Five years is an awfully long time to hold your breath. In the eighteen hundred days since then, I had been living in a house that was no longer home but a museum devoted to someone not there anymore. The hallway had become silent to me and the noonday shadows on the door of Jennifer’s bedroom seemed familiar. I knew, without question, that my life would end just as it had begun, in this cold and ghostly old house where unresolved rows lingered.
Until Tuesday, that was.
It was around 6:00 in the morning, that strange time when everything feels slightly unreal in the pale light. I was still trying to make my way to the kitchen for a quick cup of coffee, but my brain wasn’t fully awake yet. When the doorbell rang, I barely registered it. Visitors don’t come that early in our house. They rarely come late, either. It was a sharp ring, the kind that suggested whoever pressed it didn’t plan to wait.
I opened the door, pulling my robe tighter against the cold. I remember feeling annoyed that someone would ring at that hour. It had to be a mischievous neighborhood kid or a delivery gone to the wrong address.
The porch was empty. The street was quiet. But when I looked down, the whole world seemed to turn upside-down.
There was a basket sitting on the mat. Inside the basket there was a swaddled baby girl, perhaps three or four months old. Her hair was dark and she had her eyes open, looking up at the porch light. However, it wasn’t the baby who made me drop to my knees. It was the garment the baby was wrapped up in.
It was a blue jean jacket that was Levi’s, which meant it would fade out to that particular shade of blue after a hundred washes. The left cuff was ragged, a raw tear in it caused by years of Jennifer chewing the fabric while feeling nervous. This jacket was something that I had bought for her when she turned fifteen years old, and she hated it because it was “new.” Therefore, she had taken the jacket and dragged it along with her bike and put it in the sun until it had become “authentic.”
It wasn’t until I spotted the tears on the baby’s head that I realized I was crying. I was shaking so badly I could barely get myself to lift her up off the sidewalk, but I couldn’t leave her there. So I picked her up and ran inside, shutting the door and locking it like I expected someone to come back and take her away.
I set the basket down on our kitchen table beside the cold coffee. “This is not real. This is not her.” My mind was a jumbled mess of denial. But I knew what I needed to do. I began to rummage through the basket, looking for any sign of who left her here, what they needed from me. There was an old diaper bag stuffed at the bottom, with formula and a couple of onesies, a pacifier. Inside the pocket of the blue jean jacket, a piece of notebook paper.
The writing was not Jennifer’s. It was small, scribbled, almost illegible.
“Her name is Hope. She’s Jennifer’s. I’m sorry, I really am. I tried to do this on my own, but I’m drowning. Jennifer always said you were the only one who actually loved her for who she was. Paul told us three years ago that if we ever showed up, he’d call the cops and say I kidnapped her. He said he’d make sure I went to prison. We were scared. But Jennifer’s gone now. She didn’t make it after the birth. I can’t do this anymore. Please don’t hate her. — Andy.”
I believe I went a whole minute without breathing. The words, “Paul told us,” made me feel physically crushed by an invisible hand.
For five long years, I lived in a permanent state of mourning. I had believed that our last fight in the kitchen was my fault. After all, it was nothing big, we were just fighting about something insignificant, some boy, some curfew, typical teenage drama. The escalation had been done by him, he had insulted her and told her how much she disappointed him. And when she stormed out, I assumed that she was just cooling off. When she never returned, I fell apart.
But Paul knew the entire time.
It wasn’t just that he was my husband, he was also the one who looked at me while I wept over my soup during dinner. He was the one who saw me examine the missing people posters, then turned around and said “Forget it, she’s made her decision.” It was him who communicated with them. He was threatening the father of his grandchild to stroke his ego. His daughter being dead was better than her not being controlled by him.
I did not hesitate, I did not think, just I called him. He had moved out three years ago, about the same time that he allegedly told Jennifer to stay away from us. He was living his “new life” as he liked to call it – he had a new wife, a new house that didn’t hold memories of his abandoned daughter.
“Come here,” I said when he answered. I could hardly recognize my own voice, but it sounded cold.
“It is six o’clock in the morning and what is going on?” He groaned.
“This morning or else I’ll report everything in Andy’s letter to the police.”
There was no answer.
He arrived thirty minutes late, disheveled yet still managing to project that “sane” image he cherished so deeply. He entered the kitchen, looked at the infant, and simply turned pale. Then, he looked at the coat. He looked at the letter left on the table.
“I did it for our sake,” he began, his voice quavering. “She was a disaster. The boyfriend was a bum. I thought that if I made them both leave, she would know how tough life could be, and she would come back to me for good. I did not imagine that… that…”
“You didn’t think she’d die?” I demanded, feeling a rage that blurred my vision. “Did you ever consider that I would spend five long years mourning the loss of my child because you allowed her to believe I despised her so much that I never answered the phone? Did you know that she carried a child?”
He reached out to place a hand on my shoulder, but the thought of him touching me made me want to kill him. I asked him to leave. I told him that if he ever showed his face again, I’d make sure he would spend the rest of his life dragging in court for what he’d done.
After he left, the house seemed empty. Hope woke up crying. I hadn’t changed a baby’s diaper in decades, but it was as if I had only done that the previous night. I took care of her and just stared at her as she fussed. She had Jennifer’s strong jawline.
The following morning, I spotted a car I didn’t recognize. A beaten-up sedan with a broken windshield. I knew who it was. I stepped out onto the porch, and after several moments, the front door opened and a young man emerged.
It was Andy.
He did not fit the description of the “drifter” that Paul had given me. On the contrary, he appeared as though the entire world was pressing down upon him. He was scrawny and wore worn-out clothes; he seemed as though he had not slept since Hope’s birth. He did not approach the door but remained standing near his car, staring at me with an expression of sheer, utter terror.
I did not scream at him but simply motioned for him to come closer to me.
We spent two hours sitting side-by-side on the front porch steps. He explained everything to me. He spoke about how they had relocated to another state altogether. Jennifer had taken a job working at a restaurant until her pregnancy reached eight months. She would speak of the “blue room” at our home and how much she longed for my pancakes. He informed me about the hospital and how things happened so quickly that even the doctors could not respond in time.
When I met his eyes, I did not see a murderer, but rather a boy who had lost the woman he loved and was doing all he could to honor her last wish.
“Your daughter is safe,” I reassured him. “And you no longer need to fear for Paul. It is over.”
I spent most of the time accepting the reality that Jennifer was truly gone. No longer was there a sense of uncertainty, but only an overwhelming sense of loss that was both painful yet strangely peaceful. The house no longer felt like a waiting room.
That night, after Andy had gone to stay at a motel (I had to pay for it; he hadn’t had even a cent), I entered Jennifer’s room. After five years, for the first time ever, I decided to open the window, letting the fresh air into the room. I moved the books and cleared the top of the dresser for a bottle warmer and some baby wipes.
Taking the blue denim jacket off the kitchen table, I carried it to her room and gently put it down there. No longer did it have the faint vanilla scent, which reminded me of her favorite perfume. It was just baby powder and old clothes.
Jennifer didn’t return home as I had always imagined over five long years of waiting. There were no apologies and tearful explanations; there was no “I’m sorry I left.” However, standing in the darkness of the room and listening to the breathing in the next room, I understood that she managed to send me what really mattered to me back home.
After eighteen hundred sleepless nights, for the first time ever, I fell asleep, having stopped waiting for the doorbell.
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Bored Daddy
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