The Man Who Rejected Me at My Cousin’s Wedding Was Standing at My Front Door Nine Months Later

Part 3: The Napkin

I made the tea.

Nobody drank it.

We sat around my kitchen table like people at a wake, which in a way we were, and the baby slept through it, which was its own small mercy.

Daniel talked first.

He said he didn’t remember Kayla. He said that honestly, looking at me. Not proud of it, not defensive about it. He said he remembered the wedding because his brother had gotten married and he remembered being at the bar and he remembered a woman in a green dress, vaguely, and he remembered the next morning waking up alone in his room with a headache and a room service tray he hadn’t ordered.

He said he’d been drinking since Thursday. He said his ex-fiancée, whose name was Meredith, had called him the morning of the rehearsal dinner to tell him she was pregnant with someone else’s baby. He said he had gone to his brother’s wedding and smiled through it and gotten catastrophically drunk and said things to women he did not remember saying, and he was not proud of any of it, and he was not asking us to feel sorry for him.

“But I would have called,” he said. “If I had the number. I would have called.”

“Which one of us,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Either one of you,” he said. “Both. I don’t know. I was not, I was not a person that weekend. I was a hole in the shape of a person.”

Emma made a small sound.

“Kayla said the same thing,” she said. “About herself. That weekend.”

Daniel didn’t answer.

“So what happens now,” I said.

Emma looked at the sealed envelope.

“That’s up to him,” she said.

Daniel picked up the envelope.

He held it for a long time without opening it. Then he set it back down on the table, unopened, and he said, “I need to know what’s in it before I decide anything. That’s not fair. I need to decide first.”

“Decide what,” Emma said.

“Whether I’m keeping her.”

The word keeping sat in the kitchen like a piece of furniture nobody wanted to walk around.

“Daniel,” I said.

“I’m thirty-six years old,” he said. “I live alone in a one-bedroom in Dupont. I work seventy hours a week. I have not held a baby since I was fourteen and my aunt made me hold my cousin at a christening. I do not know how to do this. I do not know how to be a person who does this.”

“Nobody does,” Emma said. “At first.”

“Kayla did.”

“Kayla was terrified,” Emma said. “The whole time. She just did it anyway.”

Daniel looked at the baby.

Nora had woken up. She wasn’t crying. She was just looking at the ceiling with the flat, considering look babies have, like they’re deciding whether the ceiling is going to be a problem.

“Can I hold her,” he said.

“You don’t have to ask me,” Emma said.

“I’m asking anyway.”

Emma unbuckled the car seat straps. She lifted Nora out. She held her for a second, one hand under her head, the other under her little diapered bottom, and I watched my sister’s face and I understood, suddenly, that she had been holding this baby for six weeks. That she had rocked her and changed her and fed her at three in the morning and sung to her, probably, in the terrible off-key voice Emma has always had, and that she had done all of this while planning to give her away.

Emma handed Nora to Daniel.

Daniel took her the way you take a bomb. Then, slowly, the way you take a baby.

Nora looked at him.

She did not smile. She did not cry. She looked at him the way she had looked at the ceiling. Considering.

“Hi,” Daniel said.

Nora made a small sound.

Daniel started crying again.

I got up and went into the other room because it felt like something I should not be watching, and I stood in my living room and looked out the window at Emma’s car, still parked crooked in the driveway, dish sponges still on the ground, and I thought about the napkin.

He had thrown it away.

He had thrown away a napkin with my phone number on it that Kayla had written thinking she was throwing it away for herself, and somewhere in a hotel trash can in June there had been a piece of paper with my name on it and a baby’s whole future attached to it, and none of us had known.

I thought about the fact that I had told Emma, that night, walking back to our room, that Daniel was a dick and I hoped I never saw him again.

I thought about the fact that Emma had said, “You won’t.”

She’d said it with such certainty. I remembered now. Because she already knew. She already knew that he’d asked for a number and gotten mine and that he’d left with it in his pocket, because Kayla had told her in the car the next morning, crying, and Emma had told me none of it. For nine months.

She had kept a secret from me that had a whole human being attached to it.

I stood there for a while.

Then I went back into the kitchen.

Daniel was still holding Nora. Emma was watching them. The sealed envelope was still on the table.

“Emma,” I said. “I need to talk to you. In the other room.”

She looked up.

“Rachel.”

“Now.”

She got up. She followed me into the living room. She closed the door behind her, quietly, so as not to wake anyone who was not asleep.

“You didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I know.”

“For nine months.”

“I know.”

“You let me think that man was just some guy who was rude to me at a wedding, and the whole time you knew he had also, that he had also.”

“Rachel.”

“Why.”

She looked at the floor.

“Because if I told you,” she said, “you would have made me tell him. You would have said he had a right to know. And Kayla didn’t want him to know. And I promised her.”

“So instead you cooked up this.”

“I didn’t cook up anything. She died, Rachel. She just died. And her mother is dying. And I have a baby in a car seat in my apartment and a will that says I get to keep her if her father doesn’t want her, and I love her, I love her more than I have ever loved anything, and if I just kept her, if I just told him nothing and kept her, I would be doing exactly what Kayla was afraid of. I would be raising a child whose father didn’t know she existed because I made that choice for him.”

She was crying now.

“And I couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t do it. Because she deserves better than that. Both of them do. So I sent him the money and the note and I waited and he came. He came, Rachel. He drove three hours to a stranger’s house because a note told him to.”

“And if he’d thrown the note away.”

“Then I would have kept her,” Emma said. “And loved her every day of my life. And never told her.”

I sat down on my own couch. In my own living room. Where I had been drinking coffee that morning like a person whose Saturday was going to be normal.

“Emma,” I said. “You have to know how insane this is.”

“I know.”

“You put a baby in a stranger’s building.”

“I put a baby in her father’s building. And I watched from the lobby. And if he had done anything wrong, if he had panicked, if he had called the police instead of picking her up, I was ten seconds from the elevator.”

“Emma.”

“I had to know.”

I put my hands over my face.

I thought about the fact that this was the same sister who had once cried for three days when her hamster died in seventh grade. The same sister who still called me before making any decision that involved more than one hundred dollars. The same sister who had, apparently, been planning a nine-month-long moral test for a man she had met once at a wedding.

“I am so mad at you,” I said, into my hands.

“I know.”

“But.”

I stopped.

“But what,” she said.

“But I don’t know what I would have done differently. If I were you.”

She sat down next to me.

We didn’t say anything for a while.

In the kitchen, we could hear Daniel talking to the baby. Very quietly. We couldn’t make out the words.