Work of Art (25 page)

“But you did.”

“Yeah, because you told me you had an abortion. I couldn’t forgive that. It was too much to hear that you’d done it without my knowledge or consent, and I was pissed. But then school started, and I missed you, and I figured I could forgive you in time, but you weren’t at school, and your cell number was disconnected. I sent you an email, but you never responded.”

I shook my head. “My mom had my cell turned off, and my email was through her
AOL account, so she locked me out of it. When she kicked me out of the house, I got a new number and a new email account.”

“Well that explains why you never answered any of my emails in the past ten years.”

I looked at him in confusion. “You emailed me?”

He nodded. “Yeah, every few years or so I would try again in the hopes that, I don’t know. I think I just wanted to see how you were.”

I tried to wrap my head around that information. He hadn’t stopped thinking about me. He’d reached out, and since I hadn’t responded, he’d assumed I’d written him off.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, shaking my head as this all started to sink in.

“No, I’m sorry, Harper,” he said then, and I knew he was trying to apologize for eleven years of anguish that he could never make right, even though none of it was his fault.

He’d tried to get in touch with me, but more than that, he hadn’t wanted to let me go in the first place. He’d wanted me, he’d wanted us, and someone, someone who didn’t want him to want those things, had interfered in an effort to keep us apart. And it had worked.

Tyler never knew his father, and he never would. And Ryan would never know his son.

And
I’d had to go through everything alone – giving birth to our son, raising and nurturing and loving him, and ultimately, holding him as he took his last breath, because I thought his father hadn’t loved either of us enough to want to be in our lives. And I was so wrong. But it had been my reality for years, all because someone had felt the need to manipulate us into believing a lie.

And now that the tr
uth was coming out, a part of me wanted to feel relief, because I hadn’t been dismissed so easily, and Ryan had loved me as much as I though he had, but the truth also didn’t change the past, and it didn’t change the fact that someone had taken something from us that we could never get back.

I suddenly h
ad to look away from him, because there was too much emotion building up inside me, and I was getting angry. I knew it was his family. I knew they’d meddled, and they did everything in their power to keep us apart and to keep Ryan from knowing he even had a son. It was cruel and heartless and sick. It was just sick.

“Do you ever wonder what it would have
been like if I’d been there?” Ryan asked quietly after a few minutes, and I closed my eyes to ward off the tears that were brewing just behind my eyes.

Every fucking day,
I wanted to tell him. Because every day I’d wished he’d been there with me. Every time Tyler did something for the first time or he laughed or when he started talking, I’d wished Ryan was there. Because I’d held on to the Ryan that I’d loved, and I knew that Ryan would have been as excited as I was to be experiencing parenthood with me. But I also hated the Ryan who’d left me, so when I thought about him, it almost always made me sad.

“Who sent this?”
I asked instead of answering his question, because I was afraid to go there with him. It was too soon.

I looked back to see the anger building in his eyes as I held up the email he hadn’t written.

He shook his head. “I think we both know exactly who sent this.”

I looked up and met his gaze.
“Your parents.”

“Yes.”

Then he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. “Fuck.
Voicemail.” Then he dialed another number. “God dammit!”

He threw his phone into the corner of the couch and ran his hands back through his hair
, all the anger that had been simmering just beneath the surface suddenly exploding out of him. I put my hand on his forearm, hoping I could calm him down. I was just as pissed as he was, but I also knew it wouldn’t do any good.

“I’m done,” he spat. “If I find out that they did anything to hurt our relationship or that they s
igned over my rights to my son without my permission, I will fucking kill them. They meddled and they tried to get me to break up with you so many times, and I didn’t, because I loved you. And then when I got that email from you, I just figured you’d panicked and made a decision that went against what we’d decided, and I was pissed. I never thought for one second that my family was behind it. I never thought they could be so vindictive as to manipulate something that affected my life on this gran of a scale.”

I knew
he was piecing together the same things I had, and it made my blood run cold. We’d each received an email at the same time, and I was wondering, as I knew he was, if the email he’d gotten from me had been from an email address that looked so similar to mine that he never would have suspected it wasn’t legitimate. A letter or a symbol changed or omitted would go unnoticed unless you were looking for it, which of course you wouldn’t be when the message in the body of the email was so crushing.

But then to think that when
his family learned that I’d kept the baby, they had taken the information and not only kept it from him but had also manipulated it so he lost all rights to his own son. It was sick and twisted, and I knew it was the exact thing his mother was capable of, and at the time, she sure had a good enough reason. Thanks to my mother who couldn’t keep her legs together.

I looked over at Ryan
. He was visibly agitated, and with good reason, but he wasn’t going to be resolving anything tonight, so I needed to find something else to lift his spirits.

“I’ll be right back,” I told him as I headed
to my studio to grab something, hoping I knew what might help him.

When I returned to the living room, he was leaning back against the couch with his feet propped up on my coffee table with his eyes closed and his thumb and forefinger massaging his temples.

“Do you want something to drink?”

His eyes snapped open and he looked up at me. He shook his head but patted the space next to him.

“I’m fine. Come sit,” he said, and I clutched the box to my chest as I walked the five feet over to the couch.

I tentatively sat next to him, and he pulled me into his arms. It felt natural, but at the same time it felt
so strange.

“I’m
so
sorry,” he said softly, as he rested his cheek against my forehead.

“For what?”

None of this was his fault, but I knew he was accepting blame for what his family had done. It was the only way he could remain in control, and I hate that he was apologizing for them.

“
For my family being so callous and heartless. I hate them, but more than that, I’m sorry that because of them, I wasn’t there for you. I’m sorry for not doing more to find you when you disappeared. I’m sorry for believing that you’d do something that was so out of character for you. I’m sorry for going to Yale and leaving you stranded when you needed me the most and for not returning your phone calls. For not being a father to our son, and for not being there when he got sick.” His voice broke suddenly. “I’m just sorry for all of it, and I sort of hate myself right now.”

I pulled back and looked at him. “Ryan, don’t do that. You can’t blame yourself for something you didn’t control.”

“No,” he said firmly. “You shouldered so much by yourself, and all that time you were thinking that I didn’t want anything to do with you or our child, but I did. I should have returned your calls that summer. I shouldn’t have given up on you, because I knew you, and I knew you wouldn’t do that to me. And I missed you so much for so long that it affected my life. I almost failed out of college. I didn’t have any friends for my first two years at Yale. I definitely didn’t date. All I did was exist, and I didn’t even do a great job of that, because the whole time I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach and left a gaping hole there that just couldn’t be filled. I fucking was miserable.”

I reached out and took his hand
, my heart breaking to hear how awful his life had been for so long. And had I been alone, I might have felt the same way, but I had Tyler and my dad, and because of them, I had no choice but to move on with my life. I’d initially been miserable too, and there were times when I’d cried about our break-up, even years later, but for the most part, I was happy. I had Tyler. I’d had a ray of sunshine in the rain. Ryan didn’t have anyone.

“I hate that you were
miserable, and I hate that I believed so readily that you’d leave me, that you’d leave us. You weren’t that guy, Ryan, and I knew that. I should have gone over to your house and demanded to talk to you. I wish I would have, but at the time, I just couldn’t. That email almost broke me, and I sort of hated you. I wasn’t thinking rationally at all.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t put that on yourself. It’s not your fault. It’s my fucking family. They made sure that there was no way you’d want to reach out to me. They made sure of it. They’re evil, every last one of them, and I’m so sick of trying to please them and do what’s right in their eyes, because it’s making me miserable all over again. I don’t want this life, this job, this mar–”

He stopped talking when he realized what he was saying, and he looked up at me in shock. I didn’t know what to say to him. Was he about to tell me he didn’t want his marriage? He was getting married in two days. It was a hell of a time to back out.

I took the opportunity to change tactics, knowing I needed to. We didn’t know each other well enough anymore to be having a conversation about his relationship. It wasn’t appropriate.

“Do you want to see
more pictures of Tyler?”

He looked up at me in surprise
, and then his face softened. “Yes. Please. That would be amazing.”

I smiled a small smile knowing I’d be smiling through my tears in mere minutes. Then I took a deep breath like I always
did before I looked back on his short life and opened the lid of the box. And then I started to tell Ryan all about Tyler as he sifted through the pictures that were in chronological order.

He stopped on the first few which were of me holding Tyler in the hospital, his thumb running over the image. I was sweaty and looked exhausted, but there was a smile on my face as I gazed down at my son for the first time.

“I was in labor for fourteen hours,” I told him, and he looked up at me, but didn’t say anything, so I started talking about that day, and I didn’t stop talking until I’d shared every piece of Tyler’s life I could remember from the day he was born to the day he left the world, and soon enough both of us were in tears.

When I finished talking an hour later, we were both exhausted, and it was late, but a part of me felt cleansed
for the first time in years. I’d gotten so much off of my chest that I hadn’t realized had been sitting there, and I finally had someone who I could talk to who understood my pain. That didn’t happen often. My dad hated to talk about anything emotional, especially Tyler. We shared a bond because we’d gone through everything together, but I couldn’t talk to him.

Kelly,
Julian and Devin knew the story, but none of them had ever met Tyler. We’d become friends a year and a half after he’d died.  I hadn’t really been looking to make any friends, but I never realized how much I needed them in my life until they were embedded there.

After Tyler died
I was depressed to the point that my dad started to get concerned that I wasn’t ever going to snap out of it. Then one day, he sat down next to me and showed me a picture I’d taken of Tyler when he’d been painting on the back porch. Tears had sprung to my eyes, but I was no stranger to tears. I cried all the time. But he told me that my son would be so disappointed to know that I’d given up my gift of making the world a prettier place because of him.

I’d started painting again the very next day. I threw everything I had into my art and photography and even talked to Mario about coming back to the tatt
oo parlor, but he’d sold the shop two months earlier and was moving back to Hawaii where he’d grown up. So I decided to branch out on my own. I sold my art, saved my money, and six months later I opened up Art Studio, an art gallery and tattoo parlor in one. And I met Julian on the second day I was open.

“Do you want a beer?” I asked Ryan, as I got up from the couch.

I needed something to take the edge off, and I had a feeling he did too.
He was still flipping through the pictures again, marveling at Tyler’s sweet smile and his bright blue eyes.

“Please,” he said, glancing up at me for a few seconds before his eyes went back to one of the pictu
res. “I can’t believe how much he looked like me.”

I handed him his beer. “Well,
he was half you.”

“H
e looks so much like you too,” he said, taking a long swig from his bottle and gazing up at me. “He had your nose, and your smile.”

“I know,
” I said, smiling down at the picture. “But he had your dimples.”