Chapter  7

“Okay, I’m going to give it to you,” she said. “You might not like it, but if you’ll just listen to me, I’ll listen to you, deal?”

“You expect me to just sit here?” I asked.

“No, I’d like that, but I don’t expect it,” she said. I snorted.

She leaned back against the cushion and stretched those impossibly long legs out. “John, I love you,” she said. “I’ve loved you since our first date. I never stopped and I don’t think I ever will. You’re the only man I’ve ever loved. You’re the one for me. When I came to you and told you I needed to get away for a while, I never meant permanently. I wasn’t even thinking of another man. I was still as much in love with you as ever. I thought I was too much in love with you. I was wrong. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was.”

“I hate to say this, Sara,” I said, “but this sounds like buyer’s remorse. It sounds like you went out and got what you thought you wanted and it didn’t turn out like you thought it would.”

“No, you’re wrong,” she said. “What I regret is the way I did it, not that I did. I grew up, John. I was a stupid, callow girl. I’m a woman now. I did what I needed to do and if you hadn’t run away like you did, it would have been so much easier for both of us. I’m not sure it was a bad thing. “

“You’re not sure it was a bad thing? It was sure as hell a bad thing for me; I can tell you that. You’re telling me you don’t regret leaving me?”

“I didn’t intend to leave you, John, I keep telling you. I moved out. It’s not the same.”

“That’s bullshit, but have it your way. You had something you ‘needed to do’, so instead of trying to work it out together, you just moved out. And now you’re telling me everything would have been okay if only I had sat at home all alone and waited for you to decide to come back to me?”

“I didn’t say I was smart, John, and I’ve already told you I’m sorry for hurting you so badly. I can’t really regret it, though, because while I was away, I did grow up. When I found out I was pregnant, I had to grow up in a hurry.”

“When did you find out?” I asked.

“Not for a while,” she said. “I really didn’t think about missing my periods. The first thing I noticed was being a little nauseated in the morning. I just thought I had a bug. It didn’t go away and I went to the doctor. That’s when I found out. I was nine weeks along.”

“Did you know she was mine?” I asked.

“John, there was never a doubt,” she said. “You are the only man I ever allowed to touch me in an intimate way from the time we started dating until the day our divorce became final.”

“Couldn’t wait for the ink to dry?” I asked.

She looked at me and she was angry. Her eyes flashed. “No, and I never touched anyone until after Sareen was born, either,” she said.

It sounded as if she was playing games to me. “What are you saying, Sara?”

“I’m just telling you that there was, and is, no question who Sareen’s father is,” she said.

All right, we could leave that alone for now. “Okay, go on,” I said. “I’ll try not to say anything unless I have a question.”

She nodded. “John, I wasn’t leaving you. I wanted to be your wife. I’ve wanted nothing else since our first date. I just wanted a chance to see if I could make it on my own. We’d been together since my second freshman semester. I lived with my parents, had one semester living in the dorms and then I moved in with you.”

“Sara, that doesn’t make sense. You already were making it on your own. Hell, you were a celebrity by the time you were 21, and it wasn’t as if you were part of a team or anything. It was just you.”

She thought for a moment. “Yes, I guess it would seem like that. John, the Sara O’Keefe who everyone thinks they know doesn’t really exist. She’s a character I made up, and I play her very well. She has a lot in common with me, but she’s not me. A lot of performers are like that, I think. My career, all this stuff,” she waved her had around the cabin cruiser, “is her, it’s not really me. When I was out in public, people always expected to meet her, not me. I started to wonder if there really was a me any more. You know, I never really lived on my own.”

“I wasn’t much different,” I told her.

“Yes, I know that,” she said. “The difference is I thought you would be just fine without me. I didn’t know how I would be if I didn’t have you. I needed to learn to trust myself. It really had nothing to do with you or us, it was me. I needed to trust me, that I was capable of standing on my own two feet. I fucked it up. I’m very, very sorry. I never intended for anything that happened to happen. I didn’t understand how upset you were, I didn’t understand how I was affecting you and hurting you. I knew you didn’t like the idea, but I needed to try it on my own. I was young and stupid, John. I found out just how stupid when you left.”

“Well, it just sounded like psychobabble to me,” I said. “It sounded to me like you were telling me I wasn’t enough for you, that you were looking for an upgrade, and that I wasn’t what you needed.”

“No, no, it wasn’t like that at all!” She had tears in those impossibly huge eyes. “I needed you more than ever! I needed you to be there for me, help me see that I was a person, on my own. I just needed to find the right words to tell you how much I loved you and that I wasn’t leaving you, that you had done nothing wrong, that it was me, but when I got myself together, three days later, you were gone.”

“I thought you wanted me gone,” I said.

“No!” She fell to the floor on her knees in front of me and held my hands. “I never wanted that. God, John, I searched everywhere for you. I called everyone I knew. I went home and cried. Christ, I cried so damn hard. Your parents didn’t know where you were; you quit your job; you just disappeared. I didn’t go to work for two weeks; I spent every minute thinking about you, looking for you, trying to track you down. Then I got the divorce papers in the mail.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said again.

“Well, you were wrong,” she said. “That’s when I found out you were in Alaska. Your attorney told me. I went to court and asked for counseling. The judge agreed, but there was no way to get you here. I could have explained everything. Then I found out I was pregnant!”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I went to pieces,” she said. “I wondered how this could happen. I was on the pill, for God’s sake. You were the only man that had ever made love to me. I knew it was our baby, but I’d fucked everything up so bad that I didn’t know what to do. I went to your mom and dad.

“I told them everything. I told them how stupid I had been. They agreed with me, I could tell, but they never said one bad word to me,” she said. “They took care of me for a week. I stayed with them. You have wonderful parents, John. They went to childbirth classes with me, took me to doctor’s appointments, your mother was there in the room with me when Sareen was born. She was the first one to hold her. I’m not even sure they believed that she was ours, but they were my rocks.”