Brian opened the blue box with trembling fingers, in front of sixteen people and a dish of scalloped potatoes, and the room went so still that I could hear the clock in the hall. There was no baby gift inside. There was a single folded sheet of paper, with the letterhead of the fertility clinic on Wilshire where we had spent three years of our lives. He unfolded it. He read the top line. And the color that had been draining from his face since he saw the tag finally ran out completely.
“Read it aloud, honey,” I said. “Everyone is waiting.” He shook his head. So I stood up and took the page from his hand. “This is a semen analysis dated March the ninth, two years ago, the same month he told me he was ready to try a fourth round,” I said. “It shows that my husband was diagnosed with a condition that makes it virtually impossible for him to father a child. The clinic sent it to him by mail. He kept it in a drawer. He let me take the shots, and the pills, and the blame, for three more years.”
Nobody breathed. The mother of Brian dropped her fork. His father, a quiet retired plumber, looked at his son as though he were seeing a stranger. I went on, in the calm voice I had practiced in the mirror. “I do not hold it against him that he is infertile. I hold it against him that he let me believe it was me. And I hold it against him that a young woman in his gym now believes a baby is his, and I am quite sure, from this paper, that it is not.”
A tablet left on a kitchen counter can show a wife what a husband has locked in his drawer for three years.
The doorbell rang. Everyone turned. I smiled, because the timing was exactly as I had planned. “That will be Ashley,” I said. “I told her to come at nine.” I went to the front hall and opened the door. She stood on the porch in a long wool coat, pale and pretty, with a hand on her stomach, five months along. And beside her stood a tall bearded man in a work jacket, holding her other hand. He looked at me and said, very quietly, “Hello. I am Mike. I am her husband.”
There was a sound behind me like a chair scraping. I led them in. Ashley, who had never told Brian she was married, stood at the edge of the dining room and began to cry. Mike put an arm around her. “She told me everything this morning,” he said. “She showed me the messages. I am not here to hurt anyone. I am here because I am the father of this baby, and I would like to know why my wife told another man it was his.” His voice did not rise once. It was the saddest voice I ever heard.
Ashley told it, in a halting whisper. She had met Brian at the gym fourteen months before, and he had told her he was divorced, and rich, and unhappy. She had believed him. She had been angry at Mike over money. She had slipped. When she found out she was pregnant, she had counted back the weeks, and she had not been sure, and she had let Brian believe what he wanted. “I did not know he could not have children,” she said to me. “I would never have taken part in this if I had known he would lie to you about that.”
I believed her. I do not know why. Perhaps because I had spent a month in the kitchen with a tablet, reading every message, and I knew that she had been as deceived as I was. She was twenty nine. She had made a foolish choice. But she had also come, that night, through my front door, with her husband, to tell the truth in a room full of strangers. That took more courage than anything my husband had done in sixteen years. I gave her a glass of water and told her to sit down.
Brian did not speak. He sat with his hands flat on the table, looking at the clinic letter, as the guests rose one by one and left without a word. His mother kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “I am so sorry, Jessica.” By the time the last coat was gone, there was only the two of us in the dining room, and the cold ham, and the lights on the Christmas tree. I said, “I will be staying with my sister. I will send the lawyer on Monday.” He nodded, and he did not look up.
The divorce was final in April. The judge gave me the house, and half of the savings, and an order of protection against nothing, because there was nothing left to protect me from. Brian moved into an apartment above a bakery. The clinic, shown the paperwork, refunded a portion of our fees for the failure to disclose his diagnosis. It came to eleven thousand dollars. I took the check and drove to the shelter on Fourth Street, where I handed it to a director who stared at me and then began to cry.
In May, a card arrived from Ashley. Inside was a photograph of a baby boy with a thatch of dark hair, in the arms of Mike. On the back she had written: His name is Daniel. I wanted you to know he is loved. I put it on the refrigerator. In June I adopted a rescued greyhound named Biscuit, and in July I enrolled in a training program to become a school counselor. I am not alone. I sleep through the night. And on the Christmas tree this year, there is one new ornament, a small blue box, empty, with a ribbon.
