“That’s just it. You didn’t think! You didn’t think of all the consequences, the implications… the morality of it all.”
“You saw what Dad left there. Mom. I made a decision. I can see it was wrong now. Now that everything’s gone bad. So bad.”
“Your father can never, never see that. It would destroy him as a man. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, Mom. Of course I understand. I know Dad. That’s why I thought I did good when I saw how happy he was. He’s happy right now thinking it’s going to work again. He’s sure it’s going to work by some miracle again because of what was taken away from you by the accident.”
Mom thought over my words for a long time and I didn’t interrupt her. Finally she said, “Give me your phone and go to your room until I tell you to come out. I need to process this.”
I handed over the phone and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” I was sure it wasn’t the last time I would say that in the next couple of days.
Sitting in my room for the next hour and a half would have seemed like forever usually, unless I was watching sports or playing a video game. But, I sat and thought the whole time, not even moving.
I thought about Mom and her having my child inside her. I thought about Dad thinking it was HIS child inside her. I thought what would happen if Mom couldn’t hide this from him. I thought about poor Dad—how he would feel if he knew his son thought he was so weak a man that he had stepped in to make his woman pregnant.
“Scott! Scott!”
I opened my door a crack and called, “Yeah, Mom!”
“Come sit with me in the kitchen.” She sounded almost normal.
“How’s the face?” She put her hand on my chin and pulled until the bright pink of my cheek showed flat to her view.
“I’m all right. It doesn’t hurt.” I lied.
“Then, I mustn’t hit as hard as I once did,” she said.
She sat with her arms folded and looked at me for a long time. My phone sat on the kitchen table between us.
Since you went to your room, I looked at this from a lot of angles. Some of those angles are disgusting, disturbing. Absolutely shameful. They made me sick, and they made me mad.
“I know, Mom. I can see that now and I don’t know what got into me to make me go crazy that day and do what I did in the spur of the moment. I second guessed myself a hundred times, but while you were pregnant, I thought I had done the right thing.”
“Scott, you had a choice in front of you, and being young and impetuous, you plunged ahead without all the facts and acted.” This was the mother I knew every day, calm and rational. That’s why her blowup earlier was even more scary.
“Mom, I would know never to do anything like that ever again.” I thought that assurance would open the door to forgiveness sometime in the distant future, if ever.
“But, that’s where you’re wrong,” she said. Her tone got quiet.
“Wrong? I don’t understand.”
“Your statement that you’d never do ‘anything’ like that again. That’s wrong. Wrong because tomorrow, you’re going to do something EXACTLY like that.”
“What?”
Mom leaned toward me, and whispered as if she didn’t want anyone in the world to know what she was about to say next: “Tomorrow, you’re going to drive your father to the clinic again. You’re going to find a way back into his room. And—you’re going to replace his sperm with yours… again.”