The Baby Gate. A Memoir.
So that’s how a fatherhood ends. A few UPCs, like those you find on packs of toilet tissue, delivered via email.
Sophia Corinne Salerno did not cry at her birth—and, at least in the two short years I knew her, seldom cried thereafter. She entered my life with eyes open and unblinking; from the first, she took her breaths with a calm self-possession that would prove invaluable in weathering the drawn-out nightmare of her parents’ uncoupling. It was Sophia’s misfortune to be born into a relationship whose principal players were united in just two things: their love for her and their contempt for one another. On this one anodyne day, however, both of them—my son and Sophia’s mother, Jessica—beamed at each other as I’d never seen them beam before, and would not see them beam again.
Although I had no way of knowing it, the day of Sophia’s birth was a perfect metaphor for the double-edged role the child would come to play in my life: a day of gorgeous platinum sunshine bounding off two-day-old snowdrifts, filthy and unappetising as only aging urban snowdrifts can be. We then lived, all of us, in Indianapolis. The date was February 2, 2000. Groundhog Day. My wife Kathy took to calling Sophia “our little groundhog.” She said it in a soft, singsong voice that somehow wasn’t cloying; we all began referring to Sophia that way, with that same intonation. Even my burly, thuggish son said it that way, merely substituting “my” for “our.” And now, more than two decades later, despite all that has happened—even despite the shattering news that recently blindsided us after years of healing—I still remember Sophia that way. I hear that soft, singsong nickname.
After the baby’s placid demeanour, the other primary topic of conversation was her lack of hair. “Our first baldy!” Kathy exclaimed with a mixture of surprise and delight. Up until then, every baby in the family had been born with a full head of dark curly hair. A baby without hair was a landmark event. Kathy ascribed it to Jessica’s genetic influence. (We hadn’t yet seen the baby pictures of Jessica in which she, too, had a full head of hair.) My son, meanwhile, good-naturedly chided the new mom, “Hey, Jess, you sure she’s mine?”
Jessica laughed—we all laughed—but it became one of those lines that tug at the hairs on the back of your neck when remembered, later, after everything changes.
Nine months earlier Jessica and my son had driven her rusting, malodorous Ford Bronco to Chicago in celebration of his 22nd birthday. Technically they went in deferred observance of the 21st birthday that he never got to celebrate: That milestone birthday had fallen in the middle of the six months he spent in an Indianapolis jail after an altercation that left another young man unconscious and bleeding on a downtown sidewalk. That’s pretty much how it went with my son, back then. Although there must’ve been more to his early years than I now recall, the pages of my mental album from the period turn as a succession of collect calls from places he was asked to leave: parties where he’d started (or finished) fights, malls where he got run out by security.
One day the calls began arriving from police stations; the cops insisted that he stay.
In bed was where he and Jessica stayed for most of their time in Chicago, as he later told it—more colourfully.
They’d met in a bar one Friday a few weeks before the Chicago trip, returning to our lakeside condo so late that neither Kathy nor I had any idea he’d brought someone home till I got up to make coffee the next morning. I heard the toilet flush in the bathroom opposite my son’s room, which was adjacent to the kitchen, at the far end of the hall from our bedroom. I was about to ask if he could handle some eggs when the bathroom door creaked open and I watched a tall, curvy blonde pad back to his room, seemingly wearing nothing but one of my son’s oversized sweatshirts. She broke stride just long enough to throw me a sideways glance and a sleepy little smile.
I took my coffee back to bed and shared this news with my groggy wife, who shrugged and went back to sleep. There was no reason to be shocked. In spite of spending most of the time since his release from jail on house arrest, my son had been leading anything but a monastic life. Kathy and I often remarked at the number of provocatively attired girls who came and went at various hours of day and night. Sometimes they brought pizza or Taco Bell; I’d had to laugh one afternoon when I heard my son greet one of his sexy visitors by asking, quite soberly, “You have plenty of hot sauce, right?”
They’d disappear behind the closed door of his room and watch TV while sharing the delivered meal. Then the lights would go out, the TV would go off, and we’d hear nothing further from that quadrant of the house for the next hour. “At least,” Kathy once said, “they’re quiet about it.”
I suppose we shouldn’t have permitted such libertine behaviour under our roof, especially at a time when our son was still atoning for his sins. In my defence, I was just grateful to have him home safe. For years, even the routine comings and goings of teenage life had always made me jittery and morose till I heard his heavy gait in the hallway again. It’s a state of mind that surely sounds overwrought to parents who never had their sleep broken by deputies with K-9 backup pounding on the door, or who managed to get through spring cleanings without once finding a .45 hidden under their child’s mattress. Back when my son was still an infant in his crib, I’d had all the usual fears of him dying during sleep, so when I awoke in the wee hours I’d pad into his room and lean over him in the darkness to listen for his soft breaths. Countless parents do this, and for most of them the sense of impending doom subsides in time. For me the fear simply mutated into a more abiding sense of the tragic ending that, I felt, lurked just a phone call away.
And so if my son bent the rules—what should’ve been the rules—we looked the other way. Our boy was okay. That’s what mattered.
And while there were many girls who came and went, prior to Jessica they always went. She was the first to stay the night.
That first morning, the twosome emerged from my son’s room a few hours after I’d first seen Jessica. Kathy got up as well, and I fixed breakfast for the four of us. No explanations for Jessica’s presence were volunteered, and the introductions could not have been more casual.
“Jess, this is my Dad.”
“Hey, Jess. You like your eggs scrambled or sunny side up?”
“Scrambled would be great.”
“Some OJ?”
“Sure, thank you very much.” She added matter-of-factly, “I feel a bit dehydrated.” (I thought I heard my wife sigh.)
Sitting about as far from Kathy and me as was possible at a six-foot dinette, my son and his new lady giggled and good-naturedly rough-housed their way through breakfast, poking and punching each other’s upper arms, thereby setting a boisterous physical pattern that endured to the end, with Jessica always giving at least as good as she got. Later in the relationship, when all the good nature was gone, my son would switch to mostly defensive slaps to deflect the fists and flying feet that Jessica aimed at his face, groin, or anywhere else she hoped to land a decisive blow. She would also break various household items over his head.
But that first morning, for all the rough-housing, Jessica came across as sweet and vulnerable, constantly flashing an impish, crinkle-nosed grin. She seemed utterly without artifice. We learned that she was estranged from her parents—“after a while, we got sick of disappointing each other”—and not all that close with her one sibling, an older brother. She went on at length about how much she had loved playing girls’ softball. “I could hit the ball as far as the guys!” she boasted. But that love paled before her love of children, she said, adding, “I want a big family someday. A big family.” She satisfied that need in the meantime by taking on sporadic assignments as a nanny. Her overall financial posture was, she confessed, precarious. She lived in cheap apartments of her own when she could afford it, and with girlfriends—or expedient male hosts—when the funds ran out. She shared the latter revelation as casually as if she were telling you what kind of car she drove.
Maybe it wasn’t the lifestyle you’d pick for your daughter, but on Jessica it all sounded touching, not tacky.
When she gathered up her belongings to leave—a lacy, nude-coloured bra dangling off her forearm in plain sight—we followed her to the door.
“It was nice meeting you,” said Kathy. “Come anytime.” That set off another round of giggles.
In the ensuing weeks, Jessica took my wife at her word and then some. She became a fixture in my son’s room till the day they left for the Chicago trip.
Alas, the honeymoon proved short-lived. Days after returning from Chicago they had a genuine donnybrook over a call he received from one of his erstwhile pizza partners. We were all sitting in the living-room when it happened. They’d been laughing and flirting in an unabashedly sexual way when they were drowned out by the hip-hop drumbeat of my son’s cellphone, which grew louder and more obnoxious as he withdrew it from the pocket of his saggy shorts. (I’d asked him to lower the volume several times, so naturally he’d made it as loud as possible.) He got up and retreated to his bedroom to take the call, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. I couldn’t make out any actual words, but his now-and-again laughter oozed that same sexuality that had coloured his banter with Jessica moments earlier.
He was on the phone for a good ten minutes. Jessica remained on the couch in front of us at first, hands clasped stiffly in her lap. But the pretty smile she tried to maintain for our benefit grew increasingly tight-lipped; her straight-ahead stare took on a feral quality. I was reminded of that scene from The Godfather after Michael returns from the john with the hidden gun, and we know it’s just a matter of time before he’ll plug Sollozzo and the crooked cop in mid-veal.
And so, with what sounded like an actual growl, she bolted to her feet, marched into my son’s room and slammed the door behind her hard enough to rattle the delicate porcelain hummels above the fireplace.
Seconds later the door flew open again and their tandem fury exploded into the living room. Over the next five minutes they spat more profanities at one another than my wife and I had exchanged through the ups and downs of a quarter-century of marriage. When I rose to intervene, Kathy gripped my elbow, then also got up and tugged me back toward our bedroom.
“It’s a no-win situation,” she whispered, though whispering was hardly necessary, given the volume with which the two of them were cursing. “One or both of them will think you’re taking sides. Let them get it out of their system unless it turns violent.”
No sooner had we reached our bedroom door than Jessica aimed a series of max-effort karate-style kicks at my son’s crotch; he pivoted so that the blows landed on his hip and buttocks. I darted over to referee, but Jessica was in no mood for peacemaking. She let loose with the fiercest fuuckkk youuu!! I had ever heard and stomped out.
For several weeks my son acted as if she’d never existed, though the ruddy bruises on his lower body testified otherwise. Then one day he made a halfhearted effort to patch things up via telephone. In my son’s retelling, the dialog went like so:
“Hey Jess, it’s me. I wondered if maybe you wanted to get together.”
“Why? So you can make a fool of me again?”
“Why do you have to start with that shit?”
“Go tell it to one of your whores.”
“Oh, they’re whores, huh?”
“Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you.”
“Asshole!”
“Cunt!”
Click.
Within a month they’d lost touch altogether. One of my son’s friends later told him that Jessica was living in a seedy apartment above the downtown pawn shop where she now worked. She’d had a somewhat better job when she first met my son but lost it after blowing off several days of work to partake in one of their nonstop fuckfests.
Then one September day my wife, my son and I arrived home from shopping to find a crude note taped to the door. In thick felt-tip lettering, and with misspellings preserved, it read:
YOUR GOING TO HAVE A DAUGTER, SEE YOU IN COURT
My son grumbled indignantly, “My ass she will.”
Kathy could not let it go at that. In bed that night she leaned over and said, “We have to help them, Stephen.”
“Them? What them? Honey, they hate each other.”
“I don’t think that’s really true. They’re just—tempestuous? Anyway, it’s not about them.” She drew a deep, soulful breath. “The baby is an innocent in all this. What’s this poor child going to have otherwise? You want her being raised above a pawn shop, with random ‘uncles’ drifting in and out of her life?”
Kathy gestured in the direction of our son’s room. “Besides,” she added, “this is a second chance for him. Maybe it’s not the way you’d plan to have a child come into your life, but she’ll be someone for him to love, and to love him back. Maybe this will straighten him out.”
If Kathy was not specifically put on this earth to be a grandmother, she should have been.
She took a personal hand in brokering a reconciliation, and within weeks had persuaded them to lease an apartment near us. We cosigned on the app and paid the first and last months’ rent.
“Now they can build some basic sense of partnership before the blessed event,” said Kathy.
II.
And blessed the event was. From my first glimpse of what was visible of Sophia—between the protective skull cap and the enshrouding receiving blanket—there was something magical about the connection between us. She would search my eyes in a way that seemed to affirm that connection at some deep, spiritual place. Yes, I am aware of how odd that sounds. I too would once have gagged if I heard a man my age describe the intensity of his bonding moments with a days-old infant. I can only tell you that Sophia looked at me differently from the way she looked at others; everyone commented on it. At times her tiny mittened hands would shake in seeming frustration at our not being able to actually converse. She was just so open to me (and in that regard, so unlike her mother. I’d glance over at Jessica, wanting to share my euphoria at what she’d brought into the world, and she’d look away. Quickly, deliberately, not at random).
And Sophia was so damned happy. To all appearances, everything pleased this baby; nothing bothered her. So unlike her mother and father, who seemed bothered by every last thing about each other and seldom passed up an opportunity to let that botheration be known. Loudly.
The new parents made several fresh/false starts as a family. Like myriad couples before them, they tried to add symbolic weight to each attempt by trading one setting for another. A new apartment. A new section of the city. And like myriad couples before them, they realised each time that what they now had was the same crappy relationship in a different venue. Every so often they’d move in with us, either because they couldn’t make the rent or the relationship had grown so acutely incendiary that they needed peacemakers at hand. When I landed a coveted editing job in Pennsylvania and Kathy and I moved east, they decided to join us in our new condo. Another fresh start.
And another familiar finish. Daily the profanities flew back and forth, sometimes punctuated by one of Jessica’s punches or kicks. I had to give my son credit; though legendarily hot-headed, he would grit his teeth as he did his best to suppress his more violent inclinations for Sophia’s sake. “What she sees from her mother is bad enough,” he explained. That did not mean he kept his voice low or calm.
Sometimes I could hear the histrionics from the street as I pulled into the driveway after work.
Yet as the weeks passed, if I never quite knew what chaos I might encounter upon arriving home, I knew at least that my little Sophia, hearing my footsteps on the long interior staircase, would lose interest in whatever else she was doing and crawl or stumble towards me as best she could. She’d even squirm for release from Jessica’s maternal embrace in her endeavors to reach me. We usually met just as I stepped over the child-proofing gate at the top of the stairs, where she’d do her best to hoist herself up on my trousers. I’d pick her up and she’d nestle into the hollow of my shoulder, lay her head down, go limp, and begin to coo. I patted her back as I held her, and one night she began patting my shoulder in return.
In my fifty years I had never known a more serene feeling. Somehow those moments of serenity drowned out the screaming in the background.
We celebrated Sophia’s first birthday by reserving the condo clubhouse and inviting all relatives within reasonable driving distance. Jessica and my son celebrated the festive occasion by separately fleeing into the near-freezing temps in a blind rage; first he stormed out, then they patched things up, then an hour later she stormed out. Sophia, cradled in my arms for much of the fête, hardly seemed to notice. Afterwards, the combustible parents decided that they’d diagnosed the real problem: their new beginnings to date hadn’t been sufficiently dramatic or consequential.
Hence, they announced, their newest new beginning would be in that quintessential lotus-land of reinvention: California.
On moving day, Kathy and I looked on as Jessica strapped the baby into the cab of the moving van. Sophia reached for me but Jessica was disinclined to allow me a final hug. “We need to get started,” she said flatly. Sophia looked distressed.
My son locked the van’s back door, jumped off the tailgate and stood awkwardly in front of me and his mother. “I guess we’re on our way,” he said, smiling broadly, the tautness of his mouth highlighting the tiny scar on his upper lip from when Jessica had broken a lamp across his face.
He then pivoted on his heels and joined his girls in the truck. Jessica yelled brightly, “California, here we come!” The baby cackled with laughter. Sophia never stayed sad for more than a minute or so.
The truck’s clanking engine roared to life. They lurched out of the driveway without a backward glance.
Kathy and I stood numbly, arms around waists, till we could no longer hear the truck’s growling motor in the distance.
When I began to turn us toward the house, my wife stiffened against me. “I can’t go back inside yet. I don’t want to have to see them not there. Or find one of the baby’s toys they forgot.” She pulled away softly and walked around the side of the house to have one of the good private cries she allows herself now and then. Presently she looked back at me.
“Maybe San Diego will be good for them,” she said, toneless, just mouthing the words.
III.
Out West, the pattern picked up where it had left off. The only difference was that the rancorous arguments now took place with palms instead of maples for a backdrop. Jessica began drinking to excess. In July, with a cease-fire very much in order, Jessica took Sophia to her family’s annual reunion at an campground in Ohio. Kathy and I were only too happy to make the 12-hour round trip that would give us a few precious hours with our granddaughter.
Pulling into the campsite, I scanned the dirt road ahead of me and the series of modest wood buildings framing it, impatient to find the numbered cabin Jessica had indicated. But my eyes soon settled on a rosy-cheeked form toddling her merry way from one end of the play area to the other. I swerved the car haphazardly into a parking spot on the far side of the dirt road. Having not seen the baby in five months, I feared she might have forgotten me, and was desperate to get to her. The closer I got to Sophia, the more I marvelled at the crop of golden curls that had sprouted since February.
Within a few feet of her I stopped, bent at the waist and smiled down at her. For a moment Sophia studied me. Then she took a step forward and stretched out her arms. When I lifted her up, she settled into position on my left shoulder and began patting me. Just like old times. I choked up and began sniffling, and she now began rubbing my back in broad circles, just as I had rubbed her back on those rare occasions when she’d cry. Tears streamed down my cheeks. She rubbed my back in the broadest circles her little arm could make.
Jessica was cordial to us, less furtive in her ways. Laughing, joking. Kathy and I agreed that she made us feel like family.
No sooner had she returned to California, however, than she declared her intention of taking Sophia to live with her mother in Colorado “for awhile.”
“How long awhile?” my son pressed.
“We’ll see,” she responded.
That didn’t ring true to any of us given her grim descriptions of the lifelong chill in the air between her and her mother. She’d made their occasional rapprochements sound as volatile as her relationship with my son.
Steve Salerno
Hoping to defuse my son’s objections to her latest plan, Jessica cautioned that she “knew things” and could “make life hell” for him. Kathy flew to California to spend a bit more time with the baby the week before Jessica’s planned departure. (Work kept me in Pennsylvania.) Wary of jumping into a hornet’s nest, my wife stayed with our daughter, who by then was living a short drive from our son. Jessica agreed to drop the baby off on two consecutive afternoons.
The night of the first drop-off, Kathy called me to report that Jessica had “done a complete 180 since Ohio. She’s so aloof. Worse than before. No small talk, no ‘How have you been?’ She just said ‘I’ll be back at 5’ and took off. And at 5 on the dot she scooped up the baby and was gone.”
More troubling yet, Kathy spotted some biker type with a gigantic tat on his neck slouched behind the wheel of the car. (“She’s been seeing guys practically ever since we got out here,” my son told me later. “So much for new beginnings.”)
Jessica did indeed stay with her mother in Colorado—for under a week. She then scooped up the baby again and headed back to Indiana, where she had grown up, met my son, given birth. She said she’d “be staying with friends.” Kathy and I called to check on the baby; our phone messages went unreturned. When Jessica began dodging my son’s inquiries as well, he decided to call her bluff. He walked into family court two weeks before Christmas and accused her of abducting his daughter.
The system kicked into action with a vigour that shocked me, accustomed as I was to horror stories about bureaucratic lassitude and screw-ups in the handling of such domestic matters. A judge issued an interim order sending Sophia back to San Diego to spend Christmas with her father.
My son felt an unfamiliar sense of vindication. It lasted for two days.
That was when Jessica played her trump card. “The baby,” she told him, “isn’t even yours.” By his account, she chuckled wickedly like some movie villain as she said it.
At first, neither Kathy nor I took Jessica seriously. We assumed it was just her way of making us all squirm. Legal manoeuvres East and West consumed several weeks before a judge ordered a paternity test. I read up on human gestation, dug out two-year-old calendars, calculated and recalculated dates. Kathy and I persuaded ourselves that the timing was on our side (conveniently ignoring that the timing also worked for any other man Jessica had slept with right before or after the Chicago trip). I bought a wooden picture frame inscribed with the words DADDY & ME, inserted a favored photo of Sophia and my son, and put it in a drawer, intending to send it to him after the triumphant verdict.
It was there in the drawer on the late-January morning that my son phoned to tell us he expected the test results later that day. He’d call back as soon as he knew.
We had to do something to kill the time, and a cleaning blitzkrieg seemed as worthwhile an enterprise as any. By early afternoon, the cordless phone that would deliver the news had been placed in a position of honour on our walnut cocktail table, which Kathy had polished to an otherworldly sheen. The table stood centred with surveyor’s precision on a large throw rug, itself carefully positioned on teal carpeting I’d vacuumed from two directions, leaving subtle geometric patterns reminiscent of what one sees in the outfield grass of ball fields. Throughout our condo, in fact, everything was immaculate and in its proper place: washed, waxed, dusted, polished. Even the air-intake vents located here and there above the baseboards were free of dust bunnies—probably for the first time since our house guests moved west. When Sophia was crawling about, we kept those vents spotless.
When the phone rang at 4 pm, we’d been slumped for an hour on the sofa behind the cocktail table; we were exhausted from cleaning, and near-catatonic from playing and replaying all the contingencies in our heads. The shrill ringing startled us, and oddly, several seconds elapsed before we reacted.
I turned to Kathy. “You get it. If it’s good news, he’ll want to share it with you first.”
The answering machine had already picked up as Kathy took the receiver in hand: You’ve reached the Salernos. We’re not here to take your call, but if you leave a brief message after the beep...
Later, Kathy would tell me that even through the scratchiness of the outgoing announcement on our antiquated machine, she could hear our son’s baleful sigh. Before he’d said a word, she knew: It would not be good news.
Clicking the button to disengage the machine, Kathy brought the receiver to her ear. “Hi honey,” she said, her stab at casual good cheer undone by the shakiness of her voice.
There was a brief pause. I heard my wife say three things in rapid succession.
“She’s not?”
“They’re sure?”
“Oh, God, honey, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
For a few moments, Kathy just listened. When she spoke again, her voice was composed, resolute.
“You were a good father. Biology isn’t everything. That’s a terrible thing she did, to deceive you that way.”
“To deceive us,” I said quietly in the background.
Because I’d been sitting with my hand stiffly extended toward the receiver, Kathy now transferred it to me, turning her head to the side and staring out the window into the typical late-day gloom of an East Coast January. I stammered to say something useful and coherent to my son, my voice cracking repeatedly over the course of several attempts.
He cut me off. “I’ve got enough to deal with as it is. I can’t take on your feelings besides.”
“Is Sophia still with you?” I asked.
“She’s climbing on my back.”
A lump rose in my throat. “So what’s going to happen now? Does Jessica know?”
“She’s already in town. She knew all along. I called and told her, ‘You can come get your daughter.’”
“Just like that?”
“What do you want from me! The baby’s not mine! Jessica wants her back tonight—she was saying all kinds of mean shit, laughing at me. She’d had a fucking steady boyfriend out here for the past month! So I told her to come get her daughter!”
Then I heard Sophia herself. In that sweetly strange voice that made everything sound as though her native tongue were a hybrid of Japanese and Daffy Duck, she cooed, “I ruv you, Datty.”
The lump in my throat choked off all air.
“I’m gonna go now,” growled my son. “It’s over and there’s nothing to be done about it.” He hung up.
I turned to Kathy, who continued to stare out the window. She didn’t seem to want to hear anything, and I had no idea what to say.
Kathy sighed and picked up the phone. It now fell to her to tell her dear sweet 80-year-old mother that she’d just lost a great-grandchild.
After some moments an email arrived from my son. He had forwarded the test results. They consisted of bar codes, with arrows pointing to where things didn’t match up.
So that’s how a fatherhood ends, I thought. A few UPCs, like those you find on packs of toilet tissue, delivered via email.
We would never see Sophia again.
IV.
A snowflake hitting the windshield of a warm car. That was our Sophia. In an instant, nonexistent.
Jessica took pains to make the two of them difficult to find or even contact. She moved often (nothing new there) and changed phone numbers more often. She changed legal surnames more than once. She changed the baby’s last name, which had been our family name.
My son returned home to Pennsylvania a few weeks after the family-ending phone call. One afternoon Kathy drove him to the mall to shop for winter clothes, and en route they passed a store whose owners were belatedly dismantling an elaborate holiday window display. Unprompted, he began reminiscing aloud about that final Christmas with Sophia. As Kathy would tell me later, he spoke with animation of their obligatory visit to a mall Santa. He imitated Sophia’s giggling and described her complete (and unsurprising) openness to the Santa’s-lap experience. She had spoken to Santa in that strange private tongue of hers, which my son also mimicked for his mother. He called Sophia his little groundhog... and suddenly paused.
“And then she went away,” he said. For the rest of the ride, he stared out the passenger window in silence. Kathy could barely hold it together.
At first I had no intention of going quietly into the night. I investigated grandparents’ rights (even though the DNA tests had legally stripped me of any formal status). I Googled what I could, but the Web in 2002 was not yet the source of infinite knowledge it would become. I tried searching Sophia’s social security number, which we’d obtained when we opened a small savings account fund for her in Pennsylvania. When nothing helpful came up, I toyed with hiring a private investigator.
With my son now home, however, Kathy reminded me that any intrusions into Jessica’s life would only drag him back into the nightmare, prevent him from moving on. He vowed to “forget the whole thing” and even cut off all contact with people who might’ve been able to provide news on mother and child. So after some teeth-gnashing I realised there was no real point in forcing the issue. Nor did we wish to take any course of action that might have an adverse impact on Sophia herself. She had always been such a carefree child. We wanted her to stay that way. We suspected her world was destined to be unsettled enough without our adding to the mix.
Part of me felt for Jessica, too. Such a mess—so broken, so obviously ill-equipped to live a normal life. What would I achieve by putting her back on the defensive? Making her divert money to lawyers that would’ve been better spent on Sophia’s needs? Hell, I’d probably just put extra drinks in Jessica’s hand—a scary prospect. So I let it go.
Perhaps someday, I figured, my son could have a child under better circumstances. Conceived in the fact of love, not just the act of it.
CODA
Over the following years, I became an unseen bystander to an imagined life.
In my mind’s eye I saw the cute little dress Sophia wore on the first day of school. I saw her playing softball (as her mother once had), her indefatigable optimism keeping her teammates in the game. I’ve seen a pretty pink cake through the haze of 16 candles being blown out by a giggling young woman-child with long blonde curls. I’ve seen Sophia dressed in lacy finery for the prom; she smiles when her date hands her the corsage.
Such musings have helped. As did the fact that the intervening years blessed us with four (uncontested) grandchildren. All courtesy of our first two kids, and all now on their way to becoming fine young men and women. The youngest just entered college. They have doting, supportive parents who were able to give them every bit of the nurturing one would wish for one’s grandchildren. We live in Las Vegas now, and when they fly out to visit, I can shower them with more than imaginary love. Through all this, I found peace.
Until a few weeks ago.
Finally, after years of relying on conflicting third-hand rumours about the whereabouts of Jessica and the baby, we learned something concrete—and horrific. No less so for the fact that it happened 17 years ago.
In May 2007, in the wee hours of an evening spent out drinking with girlfriends, Jessica sent a one-line text to her estranged father. It read, simply, “I have no soul inside me.” They were her last known words to anyone.
It is said that women, when they take their lives, turn to pills or slash their wrists. If they must use a gun they’ll shoot themselves in the heart; vanity will not permit them to disfigure their faces. A rebel to the end, Jessica walked into the garage of the Indianapolis home she shared with her latest lover, placed the barrel of a .357 magnum under her chin, and pulled the trigger. In that ultimate act of defiance she erased not just the pain inside her, but the beauty in which the pain came wrapped.
When I heard what happened, I lost it. I drove out into the desert and screamed and screamed into the night. All so stupid, so pointless, the whole fucking thing...
Thankfully, the police had found Sophia safe asleep in her room along with baby sister Mia, another child of uncertain parentage.
This all took place nearly two decades ago. My precious Sophia is long gone from my life; we’ve had no further updates. Jessica is long gone from this earth. Kathy and I are long gone from that condo where we cleaned and cleaned as we waited for the call that would tell us that Sophia was not our granddaughter. Even so, a part of me remains at the top of that interior staircase, where, for a little while, a gate was anchored to a wall, and a man and a child were anchored to each other.
And then she went away.
