Mistake

Oliver was sixteen years old when he made the first in a series of mistakes that made him grow up long before many teenagers should. He was drunk out of his mind and she was smoking hot, at least to his inebriated eyes. He assumed she was on the pill, she assumed he was using a condom.

Mistake number one, on both parties. The next morning, when Oliver woke up and realized that he'd slept with a girl he didn't even know, he slid out of bed and vanished as quietly as he could, not even bothering to leave a number she could contact him at behind.

Nine months went by. Oliver was seventeen the night that the phone rang for him. His mother yelled up the stairs that it was a woman named Gail and he told her to hang up. He didn't know a woman named Gail and he was pretty sure that he'd never even briefly met a woman named Gail. It was such an old fashioned, uncommon name that he thought he would remember.

The next day, the doorbell rang and he answered it, like most relatively sane people would. The day had been hot, one of those days where you just want to find a patch of shade and collapse in it, where the humidity made the sweat pour off of your skin. Yet even though it was one of those days, when Oliver's eyes settled on the small bundle on his door stoop, he felt goosebumps sprout all over his body.

There was a child on his doorstep, wrapped up in a thin blanket and bawling it's eyes out. A Post-It note was ungracefully attached to it's forehead and he peeled it off, taking a moment to decipher the messy handwriting, smudged to the point of near illegibility.

This is what you get, motherfucker.

The child screamed and screamed, it's nose a bright red tomato in the middle of it's scrunched face. Thin strands of blonde hair, his hair, covered the top of it's head, barely concealing it's pink scalp. The eyes were blue and watery, swimming in tears that showed no sign of ending.

This was his child. What the hell was he supposed to do?

He did the only thing he could think of. Cradling the baby in his arms carefully, like he'd been taught by his mother when his younger brother was born, he carried it inside and shut the door before bursting into tears of his own.

***

The baby was a girl and he named her Emily, although he preferred to call her Em. He'd tell no one but he always associated her name with the letter M, which stood for mistake.

That's all she was after all; a mistake. Before he had opened his door that day, he'd been thinking of going to university after he was done high school and maybe majoring in law or English. Maybe he would have had a minor in Philosophy. He'd have an apartment in the city and he'd go to the openings of plays, to concerts, to movie marathons in the parks. He'd have a beautiful girlfriend who was artistic and covered their apartment with her creations.

Instead, at the age of twenty one years old, when he should have been sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor discuss the symbolism of Shakespeare, he was sitting on the front porch of his one bedroom house, flipping through the English textbook of a community collage, puffing his bottom lip out and blowing a piece of shaggy hair out of his eyes. Emily was sitting in the driveway with her favorite doll, a knitted creation his mother had given her for her fourth birthday.

The neighborhood they lived in wasn't the greatest. It wasn't uncommon to walk by one of the other houses and have the acrid scent of marijuana invade your nostrils or to lie awake at night and listen to the neighbors screaming at each other, over the rent, infidelity, anything under the sun. Emily always slept through this but it always kept Oliver awake, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling until the noise disappeared. He tried to keep Emily away from all of it but already, she was much more grown up than he had been at that age.

He hadn't had sex since that day he'd discovered her on his door. He used to hear that children always attracted women but so far, he hadn't had any luck. He hadn't even had a second date; once he mentioned that he had a child, any chance of him even getting a good night kiss were dashed.

He loved Emily, he really did, but he still wondered what his life would be like if she'd never existed. What if that mythical creature, her mother, had decided to have an abortion or put her up for adoption? Would he be in a paint covered loft, watching his girlfriend's chest rise and fall, or would he still be lying in this crummy house, hearing vermin in the walls? It wasn't something he enjoyed considering but what if he was meant to be in this situation?

He loved her but she was a mistake. And that was enough to make him hate her sometimes.

He slammed his textbook shut and brushed his hair aside again, giving the street a quick glance. The Hudson's were screaming at each other again, this time over their lack of food and their twelve year old son was leaning against the side of their home, smoking a cigarette. Other than that and a few cars parked almost on the curb, the street was deserted.

"I'll be right back sweetie," he said, standing up and cracking his neck. "Daddy's gonna go get his other textbook."

"Do you have a test tomorrow?" Her voice was light and bubbly, like a fairy. She was going to grow up and be beautiful, he could just tell. Her blonde hair was just as wispy as it had been at birth, almost floating around her face and her eyes were the color of the sky on a perfect day. He couldn't remember what her mother looked like but he had the feeling she'd been incredibly good looking.

"Yep, Daddy has to know all about those silly Roman's," he said, cracking a smile as she giggled. He blew her a kiss and ducked inside to fetch his Roman history textbook, pieces of plain white notebook paper sticking out of the top. Although it was a subconscious decision, he hadn't touched a Post-It in four years.

"Honey, do you want to help me study?" Sticking his head back out the door, he noticed that small drops of rain were beginning to hit the cement, drowning the chalk drawings on the sidewalk.

"Okay Daddy." She came running in and as he shut the door behind her, Oliver saw her doll lying on the sidewalk, becoming damp and useless.

***

He never wanted Emily to know she was a mistake. When she asked about her mother, he told her that she was too sick to take care of her. To make up for her lack of a mother, he spoiled her, often putting her trivial needs against some of his own primary ones. When she wanted a new doll to replace the one she'd carelessly left outside, he took money out of his textbook fund to buy her a teddy bear, gray with black paws, one of which was clutching an pink artificial daisy. It was a rather plain stuffed animal but it still cost twenty dollars.

Emily barely even played with it; after two weeks, the bear was abandoned on the living room floor. Oliver placed it on the kitchen table as a kind of center piece, thinking that Emily would come back to it.

It stayed there for nine years. By that point, Emily was thirteen years old and Oliver had finally squirreled away enough money to move them out of the increasingly decrepit neighborhood to a house in the older section of town, where the streets were mainly filled with bicycles and scooters. Their home even had a fireplace and it was on the mantle above the fireplace that the teddy bear sat, still holding it's daisy.

Over this time, Oliver had actually come to unconditionally love Emily. He no longer thought of her as a mistake. He merely thought of her as his daughter. The old resentment that had used to flare up when he thought of how she had held him back from his dreams no longer existed. He could barely even remember ever feeling that way.

Three years later however, when he had moved on from the mistakes he'd made in the past, the result of those mistakes bit him in the ass.

It was a weekend. The rain had been coming down all week and the moon was buried under gray clouds that stretched from one end of the sky to the other. Emily had been gone all day. As she'd grown, she had become truly beautiful and always had male suitors. Oliver never interfered in her personal life; she had a good head on her shoulders and he figured if she needed help, she'd ask.

Oh, how wrong he was.

She had finally come in near ten o'clock, soaked right to the skin, clutching the hand of a boy with shaggy dark hair. Oliver had seen him around a few times and had the vague idea that his name was something that started with a T.

"Daddy, me and Travis have to tell you something," she said, still standing in the doorway. He had been half dozing in a chair by the television but he could tell, just from the way she clutched Travis' hand a little tighter, that something big was about to happen.

"Do you want to sit down?' he asked, gesturing towards the empty couch. Emily shook her head, almost in tears by the look of it.

"I'm moving out," she said, exhaling loudly as a punctuation point. "I'm moving in with Travis. His parents have said it was okay with them."

"Did I ever say it was okay with me?" He stood up, hands balled into fists at his side. "I don't ever remember giving you permission to move out."

"Daddy, with me gone, you can finally go to university!" Now she seemed to be pleading, wringing Travis's hand at her side. He looked decidedly uncomfortable, trying to hide in the shadows around the doorway. "I'm doing this for you!"

"Emily, I don't want that anymore!" He stepped forward more and laid his hand on her shoulder, feeling it trembling. "I gave those dreams up long ago, so that I could give you a better life!"

The argument didn't last long. Even as Oliver still pleaded for her to stay home, even offering to let Travis move in with them, she was packing, mostly clothes and her laptop. Eventually, he gave up, sitting down on the couch and staring down at his hands. He was only 32 but oh God he felt old.

When the door shut behind her for the last time, everything was quiet. He couldn't yet comprehend that this would be his life for... well, for whenever. He was too used to waking up in the night to hear Emily blaring her music at an obscene level, to smell burnt toast when he got out of bed in the morning, to giving her Midol when she had cramps. Being a dad was his life.

His eyes drifted to the mantle place and he sat up, gaze locked on the bear that had been doing nothing but collecting dust. In a burst of speed that showed how young he still was, he snatched it off and ran outside, nearly slipping on the soaked driveway. Emily was just climbing into Travis' beat up car and he screamed her name, clutching the bear close so it wouldn't get wet.

"Please," he panted, holding it out like a powerful talisman. "Please, take this... for me." Her fingers reached out, stroking through the fur that was coated with dust. A small smile briefly appeared on her lips and for one second, Oliver saw the little girl he loved still in there, still alive.

And then she was smacking it away, sending it flying out onto the cobblestone driveway.

"I don't want to be your mistake anymore," she whispered, sending him one last look of mixed love and anger before slamming the car door, almost nicking his fingers in the process. Travis tore away down the street but all Oliver could do was sink to his knees, groping out and pulling the soaked bear to his chest, face covered in rain and tears.

"I'm so sorry," he sobbed into the rain, words disappearing as soon as they passed his lips. "I'm so sorry."

He wasn't even sure what he was apologizing for.

It was a year before Oliver heard from Emily again. He had been awoken by a noise... some kind of strange, hauntingly familiar noise. The sun had barely come up but a car was already screaming down the road, tires squealing. The noise was coming from his front step and when he opened the door, he was sixteen again, staring down at a squealing, wriggling mass of blankets sitting on his stairs.

There was a piece of paper sticking out and he unfolded it, immediately recognizing his daughter's handwriting.

Her name is Tatiana. She's my mistake. She doesn't have be yours.

He read it six times before crumpling it up and tossing it out into the driveway. The baby was squealing even louder and he picked her up, reverting back to father mode almost instantly.

"Aren't you beautiful?" he whispered, carrying her inside and shutting the door. Once she was out of the cold, she fell asleep almost instantly and he lay her on his couch, sitting on the floor and taking in the details of her tiny scrunched face. She looked nothing like Emily; her hair was black and already quite thick, while her nose was a tiny little button.

She looked nothing like him but she was his daughter. After watching her sleep for a few moments, he stood up and took Emily's old bear off the mantle. It still smelled like the rain but he tucked it into Tatiana's arms, feeling his heart swell when her tiny fingers closed around it's paw.

Sometimes, the worst mistakes lead to the best moments of our lives.