In December she meets a man named John Winchester. He doesn't say much, keeps to himself most of the time, has a lot of scars and it looks like a bear's been feeding on him, but he's nice. Quiet. Sad. He wears his sadness around him like a pair of comfortable jeans with the holes in the knees that have been around so long you can't bear to throw them away. Like an old leather coat.

His sadness makes him invisible the way homeless people are invisible. It's too thick, so people avert their eyes so that they don't have to deal with it. It makes Kate curious, but she doesn't want to ask him directly. Instead she buys him a beer and approaches the topic sideways, the way she's learned how to do in the hospital. It takes three hours to get him to open up about his deceased wife, about what happened. She knows he isn't telling her the whole truth. But he's telling her the bare bones of it, what he can stand, and the details don't matter. Whether his wife died as a result of a home invasion gone wrong, whether it was an accident, whether it was something else mysterious and improbable like organized crime or black ops or magic, as he said. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she is dead, has been for nearly a decade, and he's still hurting.

The fact that one person can have that depth of emotion and resolve is staggering.

In February she catches a winter cold that lasts just a little bit longer than it should, and when she gets a phone call from the doctor's office she falls to the floor and cries for what seems like hours. She's not ready for this. John Winchester left town weeks back, and she's just one woman, she's not equipped to deal with this. Her finger turns over the business card for an electrician service she never used, going from the number and address down town and familiar to the unfamiliar one on the back. It had been the closest piece of paper to hand.

He said, if she was ever in trouble, the kind she couldn't bring to anyone else, to call him. He said. This is trouble. Or it's not trouble, but it's something she doesn't know about or understand. She's not married. She has no help, no one to look after a baby. She can't afford to feed a baby. She can't afford to have this child.

Outside the abortion clinic she turns, framed in the doorway, and drops to her knees in the gravel of the alley next door and her meager lunch goes splattering into the grass. She thinks about what it would look like, kind of like that, a clump of cells splattering into a medical waste container. And then she thinks she shouldn't have had that pasta and now she can only bring up bile and spit. As terrified as she is, she can't do this. She'll always wonder. She'll always feel like a horrible person. She's not anti-abortion, she can understand (even more so now), but she can't deal with this. She wishes it were different. She wishes she had him there to hold her hand, even with his coat of sadness, to be there for her. But he's not, and she's on her own, so she'll have this baby on her own.

Over the next several months she feels her baby grow, feels her belly swell with the infant inside. She feels more moments of panic than she is comfortable with, days when she has to collapse into a chair and cry until she can breathe again. She's all alone in this. Raising a child on her own, giving birth on her own. It's terrifying in a way she doesn't have thoughts for, let alone the words to explain to the Medicaid psychiatrist. She does find the words to pour out to John, filling three message slots before she calls back and leaves a brief "I'm sorry about that" message and hangs up. And then she can't believe she dumped all of that on him at once. It's almost a relief when he doesn't call her back, when the next phone call meets a dial tone and an empty number.

With impeccable timing, she gets a phone call a week before her due date. She's grateful. He's distracted. She doesn't tell him about the messages even though he must have gotten at least some of them, mustn't he? No, maybe not. He asks her what's wrong, says he saw her number on his phone before he ditched it somewhere, she fades out about the time he goes into what he has to do to stay alive and the usual paranoid fantasies. They exchange pleasantries, hang up the phone, and she realizes she never told him anything at all. The birth is not the fairy tale she imagined. The nurse holds her hand. The doctor says very little. A few days later, she's home and he's still gone. She has a different phone number this time but she throws the paper she wrote it on away before the temptation to call becomes too much. He'd just disappear on her again and she doesn't need that. What she needs is someone who will help. She feels like she could sleep all the time now, but for the baby being there.

Kate moves in with a friend. It's easier with two people in the house, even if only one of them is related to the child or her. Even if one of them is a friend who doesn't want anything to do with raising a kid but is willing to put her up for a few years until it gets easier, until she can leave the kid at daycare and as long as she pays rent. She doesn't blame the woman. A child is a big responsibility, and one her friend wasn't prepared for. Any more than she was prepared for. She resents Winchester for leaving her like this, a little. He didn't want to have the kid, either. But he could have stayed. He could have owned up to their mistake. She can't even remember if they used birth control or not, now. It doesn't matter. They have a child between them, and his name is Adam.

The first time he creeps back into her thoughts Adam is one and a half years old and starting to look like his father. She is amazed at how a child can grow from infant to almost actually walking like a human being in that span of time. Or maybe just how much time has passed. She wonders for one afternoon as she watches him take determined steps if John would come back for this. But he has two sons of his own and her tiny miracle of human development has no place in his life of horrors. Adam has turned from an unwanted burden into one of the hidden sources of joy. She holds him in her lap and plays pat-a-cake with him and feels a little of the sadness drip away. Another miracle for the child's list.

Love has a way of changing people. It changed her for Adam, he's now five years old and calls her Mommy and tells her about everything in sight. She understands maybe two-thirds of it but smiles anyway because it makes her feel good. It makes her feel lighter than she does when she comes home from work, better about the world. He makes her happy. She makes him spaghetti-os and they sing the Power Rangers song and she doesn't have to chase him around for his bath because he's the Blue Ranger and water is his Power. Or something like that, she made it up and she's not sure about the real details. John is missing this.

Adam is eleven when he comes back into her life again, just when she had gotten used to it being the two of them. Her own little microcosm, John Winchester a distant if pleasant memory, a warm face and a pair of sad brown eyes that sometimes reflect in Adam's when he's tired or upset or when the world seems too hard on them. But he's asking questions now, and he deserves answers. It takes some doing, and she doesn't want to get Adam's hopes up. John won't stay. She knows that; she's made her peace with it but her son is another matter. She won't have his heart broken. She makes sure Winchester understands that before he meets his youngest son.

If John doesn't want to stay around for these moments she's not going to make him, but he's missing it. And she's not going to argue. He had a life long before she came around and wishing won't change the fact that she's the dream, the fantasy life, she's the wish that he makes and that sometimes he can indulge in, for a little while.

He brings her breakfast in bed, but she knows he won't stay, doesn't love her, and his eyes are so sad. This isn't what he wanted. This isn't what she half-believed without knowing she believed it although now that she feels it in herself it makes sense, not the magic pill that makes everything better. A child, and a woman, to replace what was lost. He has his children. He has their mother living through them, every day. She's seen the pictures in his wallet and there are features there that aren't his.

He doesn't love her. If he loves any part of her at all he loves the idea of her. A wife and a child that lived, that stayed, in a place where he could be a normal person again, work in a garage or out of a machine shop, something. He has the look of a man who works with his hands. Both of them, raising their son together to be a good and honest young man. It's a nice dream, it's one he holds close to his heart, but it isn't something he will allow himself and she knows that after two days have passed and he starts to put the sadness back on. Shrugging into it like that old coat because he feels incomplete without it. He doesn't love her. If he did, he wouldn't be incomplete. It makes sense in her mind; or to put it a more traditional way, if he loved her, he'd stay.

But this is her reality, what she has, and as imperfect as it is she wouldn't trade it away for anything in the world.

Go to the top! For you have reached the bottom.