Trespassing(76)

I study him for a minute. “Can I ask you something?”

“It’s intensely personal, I hope.”

“Sort of, I suppose.” I wait a beat or two. “My daughter. She’s been saying things that aren’t quite on par with things an imaginary friend would tell her. I mean, blaming the spill at Fogarty’s on Nini, fine—”

“She actually blamed that on you.”

“Whatever. You see what I’m getting at. Blaming Nini for things that get her into trouble . . . I understand that. But she knows things. The day before everything happened with my husband, she told her preschool teachers that her father went to God Land. And then, I show up here, at a house, which to be honest I didn’t even know I owned until after he was gone, and there are letters missing on the archway, so the place is labeled God Land. And she keeps saying she’s seen him. Even after I tell her that she saw you, not her father, she insists.”

He’s staring intently into my eyes.

“I guess what I want to know is . . . do you believe in ghosts? Clairvoyance? Because I don’t know how else to explain the things my daughter knows.”

A tiny line forms between his eyes. His thumb worries the scar on his opposite hand. He thinks I’m crazy.

“I think . . .” He takes a sip of Frogman. “I think things happen in this world that we can’t always explain and understand. I think children are more susceptible to experiencing the unexplained because they haven’t been taught to rationalize yet. They’re not programmed against believing in ghosts. And who knows? Maybe every imaginary friend is a ghost. Who the hell are we to say they’re not?”

Why couldn’t Micah have said something like that when I’d approached him with the subject? Let’s call Oprah. She’ll know what to do.

“She’s beautiful, your Bella.”

I take another sip of mojito. “Every miracle is.”

“I suppose.”

“I know every mother says stuff like that, but in my case, it’s true. Do you know what I went through to get her?”

He sort of shrugs, but I’m talking again before he has a moment to respond. “Fertility drugs up the yin-yang.” Suddenly, it feels good to be yelling over the music. “You stop your life for it. They say you have to be in for a blood draw at ten-o-six at night? You go at ten-o-six at night. They say you need to have an ultrasound before seven in the morning? You go. They say you need a special drug and that you need to take it before the pharmacy opens in the morning? You go across the state line to Indiana, where the pharmacy opens an hour earlier, on eastern time, and you put everything else on hold if you have to. You shell out three hundred dollars per dose. You just do it. And there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”

He’s chewing on his lip, looking at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

Maybe I have. “And then, all these women, all around you, they have no trouble getting pregnant on their own, and they rub it in your face, as if there’s obviously something wrong with you, as if you’re not good enough, and they’re having children with your husband, with a married man, but you’re the one not worthy.”

Finally I shut up and draw another few sips of mojito up my straw.

“Well, she’s gorgeous. Whatever you went through to have her, it’s worth it.”

“She’s challenging sometimes.”

“There are worse things than a headstrong daughter. That bullheadedness will come in handy when it really counts, you know? She’s not going to be taking any shit from any man, I promise you.”

She’s so unlike me, I realize. “I don’t know where she gets it. I’ve been a doormat. All the things happening right under my nose . . .”

“Maybe you’re trusting.” He pats my hand twice, then quickly withdraws and places his hand back on his sweating pint glass, where it belongs. “It’s not a bad thing to be trusting. The trouble comes when someone takes advantage of that trust. Shame on them. Not us.”

Us?

“That’s right.” I cover my mouth, but it’s too late to suck back in all the words I’d spewed, which sounded, in hindsight, as if they applied to Christian, as well as me. “Your wife.”

“Ex-wife.”

“I’m sorry. Here I am, going on and on about being a doormat. I didn’t mean you were a doormat, too. I wouldn’t say something like that. You . . . you’re obviously so much more together than—”

“And I know what you mean about all these women having babies—even if they shouldn’t. My ex . . . she had someone else’s kid, and I thought it was mine. Can you imagine? I’m there for the midnight ice-cream cravings, rubbing her belly as it grew, there in the delivery room, there for two a.m. feedings, then one day, a DNA test takes it all away from me.”

“Oh God.”

He takes a healthy gulp of the Frogman, draining the last bit from the glass, then exhales a long, drawn-out sigh. “Yeah, nothing like being a father for sixty-five days, and then suddenly, it’s all over.”

Our pitcher arrives, but I don’t acknowledge the server when he tells me our fritters will be up shortly. I can’t stop looking at the rugged man across the table. Can’t stop imagining his falling in love with a baby, counting his toes and fingers, waiting to be called Daddy. Can’t stop imagining him falling to pieces when he realizes it was all an illusion.