“Hurry up.” I grab Stephen’s hand, his keys gouging into my palm as I pull him inside.
He’s just gotten home from work and mistakes my over aggression for him to follow as something else. He unzips his pants as he pauses to kick off his shoes. Stephen stops when he sees the urgent look in my eyes.
“What…?” He leaves his one loafer there in the middle of the foyer floor and limps after me as I pull him into the living room. I point an unsteady hand at the TV where a handsome teenager, about sixteen, is being interviewed on one of those entertainment shows. The more I stare at the television, the more I can see he looks just like his father—the dimpled smile, his eyes, everything. And when he turns his head to the right like that, laughing his mother’s laugh, I can see a tiny birthmark on his lower neck near the collarbone. Someone, or maybe he himself, picked a shirt with a high collar in an attempt to hide the blemish. If I didn’t know where to look I wouldn’t have seen it as intended. He looks Latino, but I know he is really the product of an African-American mother and Irish-American father. “It’s him.” I look over at Stephen, and can tell I don’t have to state the obvious—he knows. “Shit, it is,” he says, sitting down on the arm of the sofa. I stand next to him, resisting the urge to go up to the 27” screen and touching my fingertips to it. “He looks just like you.” Stephen nods slowly. “Yeah.” We watch the television, neither of us daring to move for fear of missing something. After all these years, the two of us wondering what happened to him, he’s right here on our TV screen. Stephen speaks first, in a quiet voice that’s barely audible over the television I’ve turned up high. “What’s his name?” I shake my head. I was so stunned at seeing him, my other senses had shut down. I hadn’t heard a name. We watch him a little longer. He’s the adopted son of two Hollywood stars and is doing the talk-show circuit to plug his debut movie. He laughs my laugh—maybe too loud, but genuine—as he explains to the interviewer most people didn’t even know he existed. He says he’s always loved acting, but his parents didn’t want him involved in the business until he was old enough and sure this was what he wanted. His parents. It stings a little when I comprehend these are the people who stepped in to raise our child. They are the ones given the privilege of that title, not Stephen and I. “Connor Pike,” I read the name of our son from the bottom of the screen where it’s flashed for a few seconds. I watch as it settles over my husband. Stephen closes his eyes and draws in a breath. A moment later he opens them and begins to blink rapidly. My own vision blurs. “Connor Pike,” he repeats our son’s name to himself. We never named him. I stand with my arms wrapped around myself, trying to take in everything, memorize his face before he’s gone. I had given him up the summer before I went off to college, before I knew Stephen and I would actually get married four years later and want more children. I’d recently spent almost every waking moment of my day trying to recall that face, whether I was standing in the shower or deli line. During our eight years of marriage I have never admitted to Stephen-the only secret I’ve ever kept from him—that oddly enough I didn’t always miss our child. Especially in my younger years. I was so absorbed in my own life that I seldom stopped to think about the child running around out there with my chromosomes. But now at thirty-three, I have since changed my views on motherhood. I find myself checking out the maternity section in department stores and deciding among some of the maternity fashions what I would or wouldn’t wear if I were pregnant. Stephen is just as bad, and tells me he sometimes takes a few minutes and sits and watches little league games on his way home from work. We both think baby shoes are the cutest things, and traded in our coupe for a sedan two years ago. The entertainment show goes off, but Stephen and I still sit in front of the television, watching the opening segment of some game show that comes on next, stunned. On the next commercial Stephen clicks the television off and twists around on the arm of the sofa to look back at me. “That really was him, wasn’t it, Faith?” “Yes, it was.” Silence. I feel tingly, restless really. I bend to pick up the handful of letters I had dropped when I turned on the television. What I really want to do is grab the remote from Stephen and turn the TV back on and find Connor suddenly there. And then I laugh Connor’s laugh, but a little more giddy, and Stephen joins me. He crosses the room and gives me a crushing hug before lifting me up, causing me to squeal in surprise. He loses his balance and we tumble to the floor. That sets things in motion. I pant something silly but appropriate for that moment about finally giving Connor a brother or sister as we pull at each others clothes. ~ “You do realize I won’t be able to comment on how much your hair is thinning in the back if we do have more children?” Stephen sits across from me at the dinner table, wearing the silly grin that I know must be evident on my own face since we turned on the TV two hours ago and saw Connor. He blinks at me behind his glasses, his eyes two unmagnified dots. “That’s fine. And I hope you know, that if we have a house full of kids, I won’t be able to remind you to go to the gym when you start putting on the extra pounds.” I make a face at him, but keep the smile. It’s the discovery of Connor that has given me renewed hope for having another child. Finding him has reminded me that we did it once before, so why not again? I share this insight with Stephen as he twirls spaghetti onto his fork. We’ve been feeling a little down about this procreation thing. We’ve been trying for the past couple of years to conceive and it’s gotten to the point where we’ve scheduled an appointment with a specialist to see who’s holding up progress. “You’re right, we should get back on that schedule the doctor told us about when we first started trying,” Stephen says around a forkful of food. “We shouldn’t have given up so easily, he said it would take some time.” I nod, chewing thoughtfully and seeing our future so clearly it hurts. “We’ll have a girl and another boy. No, another boy first and then a girl. I want our baby girl to have two big brothers to look after her.” Stephen stops eating as if an idea has just dawned on him, and speaks with food in his mouth. “We could have twins. We could have triplets or even sextuplets.” I put down my fork, reach across the table and give Stephen’s hand a brief squeeze before letting go. Our smiles grow broader. “Yes, that would be nice.” I rub my hand up and down on my belly, imagining it expanded and full of life as it was with Connor. ~ Connor’s movie is a teen flick and we’re the oldest ones by almost two decades in the theater. But this doesn’t bother me, we get to see our son for an uninterrupted one hour and twenty-minutes which isn’t a lifetime, but it’s a start. That morning at breakfast I lunged across the table and ripped the paper from Stephen’s hand. He gaped at me; his de-magnified eyes looking bewildered. “If you would have asked I would have given it to you,” he said, righting the toppled sugar bowl and watching me curiously. I flipped the paper around so he could see Connors movie ad, my shaking hands causing the pages to rustle. I cut it out and stuck it in the back of our photo album. In the theater I check my watch and notice only two minutes have passed since the last time I looked. I don’t know how Stephen can eat popcorn at a time like this. I’m sitting forward on my seat, ready to run up to the film room and start the movie myself. Two teenage boys sit down a few rows in front of us and start throwing candy at the screen. A group of teenage girls behind us think it’s funny. I look up at Stephen to see if he’s noticing the unruly teens. He’s staring at the blank screen and methodically shoveling popcorn into his mouth—grab a few, chew for five seconds, swallow, grab a few more, and so on. I wonder if I snapped my fingers in front of his face if he’d be jolted out of the trance he’s placed himself under. I know he’s thinking about Connor too, maybe about throwing the football around together like I’m sure he’s always wanted to do. “If they don’t stop by the time the movie starts, I’m going to say something,” I whisper to Stephen. “Huh?” I see flecks of kernels in his mouth. “Those two boys up front, if they keep throwing that shit, I’m going to tell them to knock it off.” “That shit?” “Yes, that shit,” I snap back at him. I rarely curse except when I’m upset, and Stephen finds it amusing when I do. He says it doesn’t sound right, like I’m trying to be tough, but can’t. He starts up on his popcorn again, heading back to that zone where he and Connor reside. “They’ll run out of ‘shit’ by that time, don’t worry about it.” I grunt something negative back at him, but sit quietly, except for my leg which I can’t help jostling up and down. Ages later the lights finally dim. I remain sitting on the edge of my seat, gripping the chair in front of me. I fidget through the trailers and then get butterflies in my stomach when the movie starts. There he is. Stephen grabs my hand, his own a little slick and warm from the popcorn butter, and I squeeze it back. Connor’s playing the jock, but he’s smart and sensitive, and is the only one who’s nice to the geeky girl who will be pretty once she takes her glasses off and fixes herself up. The movie should have gone straight to video, but Stephen and I think Connor is excellent, and go back the next night to see him again. ~ “Here you go, Faith.” Stephen hands me another teen magazine and I add it to the small stack I’m holding. Each month since discovering Connor six months ago, Stephen and I go to the bookstore and raid the magazine stand, looking for more pictures of Connor. Stephen’s just paid a girl twenty bucks to hand over the last issue of Teen People she was holding. Connor is on the front and I think it’s his best photo yet. “You see anymore?” I nudge aside a boy reading a skateboarding magazine as I re-scan the racks. “Nope, I think that’s it.” We’re yelling across the aisle, deliriously happy and loud like we always are when we come to find Connor. Earlier we found out Connor will be a supporting actor in a movie with another huge star. Possibly Hanks or even Williams. No “Proud Parent of an Honor Student” bumper sticker can replace this feeling. Stephen and I decide after the bookstore we’ll go get a bottle of wine to celebrate. ~ “His favorite food is pepperoni pizza,” I read from one of the teen magazines. We’re both in the living room, television off, small fire going in the fireplace, wine half gone. Stephen’s head is resting on my lap and he’s reading his own magazine. He crinkles his nose at this. Pepperoni gives him heartburn. “And his favorite color is blue. Baby blue,” I correct myself. Stephen nods his head and puts it in his mental filing cabinet just as I do. He reads from his magazine. “It says here he’s been seen around town with that girl he made his last movie with.” I almost choke on my wine. “That girl? She’s been in and out of rehab, and she’s only what, seventeen?" “Yup. That’s her. I’ll give it three months.” I believe in miracles. “One.” Stephen and I have a ritual now. We devote one night a month to cutting out everything that has to do with Connor from magazines, the newspaper, wherever. We first started putting them in our family photo album, right behind our wedding pictures, but we’ve collected so many we’ve already filled two additional albums. We also have a half-full box of VHS tapes from his television appearances. He’s being called one of the top rising young actors in Hollywood and has been on Letterman and Leno each twice. Same with the daytime talk shows. We’ve finally figured out how to work our VCR so we can record these programs when we’re too exhausted to stay up late or are at work. We’re also planning on repainting the spare bedroom and hanging some of Connor’s bigger posters in there. Recently I’ve tried to become friendly with the night worker at Blockbuster Video, offering him everything short of free sex for Connor’s movie posters, but the little punk won’t part with them. “They’re saying he might be up for an Oscar,” Stephen says about Connor’s recent film. “He should be. It was a good movie. I believed he was dying of leukemia. I don’t know how they made him look so awful.” “Um hm,” he says, lifting his head up to swallow more of his wine. “Those make-up artists really know their stuff.” We don’t’ discuss how we made a spectacle of ourselves in the movie theater, crying in each other’s arms at the end of Connor’s movie, leaving others in the theater puzzled at the two of us. The thought of Connor really dying struck a cord in both of us. The credits were long since over and the theater had already emptied out before we regained our composer and made it back to the car where I, then Stephen, affected by my whimpering and sniveling, fell into another crying spell. Stephen and I continue reading our own magazines, interrupting the silence when we come to something worth mentioning about our son neither of us knew before. By the time we’re done, we’re too tired to do anything else that night, leaving our cut up magazine scraps to litter the living room floor until morning. ~ I punch up the speed on the treadmill to 6 mph and get ready to run until I feel I’m having a heart attack or my legs give out. This usually means a half-hour, tops. But today’s different. I might go longer, anger fueling me instead of my usual stamina. The night before I had a fight with Stephen about Connor’s future. Connor’s going to be getting his high school degree in a few months, and there’s talk he might put his career on hold to go on to college, which sparked our latest argument. “He’s not going to be an actor forever!” I yelled at Stephen, mad enough to the point where I contemplated stabbing him with the scissors I had poised over a movie ad. Knowing me much too well, Stephen got up from the armchair that was positioned next to the sofa where I sat and crossed to the other side of the room. He poked the dying fire around in the fireplace. “He could, you never know. Enough people do it, and besides, there are always phone commercials if his career fizzles.” His humor was lost on me. If I was quick I could dash across the room and stick the scissors in his back before he knew I was even coming. But I remained on the sofa. “This is our son’s future you’re talking about, he should go to college. He’ll be the only one in our family who hasn’t gone if he doesn’t—my parents went, your parents went, we went, he should too!” “That’s stupid to walk away from everything.” I knew there was no point in arguing with him. I threw the scissors on the sofa and left. Stephen was so stubborn he’d sit there for days trying to convince me he was right. I was too tired to continue fighting with him. We’d been fighting about Connor a lot lately. About who he was dating, the roles he chose, even how he dressed. What I didn’t tell Stephen was I didn’t want to see Connor go either, but I was trying to be realistic about the whole situation. He might just take a break and go to college, then what? Stephen didn’t realize that although Connor’s career was going strong now, who knew what it’d be like four years down the line. We might never see our son again, and that thought always twisted my stomach into knots. I wasn’t sure I could handle him disappearing from my life again. And Stephen and I had yet to make another baby. We would have nothing if Connor disappeared. ~ I get home from the gym and am surprised to see Stephen still there. It’s 8 o’clock, and I thought he’d be at work by now. I purposely left before he woke up to avoid speaking to him that morning. He’s coming out of the living room and the look on his face chills the sweat on my body. “What’s wrong?” “It’s Connor.” “What? What about him?” I drop my gym bag and take a step toward my husband. I remind myself to breathe. “I just heard he was hurt on the set of his new movie. Something about a cable he was hanging from snapped when he was doing a stunt.” I can’t stand up alone anymore and grope the wall for support. Stephen reaches for my hand. I squeeze back. “Well, he’s okay, right?” My voice is tiny, like the day I signed his adoption papers and in a rare showing of maternal instinct, asked that he get a good home, please. He shakes his head and I can feel he’s trembling. “I don’t know. They were talking about it on the morning news shows. He’s in ICU. The fall was pretty serious. That’s all I heard. I went to his Web site, but it didn’t say anything.” I hear him, but don’t hear him. I’m thinking about what hospitals Connor would have been taken to. I’ll start around the Hollywood area and go from there. I let go of Stephen’s hand and grope for the phone we have hanging in the hall. “What are you doing?” “I’m calling information and going to get a list of all the hospitals around the set where Connor was filming. I need to find out if he’s okay.” Stephen reaches for the phone and we have a brief tug-of-war before he manages to wrestle it away from me. He pulls the base from the wall and holds the whole thing to his chest. I’m standing there, crying like I’m five again, oblivious to my running nose. “If he’s not okay…” Stephen continues to hug the phone. His voice is quiet. “He’ll be fine, Faith.” ~ We both take a sick day and sit vigil by the television. We watch CNN, read the scrolling news bites at the bottom of the screen, and then switch to the FOX news network. Nothing more is said about Connor’s condition. Sometime near the evening there’s a shot of Connor’s adoptive mother—tall and classically gorgeous—as she makes her way through an airport. The voice-over explains she’s rushing back to the states to be by Connor’s side. Her husband is on a movie shoot at some remote island. It’s said he hasn’t been contacted yet. I wonder what kind of parents they claim to be, leaving their “son” alone all those miles away. I’m convinced movie stars get away with everything. ~ “Here, take this.” Stephen hands me a sandwich. Usually we make dinner together, but nothing short of a quick bathroom break will get me away from my spot in front of the television. I take the sandwich and begin to eat, my actions mechanical. Stephen wanders around the room as he eats. He studies the dozen or so 8-by-10 shots of Connor we’ve collected and framed and placed around our living room. He bends to study the photos on the end table. “I’m so glad we found, Connor,” he says over his shoulder, swallowing a mouthful of food before continuing. “I know you described what he looked like to me from that time they let you take a peak at him before they took him away, but it just wasn’t the same.” He turns back to the photos. He says something I don’t catch and I punch down the volume button on the remote. “What?” “Nothing.” “Oh. I thought you said something.” I move to turn back up the volume. “I did. I just said…” My husband won’t look at me and I sit up, ready to become more in tune with his feelings. With one eye on the television and the other on his stooped back, I ask him to repeat himself. “I was just wondering if our next child will look like its brother.” I make a noise in the back of my throat. “And don’t say we’ll never know, because we will. We’ll have our own baby we can raise and keep safe.” I study the remote in my hands. There’s no button to put Stephen on mute. He crosses the room and stands next to me, hands in his jeans pockets. He taps the top of my foot with his. I look up at him and some of the anger I felt toward him and myself for our failed attempts to create our own little family diminishes. He offers me a tiny reassuring smile. “Everything is going to be okay, Faith.” This time I believe him. ~ We don’t find out about Connor’s condition until the last five minutes of the eleven o’clock news. It’s reported he’ll be okay. He’s awake and has a slight concussion, but is expected to be back in the studios in a few weeks. Stephen and I feel a little weird celebrating in front of Connor’s photos and take it upstairs to bed. ~ “I burnt the popcorn.” “What? How?” His mistake wafts into the living room. I know I should get up and open some windows, but don’t. I’m desperately feeling for the remote I’m sure has slipped down into the sofa cushions. I need that remote, damn it. Then I feel it, and my heart beats normal again. “Never mind. Connor’s category is up next. You’re going to miss it.” Stephen sits down next to me on the couch and puts his arm around my shoulders. I lean in closer to him and hit the volume button up twice as the Oscar ceremony cuts back from commercials. Two days ago my home pregnancy test was positive. I have an appointment with my doctor at the end of the week to confirm it. I can’t be sure if Connor will always be visible, however, as Stephen explained to me when I finally told him about my fears of never seeing Connor again, at least we know he’s doing okay, is healthy, and aside from the recent break-up with his girlfriend (yes!), for the most part, happy. Life is good. The nominees flash by for best supporting actor. It’s been three months since the accident and there’s Connor, looking so distinguished in his tux. I’m taping the ceremony and I’ll rewind this portion several times. An actress I can’t quite place who’s in a backless, white gown reads the nominees for the best actor category. “And the winner is…” She fumbles with the envelope and I hold my breath, sure I’m going to die in the next moment before I find out. I feel Stephen’s hand tighten around my shoulders. My nails will inevitably leave lasting marks in his thigh where I’m gripping him. “Connor Pike for “Saying Goodbye.” Stephen and I are up, whooping and yelling and hugging one other. Then we’re shushing each other and settling down so we can hear what Connor has to say. He thanks his parents first. ###