American Outlaw - Jesse James [104]
When we returned home a week later, another message awaited me: it was Janine, who had been living on her own for months. She was nearly due to give birth, she said, and she wanted badly to be with me when it happened.
“I want to do this as a couple,” she pleaded. “You and me. One last time.”
I weighed her proposal in my mind. After all, this was a life that we had created together. In that respect, it made perfect sense that Janine wanted me there when the baby was born. But she had hurt me so badly, I was reluctant to form another bond with her.
“Call me when you go into labor,” I said, finally. “I’ll be at the hospital. But that’s all I can promise.”
Tyler’s funeral was announced in the papers. It would be held on the day of his eighth birthday. As much as it would have been easier to sit it out, I went to the ceremony. When I arrived, I saw Tyler’s entire third-grade class gathered at his grave, looking sad and confused.
Their teacher hushed them all, then gave a signal for them to begin.
“Happy birthday, dear Tyler,” the children sang. “Happy birthday to you.”
I just lost it. The force of the emotional storm that had been my life for the past year hit me full on. I began to weep, and I couldn’t stop. My whole body was wracked with sobs.
Leaving the young boy’s grave site, I realized more fully than ever that life was unfair. More than anything, it was brief. We were here for a limited time, and I could not keep giving my love to someone who would never truly know how to accept it. My separation from Janine was going to have to be complete. It was going to have to be real.
She called me on the day she went into labor. As I’d promised, I came to the hospital. But I didn’t go inside the room when she gave birth, choosing instead to stay outside. Hours later, when my child had been born and had been moved to the newborn wing, I requested to hold her.
“Mr. James?” the nurse said. “It’s time. You may see your baby now.”
Gently, I picked up my child, and held her tiny body in my arms, awed by her exquisitely small, puckered features. I felt her tiny heart beat against my chest. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, I took a pocketknife from the back pocket of my jeans, and carefully cut the baby bracelet off her wrist, so someday, years later, I could prove to her that I had been with her and held her in my arms on the first day of her life.
Sunny. Her name was Sunny.
——
My life moved on, and I adjusted to being a single man. Kid Rock had watched the whole Janine thing happen, and he was a good friend to me during my time of need. Tyson Beckford also came over often, and he talked sense to me. Karla was a sympathetic and wise conversation partner, too. All of them made a huge difference. I felt embarrassed by having fucked up in front of all my friends, but emotionally, I definitely felt like I was on the mend.
Time has a way of putting things in greater perspective, and eventually, I started to understand why I’d put up with Janine for so long, why I’d kept on taking her back every time she’d hurt me. The truth was, Janine fit handily with my childhood sense of myself. I’d grown up in a home with zero stability, where the only common threads were violence, chaos, and my never-fulfilled need to be valued and acknowledged. Janine was a perverse consolidation of all the pissed-off, tweaked-out stepmoms I’d ever had. It was almost stunning how craftily I’d managed to create this psychodrama that wasn’t good for me, but that had satisfied me in some deep way, maybe because it felt so familiar.
But I was finally outside of the eye of the storm, and the relief was enormous. At last, I had the solitude necessary to be able to think clearly and begin to gain my bearings.