Marie Sexton - Coda 06 - Fear, Hope, and Bread Pudding (2 page)

Oh well. You know what they say, sweets. Neurotic is the new black.

T
HE home study was, as Thomas had warned, tedious in the extreme, bordering on offensive, but in the end, it wasn’t a problem. Once we’d been approved, we drafted a letter with Thomas’s help, outlining our desire to become parents, and Thomas began distributing it through whatever channels he had. When that was done, Cole turned his attention to our spare bedroom. He got rid of every bit of furniture and had the carpet cleaned and the walls repainted. Then he quietly shut the door on the room and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. The word “nursery” was never uttered.

Hope had carried us this far, but suddenly we found ourselves with nothing to do but wait. Hope began to feel like something ominous. For two months, I tried to not see the closed door at the end of our hallway. For two months, neither of us mentioned the way our house had become both too big and too small at the same time. Then one morning, as I left our bedroom, I noticed the footstep pattern. Rosa vacuumed religiously, creating perfectly parallel tracks on the floor, but now someone had traversed the hallway between our room and the closed door, leaving barely perceptible dark splotches where the carpet fibers lay flat instead of upright.

I crept down the hallway, wondering even as I did it why I felt the need to tiptoe. I cracked the door open and peeked in. It was still the same room—white walls, cream-colored carpet. It still smelled of fresh paint. The room had one window, long and low and bowed outward to form a bench. The blinds were open, and the window seat was bathed in sunlight. Cole wasn’t there. Whatever he’d sought in this room, he’d intentionally done it before I was awake.

I found him in the kitchen, cooking. I sat at the breakfast bar and asked, “Is everything all right?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? I was trying to decide if we wanted mimosas with breakfast, or plain orange juice.”
“You went in the bedroom.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Should I make bacon?”
“Do you want to buy a crib?”
“Whatever for, love? I’ll just heat up some ham instead.”
His tone was light and cheery as always, yet false, and the fragility of it made me ache for him. He was fighting to maintain a sense of normalcy, and if I pushed against that, he’d become defensive. I weighed my answer as I watched him bustle around the kitchen, taking eggs, milk, and fresh green chilies out of the refrigerator and lining them up neatly on the counter. He kept his body angled away from me, his head down so the fall of his bangs hid his expression. “We could call Thomas and see if he’s heard anything.”

“Honey, the man knows his job. If there was anything to tell us, we’d have heard from him already.”
He was right, of course. Still, when I came home from my jog that night, I found him again in the empty room, sitting on the window seat. Behind him, our backyard and pool were lost to the night. Inside the room, the lights felt too stark.

“Talk to me,” I said.
“There’s nothing to say.”

He could never discuss anything important with me unless he could hide, so I reached over and turned off the light, leaving the room in darkness. With no furniture, it was easy for me to cross the room and sit next to him. “
Now
talk to me.”

He laughed quietly. “You know me too well.”
“It goes both ways.”
“I suppose that’s true.” He stopped and looked down at his hands,

clasped between his knees. I waited in silence for him to work his way around to what needed to be said. “Nobody’s ever slept in this room.” “Never?”

 

He shook his head. “I don’t have any family to visit. The few guests I had… well, they weren’t sleeping in here.”

I winced at the casual mention of the other lovers who’d been in his home before me, and he reached out to take my hand, as if sensing my thoughts. “There were far fewer of them than you probably think, Jonny. I made it a habit not to invite them to my home.”

“You invited me.”
“You were always the exception.”

I smiled, comforted, as he’d meant for me to be. I continued to hold his hand while I waited for him to go on.
“They say rooms hold an echo of whatever they’ve seen. I never believed it, but in here, it’s true. I’ve lived in this house for eight years, and this room has seen nothing at all. It’s silent. And empty.” “It won’t always be that way.”
“I want to believe that, but it’s hard.”
“You need to have hope.”
His laugh was dry and spoke more of heartache than humor. “I’ve never needed it in the past. I can only think of one other time in my life when I’ve wanted something so desperately and yet had no idea how to get it.”
“And what happened then?”
He squeezed my hand. “You pulled your head out of your ass and came after me.”
I smiled at the memory. “But this is different, isn’t it?”
“It is, and I hate it. I hate the uncertainty. I wish somebody would just tell me, ‘yes, you’re going to get a child,’ or ‘no, it’s never going to happen.’ Then, either way, I could plan. Even if it meant waiting another year, or three years, or five. At least I’d know. But the uncertainty of forcing myself to hold on to a dream that may never come true isdriving me mad.”
I nodded, wishing more than anything that I had an answer for him. I understood his pain, even if I didn’t feel it as acutely as he did. I put my arms around him, although he was stiff against me. He had to resist, because accepting comfort would be admitting how much pain he was in. “Remember what you did when you were waiting for me to figure things out?”
“I ran.”
“Yes.” I rubbed my hand up his back and kissed the side of his head. “Let’s run this time too.”
He turned to face me. My eyes had finally adjusted to the dimness of the room, and I could just make out his cheekbones and his soft, full lips. “Are you serious?”
“We never did take a honeymoon.”
“What if something comes up while we’re gone?”
“Thomas knows how to reach us. If he calls, we’ll be on the first plane home.” I pulled him toward me again. I kissed his cheek and his jaw until finally, he relaxed and went limp in my arms, melting against my body.
“Where should we go?”
“I have never seen your home in Hawaii.”
“I have a private snorkeling pond.”
“We can do more than snorkel in it, right?”
He laughed. “Indeed. I was about to tell you not to bother packing a swimsuit.”
I thought about being with him in the warm water. About kissing him while we were both salty from the sea. About adding our own heat to the pool. “Let’s leave right now.”
“I can have us on a plane in less than twelve hours, but first….” He sighed and tilted his head up to me. “Make me think about something else for a while.”
“How do you feel about neckties?”
He laughed as his lips found mine. “I’m one hundred percent in favor.”

F
ORthe next eight months, we lived much as he had lived before we’d become a couple, traveling more often than not. We spent time in Hawaii and the Hamptons and took trips to Okinawa and Prague. We dropped in to Colorado three different times to see our friends. We also spent a month touring Italy. We started in Rome. It was my first time there, but Cole hated it for some reason I didn’t quite understand, so we quickly moved on to Florence and Sienna. I fell in love with Tuscany and discovered Cole spoke Italian nearly as well as he spoke French. We rarely mentioned the adoption, although Cole lamented being so often away from my father. He began to talk of giving him a yearly stipend in order to allow him to quit his job. I argued that my father would never accept such a thing. “Besides,” I told Cole, “it’s rude to even offer.”

“Let me get this straight, sugar. You approved of me offering to pay for Angelo’s college, did you not?”
“Yes, but that’s different.”
“How?”
“Because….” It was, wasn’t it? And yet, I couldn’t think of a

reason. It made sense for him to offer to pay for Angelo’s schooling, even if Angelo hadn’t yet accepted the offer. So why shouldn’t he offer to help my father retire in style?

Despite my feelings on the matter, midway through the year, my father made a liar out of me and happily left his job of twenty-two years. He had a decent chunk of money in his 401(k), but it was Cole’s “travel fund” that really sealed the deal, and soon my father was traveling with us about half the time. He seemed to sense that the adoption was a delicate subject. He never asked about our progress, which was good since we had nothing to report. Anytime we returned to Phoenix, we’d spend a few weeks avoiding the closed door at the end of the hall. At some point, Cole would break down and go inside. He’d spend an afternoon or an evening sitting in the window seat, staring at the empty walls.

We were always gone again within a week.

“What will happen if we do get to adopt?” I asked him once, as we waited to board our plane. “We won’t be able to rush off at the drop of a hat.”

“All the more reason to do it now, then, don’t you think?”

There was some truth in that, but it wasn’t the real reason he couldn’t bear to stay at home. That room haunted him. It held so much potential, and yet at the moment, it was hauntingly empty.

We decided to spend Thanksgiving in Hawaii because my father had never been there. Even the smallest turkey was too big for the three of us, so we had fresh seafood instead. We cooked the entire meal on the grill and ate on the balcony overlooking the ocean. It was a day that bordered on ideal, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing: would it be like this forever, the three of us pretending it was all we needed?

“What’s the plan for Christmas?” my dad asked that night. He was watching football. Cole was curled up in a corner of the couch reading. I was halfway watching the game while working on my laptop.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Cole said. “Where would you like to go?”
My father shrugged. There was something odd about him, though. I had a feeling he wasn’t really concerned about where we spent Christmas. I suspected he had an ulterior motive. “Anywhere is fine.”
“Germany is fabulous in December.”
“Really?” I didn’t know much about Germany, but it hadn’t ever hit me as a tourist hot spot.
Cole smiled at me, doing his best not to laugh at my American ignorance. “Really, love. Their Christmas markets are amazing. We could spend a week in Berlin and then go to Munich in time for Christmas?”
“Sounds good,” my dad said.
Cole looked back down at his book, apparently assuming the conversation was over. It wasn’t though. I knew by the expression on my dad’s face that he was about to come to his point.
“Are you going to invite your mother?”
Cole didn’t glance up from his book, but he went completely, painfully still. “Why bother? She won’t come.”
“How do you know if you don’t ask her?”
“Because she never comes.”
“Can it hurt to call?”
“Dad—” I said, but Cole finally met my father’s eyes.
“She’ll say yes, but then she won’t show up. It’s a waste of time.”
“So you don’t want to call her?”
I wondered if he noticed the way Cole flinched at the question. It was subtle, but it was there. “Not particularly, no.”
My dad bounced the remote on his knee, considering. “Do you mind if I call her?”
“You’ve never even met her.”
“I know. And I think it’s time I did.”
Cole blinked at him as if debating how much to argue. In the end, he closed his book and stood up. He went into the bedroom and came out with a slip of paper. He dropped it unceremoniously in my father’s lap. It might have been the closest thing to anger I’d ever seen him display toward my father. “Whatever you like, honey,” he said, then went back into the bedroom and closed the door.
I put my laptop aside and leaned forward on the couch to face my father. “Why are you pushing this?”
He didn’t answer right away. He pursed his lips and turned the remote over and over in his hand as he considered it. “We’re family, Jon. I think it’s time we stopped avoiding her.”
“
We
aren’t avoiding
her
. She’s the one who didn’t come to the wedding. She’s the one who didn’t have time to see him when we were in town for his birthday two years ago. She’s the one—”
My father held up his hand to stop me. “I know, Jon. The thing is, there are two sides to every story.”
I stood up from my seat and pointed down the hallway toward Cole. “Are you saying this is
his
fault?”
“I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault. I’m just saying….” He sighed and rubbed his forehead with his fingers. “Sometimes things are harder than they seem.”
“Nothing about this is complicated. She’s too busy to bother with her own son.”
“That’s what you assume, but do you know it’s true?”
“What other explanation is there?”
“I don’t know, Jon, but I think it’s time we stopped making assumptions.”
“Cole’s right. It’s a waste of time.”
“Have you ever wondered what our relationship would be like if your mother hadn’t died?”
The question brought me up short. “What does Mom have to do with this?”
“We barely spoke after you came out—”
“Because you couldn’t handle it!”
“At first, yes. But that didn’t last long.”
I fell heavily back onto the couch. “What are you saying, Dad?”
“I’m saying that I got over you being gay a lot sooner than you probably think. But I didn’t know what to say to you. I didn’t know how to make things right.”
“You couldn’t just say, ‘I’m sorry’?”
“Sometimes that’s harder than we like to admit.”
I looked down at my hands. I’d always known it was my mother’s death that had brought us together, but I’d never considered how different things might have been otherwise. I nodded. “Okay. So what are you going to say to her?”
“I’m not sure yet. All I know is that it can’t hurt to try. Maybe she’s a heartless bitch like you imagine. But maybe….” He shrugged and turned back to the football game. “Maybe she’ll surprise us.”
I was skeptical, but I kept my doubts to myself. Predictably, Cole didn’t want to talk about the possibilities, and I didn’t push him. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Even worse, I wasn’t sure what to hope for. I understood my father’s desire to bring Cole’s mom into the fold, but I worried it would only cause Cole more pain.
We were still in Hawaii a week later when one morning my dad proudly announced, “Grace says she’ll be here.”
It was early. I’d managed to climb out of bed and wander into the kitchen in search of coffee, but I wasn’t ready to play games yet. “Who?”
“Cole’s mother.”
Cole’s mother.
Grace. I hadn’t even known her name. “You talked to her?”
“No, Jon. I used my crystal ball.”
I ignored his barb. “What did she say?”
“I had to talk her into it.”
“She was too busy?”
“No, actually. She said she didn’t have any plans, but she didn’t want to intrude.”
That surprised me. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected to hear. My father, on the other hand, appeared downright smug. I refused to give him a chance to gloat. Instead, I poured a cup of coffee for myself and went to tell Cole the news. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. He might be relieved, or happy. He might be apprehensive.
I found him just getting up, but however he felt about my announcement, he wasn’t about to betray his emotions. Not even to me.
“Good Lord, it doesn’t matter what she told George,” he said as he threw off the covers and pushed himself out of bed. He kept his back to me and crossed the room to pick his watch up off the dresser. He spent a long time fiddling with it in order to avoid facing me. “She won’t actually show up. I don’t know why you even bothered telling me.”
“Because if I hadn’t, and she
did
come, you’d have been furious.”
“Fair enough, love.” He sighed dramatically. “Well, I suppose now I have to pretend to believe her and make something she’ll like for Christmas dinner.”
“Don’t do anything on her account.”
“I never do.”