The Common Denominator

I want to tell you how much your mother and I love you. Let me begin: I knew I loved her but not enough to have kids with her. You’d know by now that love is not enough for things to work out.

You came into our lives so early. I was 23 and struggling with getting the needles out of my arms when I met her.

I was on a comedown when I used Tinder to send her: You look like the type of girl I’d bring home to my mom.

Three months later we were walking onto the platform at Berri station when she looked at me, trembling and candid. 

I should’ve had my period a month ago. I think it’s a baby, she said. 

It was you, Chloe. 

I wanted to punch a wall for this mistake. I wanted to cry and curl up and flail in a puddle of mud. The head rush flowed into a body high that ebbed up out of my stomach and into my arms and through to my face when it seemed I would become a father. I wanted to laugh and smile and pick your mom up and kiss her like it was going to be okay. I said nothing then.

The train ride I thought of my mother, who had always forewarned me of the dangers of fathering too young, too early, with the wrong girl, and how “Your life ceases to be your own.” Then, I thought of my father, who may as well have not existed. 

I would have to get clean to be a good father. I would have to finish my first book and dedicate it to you. What if I ended up being a terrible father like my own? What would that make me? 

We got home. She was still trembling. She charged around the room, furiously zipping and unzipping her coat with growing upset. At last she peeled it off and slammed it onto the coffee table. Its zipper panged the edge of the table and chipped the glass. She crumpled to the floor, weeping.

Just sit down and try to chill out, let’s talk about this, I said. How do you want to go about this?

Her eyes reddened. What do you mean? Go about this? What do you fucking mean by that?

The tears began to come alongside a flurry of unprofessed love for you. She had known you longer than I. 

In another universe this would be my version of Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. 

We’d not spoken as much as a whisper of that.

Are we gonna do this then? Together? she asked. Our eyes were red and puffy and soaked with optimism. 

The only way through this thing was together.

I tried getting off the stuff. She quit smoking. We moved in together. You were the common denominator. The mistake began to look like serendipity. Someone with something to live for. And that we could give it all to you.

Two months later we found out from the ultrasound that you were a girl. Your momma thought you looked like a Chloe right from the get go. She thought it was the perfect name for you. I felt it, too.

Another two months later and your mom got the news. She called to tell me you were gone. I wasn’t sure what to say. There was only silence from her side of the call. 

She wept for a week straight. If I saw her sleep 8 hours in that entire stretch, it’s an overstatement. Losing you killed a part of her that having another child will never revive.

After a few weeks we realized that our relationship was anchored by an idea of you as the future. And this fantasy of playing house was over.

We’d only had six months of the idea of you. Neither of us had even the chance to hold you. There are not enough words for the sensation of having been given a dream you’d never dreamt before, only to be rudely awakened from it.

I don’t know how many times I have tried to write this story, now. 

Let me start again, Chloe, you have been loved more than you’ll ever know…

Victor Vigas wants the words to dance and sing and swing. He owns a typewriter, which is unfortunately not the most efficient way to write these days. It does tickle a nerve in him that he can’t quite elucidate with words. He’s not pretentious about it. The last few years of committing his life to writing have been an interesting and humbling introduction to the life of someone that has to put words on paper to get by. He digs it.