rounded as twin halved cantaloupes. She handed me a plush terrycloth robe and a clipboard full of forms to fill out. “Doctor will be with you shortly,” she said, clicking on a high-powered light and shining it on my face, where I’d invented a scar. “Huh,” she said, scrutinizing the scar. “That hardly looks like anything.”
“It’s deep, though,” I said. “I can see it in pictures. It shows up there.”
She nodded as if this made perfect sense to her and backed out of the room.
I sat on a beige armchair, making up lies to put on the forms and wishing that I had a scar – some physical sign to show the world – to show him – what I’d been through, and what I’d survived. Twenty minutes later, there was a brisk knock at the door, and my father walked in.
“So what brings you here today, Ms. Lane?” he asked, his eyes on my chart. I sat quietly, saying nothing. After a moment, he looked up. There was an irritated expression on his face, a stop-wasting-my-time look that I recognized from my childhood. He stared at me for a minute with nothing registering on his face but more annoyance. Then he saw.
“Cannie?”
I nodded. “Hello.”
“My God, what…” My father, a man with an insult for every occasion, was for once gratifyingly speechless. “What are you doing here?”
“I made an appointment,” I said.
He winced, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose – another pose I’d remembered well. It usually presaged a temper tantrum, anger of some sort.
“You just disappeared,” I said. He started shaking his head and opened his mouth, but I wasn’t about to let him start without saying my piece. “None of us knew where you were. How could you do that? How could you just walk out on all of us like that?” He said nothing… just stared at me – through me – as if I were any hysterical patient, shrieking that her thighs still felt lumpy or her left nipple was higher than her right one. “Don’t you care about us? Don’t you have a heart? Or is that a stupid question to ask someone who sucks cellulite out of thighs for a living?”
My father glared at me. “You don’t need to be condescending.”
“No, what I needed was a father,” I said. I hadn’t realized how angry, how furious at him I was until I’d seen him, standing there in his crisp white doctor’s coat, his manicured fingernails, his tan, and his heavy gold watch.
He sighed, as if the conversation bored him; as if I bored him, too. “Why are you here?”
“I didn’t come here looking for you, if that’s what you’re asking. A friend of mine had an appointment, and I came with her. I saw your picture,” I continued. “Not very smart, you know? For someone trying to stay undercover”
“I’m not trying to stay undercover,” he said irascibly. “That’s nonsense. Did your mother tell you that?”
“Then how come none of us know where you are?”
“You wouldn’t have cared if you did,” he muttered, picking up the clipboard he’d come in with.
I was so flabbergasted, he actually had his hand on the doorknob before I could think of what to say. “Are you crazy? Of course we would have cared. You’re our father”
He put his glasses back on. I could see his eyes behind them, a weak, watery brown. “And you’re all grown up now. All of you are.”
“You think just because we’re older it doesn’t matter what you did to us? You think needing your parents in your life is something you outgrow, like training wheels or a high chair?”
He raised himself up to his full five feet, eight and a half inches, and gathered the cloak of authority, of Doctor-ness, around him as palpably as if he’d been pulling on a heavy winter coat. “I think,” he said, speaking slowly and precisely, “that lots of people are disappointed by the lives that they wind up with.”
“And that’s what you want to be to us? A disappointment?”
He sighed. “I can’t help you, Cannie. I don’t know what you want, but I can tell you this – I’ve got nothing to give you. Any of you.”
“We don’t want your money”
He looked at me almost kindly. “I’m not talking about money.”
“Why?” I asked him. My voice was cracking. “Why have kids and leave them? That’s the part I don’t understand. What did we do…” I gulped. “What did any of us do that was so awful that you never wanted to see us again?” I knew, even as I was saying the words, even as I was thinking them, that it was ridiculous. I knew that no child could be that bad, that wrong, that ugly, could be anything to cause a parent to leave. I knew that it was no fault of ours. We weren’t to blame, I thought to myself. I could let it go; I could set the burden down, I could be free.
Except, of course, that knowing something in your head is different than feeling it in your heart. And I knew at that moment that Maxi had been right. Whatever my father could say, whatever answer he could provide, whatever excuse he could muster, it wouldn’t be right. And it wouldn’t ever be enough.
I stared at him. I waited for him to ask me something, to ask what had become of me: Where did I live, and what did I do, and whom had I decided to spend my life with? Instead he looked at me again, shook his head once, and turned toward the door.
“Hey!” I said.
He turned to look at me, and my throat closed up. What did I want to tell him? Nothing. I wanted him to ask me things: how are you, who are you, what’s happened to you, who have you become. I stared at him, and he said nothing – just walked away.
I couldn’t help myself. I reached for him, for some sign, for something, as he was walking out the door. I felt my fingertips graze the back of that crisp white coat. He never stopped walking. He never even slowed down.
When I came back, I put the rings in their little velvet box. I washed the makeup off my face and the gel out of my hair. Then I called Samantha.
“You won’t believe it,” I began.
“Probably not,” she said. “So tell me.”
And I did. “He didn’t ask me a single question,” I told her at the end. “He didn’t want to know what I was doing out here, or what I was doing with my life. I don’t even think he noticed I was pregnant. He just didn’t care.”
Samantha sighed. “That’s awful. I can’t even imagine how you must feel.”
“I feel…” I said. I looked out at the water, then up at the sky. “I feel like I’m ready to come home.”
Maxi nodded when I told her, sadly, but didn’t ask me to stay.
“You’re done with the screenplay?” she asked.
“I’ve been done for a few days,” I told her. She surveyed the bed, where I’d laid my things out – my clothes and books, the teddy bear I’d bought for the baby one afternoon in Santa Monica.
“I wish we could have done more,” she said with a sigh.
“We did plenty,” I said, and hugged her. “And we’ll talk… and e-mail… and you’ll visit when the baby comes”
Maxi’s eyes lit up. “Aunt Maxi,” she proclaimed. “You’ll have to have it call me Aunt Maxi. And I’m going to spoil it rotten!”
I smiled to myself, imagining Maxi treating little Max or Abby like a
