DITW 15-4: Colleen

While they waited for Hyun to return with the baby, Kimmy got up and crossed the room. For a moment he feared she would leave through the room’s other doorway, but instead she fetched a box of tissue and returned to place it on the table at his side.

A door squeaked, a knock sounding down the hall, and an enormous jangle of fear and dread had him shaking in the couch. Those sounds were Hyun collecting the baby to bring to him. His baby, Kimmy claimed. She’d sent him pictures and he’d looked at them and he’d put them in a folder on his phone and never looked at them again. It had been this way for months. Now the time was here. The urge to flee never came. It was a blessing.

Out in the hall a shadow passed across the wall and he drew in a deep, preparatory breath. 

This was really happening.

And then Hyun filled the doorway, passing into the family room at the back of Kimmy’s new house, holding a blanket-bundled baby at her chest. He wiped his eyes with his knuckles and waited.

Hyun passed the baby into Kimmy’s arms and Kimmy—god damn it, motherly Kimmy, holding a baby—held Colleen for a moment, waiting for Hyun to leave. “Thank you, Hyun,” she said aside, and Hyun nodded as she left, though Kimmy didn’t see it.

With the baby in her arms, Kimmy brushed the curled fold of a blanket away from the baby’s sleeping face so Josh could see her. Kimmy smiled and he could see the pride she held for this thing she’d created. Maybe with another man.

“She’s Colleen,” Kimmy said. “Colleen Waters.”

Josh had to pull away; emotion soared through him like a katabatic wind cutting through a canyon. When he looked away, all he saw was the pale puff of a readied tissue; he snatched it from the box and pushed it into his eyes.

Kimmy said, “I want you to hold her.”

He moaned in his throat, cleared his eyes, returned his gaze to Kimmy and Colleen. Kimmy rose and stepped closer, stooping to present him with his daughter. He accepted the bundle, tears blinking in his eyelashes, his back heaving with hidden sobs. He gritted his teeth and looked at the baby through wet-warbled eyes.

She was just a tiny innocent thing; eyes closed to the world, unknowing of her own existence and place in the world. Her slim lips were pursed into a pinky little turtle’s beak. His hands trembled with her feathery weight in them. 

Then he jumped when Kimmy touched him. She stroked his hair above his ear, then ran the backs of her fingers down his bearded cheek. “I’m going to leave you alone for a few minutes with your daughter. Is that okay?”

It was hard to speak, but he managed to squeak out a thank-you.

Kimmy turned and left the room, pausing at the door for one more moment. He turned his attention to Colleen. Colleen Waters.

  *

The last image of Josh as she left the room would stay with her forever. Josh with Colleen on his lap, the sun on the garden behind them, Josh’s tender pose. It would be a beautiful image to memorialize. But she had to leave him, had to give him time with Colleen.

A few steps down the hall, she paused, frozen in place, suspended in a neutral zone where two poles tugged in opposites, wanting to return and witness Colleen reveal truths to her father, knowing she would let him have his moment without her adulteration, and that Hyun would convey her to the kitchen.

She crossed hands over her chest, leaning her back on the wall, listening for any sounds from Josh. She hugged herself tighter, rolling away, hurting nipples crushed under her forearms.

Before the kitchen, she straightened her clothing, checked her reflection in the hallway mirror, then padded into the kitchen. Hyun stood at the fridge with the door open, eyes blank, unmoving.

“Where’s Sophie?”

Hyun blinked and stepped back to close the fridge door. “She’s reading.”

Both of them looked around the kitchen, the moment bloated and uncertain. Kimmy went to Hyun and Hyun leaned into her. She folded arms around Hyun and Hyun rested her cheek on Kimmy’s collar. She held her in silence, soon swaying with her in comfort.

Hyun said, “He looks good.”

Kimmy nodded and rested her chin point on the crown of Hyun’s head.

  *

Fragrant, blissful and blameless.

The baby woke in slow increments, sensing a disturbance in its familiar world. Eyes twitching, nose wrinkling, the mouth opened and closed. Colleen was a perfect thing. Red-faced and curious, comically perturbed, hands moving under the blanket. He parted the folds and she raised little moving fists.

And then the eyes. God, the eyes!

Colleen woke and regarded him with kind eyes the color of dark honey.

“Oh my god. Oh my god,” he whispered. His mother’s eyes.

A wild vertigo swooned his brumy mind, breath and heartbeat stolen from him.

Then it returned all at once, the vertigo gone and replaced with sudden, infinite resolution. His heart pounded the strangest joy he’d ever felt in his entire existence. His temples sounded off like booming taiko drums; he chugged sweet air. Held Colleen close to him, felt her skin on his cheek.

But she gripped a tiny fistful of beard hair.

“Ow, ow,” he said, chuckling, holding her tighter.

God, she smelled like blueberries.

Her lips smacked near his ear. She mewled. He kissed her brow, held her back to regard her again. And she regarded him. Those familiar eyes looked deep into him, and he opened the door wider, wanting her to step inside.

“I wasn’t ready,” he pleaded, tears on his cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Colleen. I’m so, so sorry.”

Colleen’s face scrunched up, she blinked, and looked like she would cry but changed her mind. She squirmed and grunted, little hand out and searching. He gave her his finger and she squeezed.

  *

Fifteen minutes ticked by at the same mucky pace the last seven months passed. Every second battened on dread and drama. 

Fifteen minutes would be enough time. Enough time for Josh to look at Colleen and make his decision. He could run. But maybe he would stay.

The sun was setting off in the west, the sunny sky high above the trees shading a deep starry blue, the horizon washed in the color of lemon-cream. She’d changed clothes. She’d got comfortable. Now in her bedroom she moisturized her wrists and hands and stared at the sky.

Satin robe, satin pants, buttoned shirt.

Fifteen minutes passed and she closed the blinds and headed downstairs.

  *

Colleen craned her head to the side to see her mother coming in.

“She’s here,” Josh whispered. He thumbed Colleen’s soft cheek, and brushed her wispy fair-haired lock away from her brow. Fair-haired!

Kimmy had changed. Standing now like she was ready for bed; satin pajamas, an expensive robe that swept the floor. Her makeup had been cleaned away, her hair untied and hanging around her shoulders. The expression on her face showed a sickly anxiousness, and she shuffled around to the leather chair again. She sat down without making a sound, her eyes falling on him, roaming the sight of him holding their daughter. She rested a cheek in her hand, looking tired and drawn.

He returned his attention to Colleen, bouncing her in his lap, still humming away with syrupy relief, a rumble in his chest. Colleen’s weight in his hands tingled his fingertips like magic.

Kimmy said, “I have the paperwork.”

He didn’t think she’d meant for that to sting, but it did. His assumption was the paperwork she referred to would be a paternity test, and it was a reminder he’d been away from his own daughter her whole life and it was his own decision.

A decision forged in heartbreak and fear.

He shook his head and stroked a thumb on Colleen’s delicate brow. She became disgruntled, scrunching her face up and showing her toothless grimace.

“I don’t need the paperwork,” he said.

Kimmy was silent, and Colleen mewled. Kimmy leaned to the side and snatched a tissue. He looked up and saw she was crying. She covered her eyes with a hand balling the tissue. “I have proof. That’s all. I have proof.”

“I don’t want to see it,” he muttered, eyes turning down to his daughter. Maybe if Kimmy had showed him proof he’d have been here sooner. “You could have told me.”

Colleen squealed and bawled now, hands reaching up in the air, her red face reddening. She had a delicate cry. 

“I think she wants her mother,” he said, offering the swaddled bundle back to Kimmy.

“She’s probably just hungry,” Kimmy said, slipping off the seat and taking Colleen in her arms. Josh took the chance to get a fresh tissue for his own eyes. Kimmy returned to the deep cushioned chair and reclined this time. She soothed Colleen, bouncing her gently in her arms, shushing her with gentle whispering. She unbuttoned her satin pajama shirt. “You don’t mind?”

He shook his head no, hypnotized by the sight of his wife this way. Nothing like how she was when they parted. Yet she was the same woman.

Kimmy parted the shirt, Colleen complaining. Her bared breast was plumped, tumid, the nipple changed, swollen in size for its new function. He should have looked away, but he didn’t. Colleen searched and found the nipple, and the crying ceased as she fed from Kimmy. The only sound now was the wet suction of his beautiful daughter nursing from her beautiful mother.

Kimmy whimpered with the discomfort from Colleen’s need, her expression tightening. Yet her eyes stayed on Colleen, watching her with love. After a long mesmerizing moment, Kimmy turned her face to his. “I could have told you. But I . . . I would have robbed you of this moment. I wanted you to see it with your own eyes, unswayed by anything I might tell you beforehand.”

Shame burned his cheeks and he knew he’d gone as red as Colleen’s little face. “I should have come already.”

“No, Josh. Whatever time you needed, you took it. I don’t blame you. I wished you were here, but you weren’t. You’re here now.”

He nodded, wiping his eyes with the tissue. “She has my . . . Has my mother’s eyes.”

Kimmy smiled, regarding Colleen, still suckling. “She has beautiful eyes.”

He reclined in the couch, that golden moment of time he’d just spent with a life he created beginning to lose it glow, the emotion fading; fading or pushed away by the horrors of the past; all the bad that brought them to this solitary quasar of possibilities, a man with a wife and daughter, a wife with another man, a home. A whole life that had moved on without him in it. He stared at the ceiling listening to the bizarre sound of his daughter suckling from her mother, feeling a thousand miles distant from the point in time he most identified with: the time his wife betrayed him and lied to him and cheated on him, tormented him and sought his destruction. His heart increased with rapid weight and he felt himself wanting to sink through the couch, into the basement if Kimmy’s house had one, down into the realms below where torment such as this was normal.

Kimmy said, “Are you ready for some dinner?”

He thought she’d said it to Colleen, but he tilted his head downward, seeing his daughter satiated, eyes closed again, peaceful, Kimmy’s shirt closed over her bare breast but not buttoned.

He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. We should . . . We should talk.”