“Is Laura okay?”
“I’m so sorry, Steve,” she said, her voice faltering, and the ground giving in beneath my feet. “What? No!
What happened? Is it the baby? Tell me, Mom!”
My mother looked confused for a moment, and then her next words struck a different, unforeseen chord.
Her eyes met mine, filled with a sorrow that immediately told me whatever news came next, it wouldn’t be good. “No, darling,” she said. “She is fine!”
“Then why did you apologize?” I asked, wondering why I was still standing on the porch instead of rushing to see my wife.
But there was something about my mother’s overall energy that made me feel uneasy. I put my briefcase down at my feet, waiting for her to say something. “I apologized because I didn’t want to be the one to tell you,” she said.
“But Laura has been cheating on you.”
The world stopped spinning. The betrayal sliced through the shock. It turned out that my mother had come home because she wanted to use our bathroom.
“My building doesn’t have any water, and I just wanted to come over and shower,” she said. “I came in, and there she was with him.”
It turns out that when my mom walked in, Laura had been on the couch with the man she was having an affair with. My mother couldn’t let him leave; she wanted him to be there when I got home.
A mix of anger and agony surged through my veins as I pushed past her into the house. The scene before me — a man, disheveled and awkward, trying to avoid my gaze — was like a surreal nightmare. “Who are you?” my voice was a low growl, directed at the stranger in my living room.
He started to speak, but I couldn’t hear him over the blood roaring in my ears. Then, she appeared. Laura.
My wife. Her face was ashen and her eyes brimming with tears. She reached out to me, a gesture which was once so familiar, yet felt so alien now.
“Steve,” she said through her tears. “I’m so sorry, I never wanted to hurt you like this.”
“Sorry?” my laughter came out bitter, hollow even. “You destroy our family, and you’re sorry?”
The room suddenly filled with the sound of our son’s crying, his body shaking in the living room doorway.
Seeing him — a witness to our crumbling lives, broke through my anger, replacing it with profound sorrow. “Come here, buddy,” I said softly, reaching out to hold onto him. “Why, Mom?” he asked.
“Why did you do it?”
Jackson’s voice was muffled against my shirt, his question simple yet loaded with confusion and hurt. It turned out that he had walked in when my mother was confronting Laura; his initial response was that something had happened to Laura because of her crying. He wanted to protect her.
But then, his grandmother had taken him into the kitchen and made him a sandwich, telling him the truth. Laura knelt beside us, her hand reaching out, but I pulled him closer to me. “Sometimes, people make terrible mistakes,” she said, her voice breaking.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you both.”
“But it does mean that things can’t stay the same,” I added quietly, the reality settling in. I couldn’t believe that my wife had cheated on me. It made me question everything, including the paternity of the baby that Laura was carrying.
As we sat there on the couch, Laura reached out to me. She went on about promises and wanting to make things right. But I didn’t see how we could move past it and be okay.
I wanted Jackson to live in a home with two parents who loved and trusted each other, but after this — I didn’t see a way through it. Later that evening, I took Jackson out for dinner. We needed to escape our home and the uneasy atmosphere that had taken over.
We needed a break. “Will you move out?” he asked me as he dug into his burger. “No,” I reassured him.
“Mom and I need to figure some things out, sure, but I’m not going anywhere.”
He nodded at me. “I thought that Mom wasn’t okay,” he admitted. “When I got home from school, Gran was trying to get Mom to come out of the bathroom — she kept calling and Mom just kept on crying.
I didn’t know that there was another man in the house.”
“Where was he?” I asked, cracking open a beer. “He was sitting on your bed, or so Gran told me,” Jackson said. After dinner, we just didn’t want to go home.
There was a disconnect between our home and the reality of the situation. But I was grateful that I had Jackson with me. Much later that night, when I went home, Laura was sitting on the couch biting her nails — something she did whenever she was stressed.
“What now?” she asked. “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to make it right.”
She moved the book that was next to her and patted the couch.
“I think only time will decide that,” I said. “But I need you to tell me the truth — is the baby mine?”
Laura closed her eyes and took a deep breath, barely able to contain her anxiety. I could feel it, bubbling off her skin and surrounding the room.
“I’m not sure,” she whispered. In the next few weeks, Laura decided to go for therapy — she said that she needed to understand why she acted out. “I didn’t think that I would be the person to do this,” she said while making us cups of tea.
“But you did,” I said. Laura nodded. “I’m going to stick around until the baby is born,” I said.
“And once we do a DNA test, we can decide on our marriage.”
I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I do know that I’m not prepared for the reality of that test. What would you do?
