His Surprise Son. Allie Pleiter

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ but for his family, it was a binding obligation, not a vote of confidence.

      “Your father never approved of me, you knew that. This just added fuel to the fire. We were welcome here, whereas we’d have to fight tooth and nail there. I was tired, still healing, and Dad was really starting to fail. It was looking like it would be his last Christmas. I’m not proud of how easy it was to throw up my hands in surrender.”

      When Josh said nothing, she went on, determined to say what she felt ought to be said. “Jonah is not a liability. He’s not faulty, and he’s not an accident. He’s a gift.”

      “A gift you hid from me.”

      “Parenthood doesn’t work as a second priority. Jonah comes first in my world. He has to. Now, I suppose, you’ll need to decide if he’ll be anything more than on the fringes of yours.”

      There was a long, raw moment where they didn’t look at each other. Josh walked back to the table and picked up the frame again.

      “What’s he like?” The single question seemed to pierce through all the pain in the room.

      She felt herself smile. “Curious and smart, like you. Stubborn, like his grandfather. Opinionated, like his mother.” She looked straight at him. “And deaf. Your son is deaf.”

      * * *

       Deaf.

      Josh felt the word push at him, like a typhoon trying to knock him over. He, a man who made his career in an electronic music application that was lauded for how perfectly it worked, had a son who couldn’t hear.

      The whole idea of Jonah’s existence was such foreign territory, Josh could barely get his head around the fact that he had a son. His entire body felt still and cold. His lungs couldn’t pull in enough air; his brain hurt from slamming together facts he had with possibilities he couldn’t grasp. He had not just a son, but one with needs he couldn’t begin to understand.

      His thoughts whirled in a million directions as he tried to sort it all out. He stared at the photograph, somehow wanting the image to give him a foothold into the world he’d just entered.

      It offered no grounding. As a matter of fact, it was a few moments before he realized he hadn’t given Jean any kind of response.

      “He’s deaf.” Not exactly genius dialogue, but he was working in shock mode here—eloquence was far beyond him.

      “Yes. Since birth.”

      “So he can’t hear anything at all?”

      She was watching him, waiting for his reaction. Josh wanted to get it right, to say and do the right thing at this incredibly crucial moment. Still, the idea of a deaf son—disjointed speech, hearing aids, isolated from communication the rest of the world took for granted—was all so overwhelmingly new. Suddenly, being introduced to Jonah presented ten times the test it had been minutes ago.

      How do I meet and get to know someone I can’t even communicate with well? He wasn’t even especially good with kids. The path to Jonah’s silent world gaped like an impassable bridge.

      Her eyes flashed just a bit at his hesitation, and he saw a glimpse of a mother’s fierce protection. “He’s not broken, Josh. He’s perfect the way he is, just different.” Her words and the jut of her chin dared him to try to pronounce otherwise. He didn’t think of the boy as broken—at least he didn’t think so—but he couldn’t sort through the riot of thoughts going on in his head right now.

      “Jonah is profoundly deaf,” she went on. “Perhaps as a result of a high fever I had when I was pregnant—we don’t really know. When he wears his hearing aids, he can sense extremely loud noises, but not speech.” She paused just a moment as if guessing his next question. “Or music.”

      He’d worked that out almost immediately, but the words had a stunning weight when he heard her speak them. My son cannot hear music. As ironies go, this one was huge and dramatic. Another realization hit him as hard as the first, and he stared deeply into her eyes. “Did you never tell me because you didn’t think I could handle his disability?” Direct, maybe, but Josh felt he was entitled to be direct given the circumstances.

      She paused before answering. “I didn’t know he was deaf until he was three months old. It made things harder—especially when your father found out...”

      “How did he know?” Josh started to shout, then remembered Jonah was upstairs asleep—then remembered Jonah was deaf—it was all tangling into knots inside his head. How was he supposed to act here? He didn’t have a clue.

      “I told you, I don’t know how he found out. Does it really matter?”

      “Yes,” he shot back. “No. I don’t know.”

      “It made it easier to come up with reasons not to tell you.” When he shot her a look for that, she sighed and said, “You never had much patience for things that don’t work the way they’re supposed to.”

      “Things,” he corrected, anger and betrayal churning in his gut. “Not people. I can’t believe the way you think I’d...” He stared at her before sinking back into the chair. “Did you ever really love me?”

      “Yes.”

      “And still you think I’d reject you and our child.” It stabbed at him that she could think such a thing.

      “Not reject.” Her jaw worked, as if she was hunting for the right words. “You’re brilliant, and when you’re captivated by something, it’s astounding. I felt astounded by you in school.” She sighed. “But it was never about balance, Josh. I didn’t truly realize that until SymphoCync. You were captivated by work, not me. I don’t even think you noticed how unhappy I was. You can’t be that way with Jonah. Jonah requires—deserves—lots of attention and patience. I didn’t want to have to go begging for those things from you.” Evidently, her talent for prickling his temper by hitting too close to the bone hadn’t faded with the years.

      “That’s not fair,” he retorted. But she wasn’t wrong. He hated the fact, but she wasn’t wrong. Silicon Valley, his valley, worshipped obsessive, workaholic people like him. Success out there demanded 150 percent of a man. He was just coming to recognize the cost of that—he was working on that with Violet now that she was the only family he had left—but he had a long way to go. “It doesn’t change that I had a right to know. You had no right to keep this from me.”

      “I accept that, but Josh, am I really that far off? Do you know how many days you took off during the time I was out in California with you? Three. You proposed to me on the front steps of your office building.”

      He planted his hands on the table, rocking it a bit with the force of his gesture. “We were sharing our success together.”

      “No. You were enjoying your success. I was just grafted in. Has it changed?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Tell me, when’s the last time you took a vacation? How many nights this week did you sleep at the office? Violet’s been telling me how hard it was to get you involved in this.” She looked right into his eyes. “I chose to give Jonah the gift of not being ignored or sidelined by a long-distance man too busy to be a father. That’s not a life for a child.”

СКАЧАТЬ