Page 37 of That Weekend in Paris
“It is.”
“Is she the jealous type?”
“It wouldn’t really matter,” I say. “We’re not together anymore.”
“What happened there?” She presses her lips together and then says, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, it’s fine, really.” I blow out a sigh, tip my head back and look up at the sky for a few seconds. “I broke up with Riley because it just didn’t seem like we were going to be a good fit for each other. A couple of weeks after that, she sent me a text saying that she had discovered she was pregnant. She didn’t keep the baby.”
Dillon stops, turning to look at me with wide, horrified eyes. “You mean—”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice thickening around the word, and then I swallow hard to push back the knot of emotion hanging there.
“So you didn’t know until—?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh. Klein. I’m so sorry.”
I glance down at the ground, kick my toe in the soft, sandy dirt that is the footing of the garden. “I would’ve liked to have known, to have some role in the decision.”
“I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t let you do that.”
I’m quiet for a few seconds, weighing my words. “It would be easy for me to blame her, but in truth, I did break up with her. I put her in that position, so really, I guess it’s my fault.”
“You had every right to know about the baby, to be given a chance to work something out between the two of you.”
“She wanted to get back together, tried to convince me. I mean, she didn’t tell me about the baby, but I guess she thought if I didn’t want her, for just her, then maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for the two of us to have a baby together.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Our innocent baby shouldn’t be the one to pay the price for our inability to work things out.” I look at Dillon then, and there are tears in her eyes.
We walk in silence for a few minutes. At some point along the way, Dillon hooks her arm through mine, and I welcome the connection to someone who feels empathy for what I have felt, who clearly understands the loss.
“It’s not right,” Dillon finally says, as we approach the end of the garden. “You should have had a say, Klein.”
We turn and head back the way we came. I squeeze her hand against my arm but find I can’t say anything that won’t reveal just how broken I am.
~
WE’VE WALKED FOR a good while in silence when Dillon says, “Do you ever wonder why human beings have to hurt one another the way we do? So much of it is just unnecessary. It’s not as if we feel good after we hurt someone we care about. I mean, I can’t imagine that Riley did not regret what she did. Did she really need to hurt you that much?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s so crazy, how we can meet someone and see in them things we think we want and find so appealing, and then at some point down the road, sometimes not even very far down the road, we see them in a completely different way. And what we had once called love, we realize, isn’t that at all.”
“It is crazy, isn’t it?”
“We have blinders on when we first meet someone, and all we’re seeing is that immediate, I don’t know, physical attraction, I guess. We all show the very best parts of ourselves to people when we first meet them and cover up the less appealing parts.”
“True,” I say.
“So maybe,” Dillon says, “what we should be doing is giving very little credit to what we see initially, because the good is not that good, and the bad can be really bad.”
“I’ve often thought that it’s kind of funny how we go to school for twelve years growing up, to learn all the things we learned in elementary school and high school. And I wonder if we would be far better served to learn about life skills, like how to find a person who really will love you the rest of your life, for better and for worse.”
“I think I would’ve gotten a lot more out of that,” Dillon says, “than I got out of chemistry, for sure. But then again, when it comes to love, or what we think is love, do any of us ever really listen anyway?”
“Probably not,” I say.
