Chapter 6

Kendi left to see the doctor and I sat on the lounge chair on the patio. What to do. I had a multitude of things running around in my head, bumping into each other. I got up to take a shower, to easy my troubled mind, but a shower didn’t help. I was about to start beating my head against the wall when my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“This Dr. Askew’s office. Is this Mr. O’Dell?”

“Yes.”

“The results of your test have come in and the doctor would like to see you.”

“My wife isn’t here right now, and I don’t know when she will be back.”

“The doctor would like to talk to you, sir. How soon can you come in?”

“I can walk over there now.”

“I’ll tell the doctor that you are on your way.”

I went into high gear and was dressed and out the door in ten minutes and walking into the doctor’s office in forty-five.

“I’m Mick O’Dell. The doctor called to see me.”

“Yes sir. Please come in.”

The receptionist led me to the doctor’s office and left the door open when she left. I hadn’t been there five minutes when Dr. Askew came in.

“Hi Mick.”

“Hi Doctor.”

“The results are in and I needed to talk to you. I am afraid that I may have done something a bit unethical. I set Kendi up with a counselor that is an old college friend of mine. She is also a psychiatrist. I just got off the phone with her and you will need to give Kendi a good listening to when she gets home. Then, you will have to decide if you want to give her the test results or not.”

“If they are good results, why would I not tell her?”

“Mick, the reasons for your anger had nothing to do with the idea of an abortion or with Kendi having another man’s baby. You have been unbelievably calm and supportive through all of this, but unless the real reason is solved, the results won’t matter one way or the other.”

“Right. Kendi seems to be a different woman than the one I married. I could never have imagined the level of hatred that she suddenly expressed. I was shocked and then I felt something for her that I could never have imagined. I actually felt disappointed in her.”

“Disappointment?”

“Yes. The baby is neither here nor there for me. It is hers. I would have loved her and the baby regardless of the sperm source. If the baby is mine, I’ll be over the moon. If not, then I will need to support Kendi throughout this entire tragedy.”

“When she comes home, listen to her. My friend says that at this point she could go in almost any direction. She loves you and may make a bad decision because of your feelings.”

“I would never do anything but that. So, what are the results?”

I held my breath as the doctor handed me the results. I read them and looked at Dr. Askew.

“Thank you. These results are really accurate, right?”

“99.9%”

“Thanks for getting them here so fast. I guess Kendi and I will talk to you later.”

I shook her hand and headed for the front of the office.

“Mick make an appointment for next week before you leave.”

“OK.”

On the way out, I spoke to the receptionist and set a date for our next visit.

“What is the appointment for?”

“I don’t know, ask the doctor. She just said to make an appointment.”

“I’ll ask her.”

I walked back to the condo and met our neighbors coming out of the elevator.

“Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

I got on the elevator wondering about the look they gave me. I got off the elevator and after opening the door I walked into the smell of coffee.

“Kendi, I’m home.”

My wife came out of the bedroom wearing a t-shirt and panties.

“Hi Mick. Where have you been?”

“I went for a walk.”

“Me too. I thought that you were going to call me if I wasn’t home.”

“I had a lot of thinking to do.”

“Me too.”

“What did you have to think about? All you have to deal with is a wife that loves you and let her hate for another man almost ruin her marriage. All you had to worry about was if I was suddenly a horrible bitch with no heart that you could not live with.”

“No. I had to find out the results of our paternity test.”

“Oh. Do I want to know?”

“Will it matter if you do?”

“Yeah, it will. You see, I did a lot of thinking and I finally figured out that fucking doctor could not ruin our love, only I could do that, and I’m sorry that I almost did. I finally remembered that you would love me forever just like I love you and more. I also figured out that the baby had nothing to do with all of this.”

“The counselor asked me a lot of the same questions you did. The first thing we had to talk about was to see if I wanted to have the baby or not. We talked about the issues if the baby was not yours. I mean if it is our baby, there is no problem, right? I was going back and forth between hating the baby for it not being yours and feeling sorry for it since none of this was the baby’s fault. We must have spent a half hour just talking about that.”

“Then I had to figure out whether or not I could carry the baby for nine months and give it up if it was not yours. I had to figure out whether you could help me carry the baby for nine months and then give it up. I finally figured out that if I wanted to keep the baby or give it away that you could live with it, if I could. But I also figured out that I couldn’t make the choice based on what I perceived as your feelings.”

“I don’t want to make this seem like it is all about me, but I guess I did make it about me. You loved me and supported me, but I was so into my feelings of hatred towards the doctor, I didn’t open up to anyone else.”

She paused and took a long inhalation; it was like she had spoken all those thoughts in one breath.

“Mick?”

“Yes.”

“The doctor told me that it was because I loved you so much that the hatred, as the opposite of my love, was bound to grow to be as intense until I dealt with it. I’m working on it. I still want my hands around his throat, but I have pushed it down so that I don’t hate the baby and the hatred I have for the doctor is nowhere close to the level of love I have for you.”

“There were a lot of things going through my head as I walked home. I wished you were with me to help clear things up. But then I began to understand that the choice had to be mine. So, Mick, my love, my life, I’ve decided that, with your love and help, I can have the baby. Then after we find out if it is ours or his we can sit down and have a talk about the future. I’ll need to figure out if I can raise and love the baby as much as you could, or if I have to give it away because it would remind me too much of the situation. It would not be right for me to resent the baby for its entire life. But that is something the we will have to decide together as a couple.”

“Kendi, I love you. I have loved you since you opened my eyes and saved my life. I promise that I will support you in any choice that you make. I really will. It will not affect my feelings towards you, or the baby and I appreciate that you want to include me in the decision.”

“Mick, will you please hold me?”

I held out my arms and held my wife in love and with tenderness. I hoped that she knew that I loved her truly.

“Thank you.”

Kendi began to sob and shake in my arms.

“Lover, what’s wrong?”

“I thought I had killed us. I thought I lost you. After all the years of looking for you and all the work I put in, I thought I lost you. I was so scared.”

“It’s OK. You had every right to be scared. You wanted a baby with me and the idea of your first being from another man caused you all sorts of distress.”

“Distress? I hated him, Mick. It scared me, how much I hated him, how much hateful passion I had. When I was walking, I had the time to think and finally calmed down enough that I was able to let some logic in and let a lot of the hate go.”

I looked at Kendi and knew that it was almost time to tell her the results.

“Kendi, take off your clothes and meet me on the patio, please.”

I stripped off where I stood, picked the paper out of my pants pocket and walked out to the patio. I sat on the lounge chair and a few minutes later a naked Kendi joined me.

“Sit here, please.”

Kendi sat between my legs and laid back against me. I wrapped my left arm around her breasts and put my right hand on her belly. I kissed her neck and shoulder and used my fingers to lightly make slow circles around her belly. Soon it would be big and soon I would be able to feel the movement, but for now I wanted her to feel my love.

“Kendi, I love you. I love your heart and I love your body and I love this baby growing inside you.”

“Even if it is not yours?”

“Even if I am not its father, I can still be its daddy. It will still be ours.”

Kendi clutched at my arms and I could feel the tears dropping onto my left arm. I was sure that she had really come to terms with the situation and could deal with her hatred of the doctor.

“Kendi, are you sure? If the baby is the doctors, are you sure about what you want to do?”

“I’m gonna have the baby and talk to you to see if you want the baby to be ours or if you want to help me through the pregnancy and then give the baby up for adoption. I may need some help along the way, but that is what I plan to do.”

“I believe you, so do you want to know the results of the test?” I asked.

“I guess I should. I will need to make plans one way or the other, right?”

“Right.”

I took my hand off her belly and picked up the paper from the side of the lounge chair. I looked at it and held it out in front of Kendi. She took it and opened it and broke out in loud sobs and tears.

“Dr. Askew says that the results are 99.9% accurate, so it could be wrong.”

“What if it is wrong?”

“Then it is wrong.”

“Mick O’Dell, it had better not be wrong!”

“I know.”

“Our baby.”

“Yup, you must have caught the magic bullet the very first time we made love.”

“Get your hands on our baby right now, mister.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I put both my hands on her belly, and we cuddled for a very long time as she cried out the tension. Occasionally she turned her head and we kissed. I felt her belly rumble.