thoroughly
covered. Later, having to deal with it all on my own, I knew—when
Chris and Jill Swart started spending most of their free time
together—that the topic would need to be broached in a more
realistic manner. After what I thought was a reasonable courtship, an
adequate amount of time for their relationship to have progressed, I
left a box of condoms on Christopher’s bed for him to find. A
good icebreaker to the subject, I believed. That night when he went
back to his room and I braced myself for the questions he’d
soon be asking, I was surprised to hear laughter coming from down the
hall.

“You’re a little late on this, Dad,” he called. “My
girlfriend is on the pill.”

“Are you serious?” I coughed. What did this mean? Jill
was smart? Slutty? Both? “Does that mean you guys are doing—”

Chris poked his head back into the living room. “It? No. Not
yet, anyway.”

“Have you ever? Or with anyone else?” Chris shook his
head, and my body sagged into the chair with relief.

“Has she?”

“I don’t think so, Dad.”

“Just be smart, okay? It’s a serious thing. Take it
seriously when you guys decide it’s time.”

“Okay.”

“Be sure you’re ready. Both of you. You don’t need
to push it.”

“We’re taking it slow,” he said. “I really
like her.”

“That’s good, Chris. Be respectful. Keep taking it slow.”

At the time, I thought it was good advice. Reflecting on it now, I
shake my head in amazement at how naive I was in regard to the life
of my own son, despite being confronted with the general craziness of
teenage life on a daily basis at work. I’m also amazed by how
lucky I got with him, even if now he is sitting here snickering at me
while he munches on French fries. He is a solid kid, just like Alan
says. And knowing this, I draw a breath and open my mouth to tell him
what I need to say.