9. JAMIE
JAMIE
A few months later…
The mall smells like cinnamon pretzels and department store perfume, and I've been on my feet for forty minutes, which is approximately thirty-eight minutes longer than my back wanted me to be.
Worth it, though. The apartment walls had started doing that thing where they feel like they're breathing, that slow contraction that happens when you've been inside for too long and your brain starts cataloguing every crack in the ceiling.
I'd looked at Jackson over breakfast this morning and told him I needed to go somewhere, anywhere, and he'd put down his coffee and said, "Mall?" like he'd been waiting for me to ask.
He knows. He always knows.
Now I'm waddling past a window display of retro-themed appliances, and the waddling is not something I'm being metaphorical about.
It's a genuine side-to-side thing that happens when you're carrying what feels like a regulation bowling ball directly in front of your pelvis. My center of gravity relocated somewhere around week twenty-eight and hasn't come back.
My feet are technically below me, but I haven't confirmed this visually in weeks because looking down is a project that involves significant architectural planning.
"You're slowing down," Jackson says from beside me.
"I'm gestating. It's a process."
He doesn't comment on this, which is correct. He's been matching my pace all afternoon — not obviously, not in the way that would make me feel managed, but his stride has shortened to something that keeps him next to me rather than half a corridor ahead.
He carries the two bags we've accumulated: a pack of newborn onesies that made me feel feelings in the middle of the store, and the pillow I insisted on because our pillow situation had become, in my professional opinion, untenable.
"There's a baby store around the corner," I say.
"We have a baby store's worth of stuff at home."
"There might be things we forgot."
"Like what?"
"I'll know when I see them."
He makes a sound that is not quite a sigh and is not quite a laugh, and I feel it in my chest the way I always do — warm, settling, like bread coming out of the oven.
The baby shifts, a slow roll that presses something hard — an elbow, maybe, or a knee — against my right side. I press back with two fingers, automatically, and the pressure eases.
She does this all day, this constant rearrangement of herself, as though my organs are suggestions rather than fixed structures. I've made peace with it. Mostly.
"She's awake," I say.
Jackson's hand comes to the side of my belly, brief and deliberate, waiting. She obliges him with another kick, solid enough that I see his jaw shift.
"Strong," he says.
"She gets it from me."
He looks at me sideways, and the corner of his mouth does the thing. "Sure."
We turn the corner. The baby store is three storefronts down, its window full of soft pastels and tiny shoes, and I'm already making my mental list of what we might have missed, what I might need, when Jackson stops.
"Bathroom," he says. "Two seconds."
"Take your time." I wave him toward the men's room, visible from where I'm standing, its door propped open. "I'll be right here."
He disappears inside.
The corridor is busy for a Thursday afternoon — families with strollers, a group of teenagers moving in the particular fluid mass teenagers move in, a woman talking loudly on her phone near the water fountain.
I find a bench against the wall between the bathrooms and the baby store and lower myself onto it, which takes a moment and some concentration.
Sitting has gotten architectural, too.
I put both hands on my belly, feeling her warmth through my shirt — the baby runs hot, which means I run hot, which means Jackson has given up sleeping with more than one blanket because I've turned our bedroom into a mild sauna. He hasn't complained. Not once.
The bench is hard but it's horizontal, and my back unclenches in a way that's almost embarrassing.
I roll my shoulders. Watch a toddler nearly separate from his mother, get caught by the wrist, and resume his trajectory toward a fountain.
Watch the teenagers disappear into a storefront.
Listen to the ambient noise of a mall on a Thursday, the low roar of it, all those people doing their ordinary things.
My body feels strange today — heavy in a way that's different from the usual heaviness, a low pressure that's been sitting in my pelvis since this morning. Probably nothing. Probably the baby dropping.
I mentioned it to Jackson and he looked at me with the focused attention he gives to things he's deciding whether to worry about, and I told him it was fine, and he accepted this in the way he accepts most things I tell him: with visible reservation that he doesn't push into words.
The toddler and his mother pass my bench. The corridor shifts and thins as the afternoon foot traffic ebbs toward the food court end.
I close my eyes for a second.
Then my nose catches something.
It's faint — just a thread of it in the mall's general perfume-and-food-court smell, something sweet in the wrong way, chemical and cloying. My brain files it away without examining it and keeps filing for half a second, and then every muscle in my body contracts.
I know that smell.
I open my eyes.
Greg Dickson is standing ten feet away.
He's wearing a button-down that pulls across his shoulders, his brown hair the same as I remember, his beady eyes aimed directly at me. Specifically, at my belly.
His face does something I don't have a word for — a loosening, a kind of ravenous recognition — and the smell reaches me fully now, and every hair on my arms lifts.
He looks the same. Exactly the same. That might be the worst part.
He starts moving toward me.
I look toward the bathroom. Jackson is inside. The door is fifteen feet away, and I cannot cross fifteen feet the way I could have crossed it nine months ago, cannot move fast enough, cannot put enough distance between me and Greg before he closes the gap that's already too small.
My phone is in the bag at my feet. My hands won't move to reach for it.
"I knew it."
His voice. The same syrupy quality it had in his school's hallways, but stripped of something — the performance is gone. What's left underneath is worse. He stops five feet from the bench, and his eyes don't come up from my belly.
"I knew you were hiding." He speaks like he's continuing a conversation we were already having. "I've been looking for you for months. Months. And here you are."
"Greg." My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. "Get away from me."
His eyes finally come up to my face. Whatever I expected to see there — rage, or the smug calculation I knew from the school — it's not there. What's there instead is certainty.
"How far along?" he asks.
"I'm calling security."
"How far along are you?" He steps closer. "You owe me that. At least that."
"I don't owe you anything." I stand up from the bench, which takes a second, and in that second he moves closer still, and now we're three feet apart and the smell of him coats the inside of my mouth.
"You owe me as the father of your child."
"What? This baby is not yours. I've never even let you touch me."
"You ran." The manic quality in his voice sharpens.
"You got that man to come take you away before I could — before we could — " He stops.
Something in his expression reshuffles into something darker and more specific.
"He doesn't know, does he? You've been letting him think it's his.
But I know. I've been putting it together, all of it, the timing — you were at my school for two years, and then you leave and a few months later you're — " He gestures at me, at my belly, the gesture encompassing and proprietary and obscene.
"You've lost your mind," I say. "You know you never touched me. You know that."
"I know what I know." His voice drops, and somehow that's worse than the loudness.
"You're clever. You've always been clever, trying to make people think I was the problem, having them come after me like I was some kind of — but I know.
I know what happened. I remember it different from how you tell it, and I have been waiting for someone to ask me my version, and when they do — "
"No one is going to ask you your version because your version is insane."
His hand closes around my upper arm.
Five fingers. The same grip. My body locks from my ankles up, every system shutting off and standing by, the freeze happening in my muscles before my brain can override it.
I hate it. I hate the way he does this without trying, the way my body drops into this pattern it learned without my permission, and I hate the feeling of his hand on my arm, and I hate that I'm standing here with my muscles locked and a wall at my back and he's still talking.
"You came to me," he says. "At the school. You remember that. You remember how it was."
"Let go of my arm."
"I just want to talk to you." His voice is almost reasonable, which is the most wrong thing about it. "I just want to understand why you decided to do it this way, to take my child and hide — "
"This child is not yours." The freeze is cracking, burning off. My voice gets sharp. My free hand goes to my belly. "Let go of me right now."
He leans in. Closer. Close enough that his breath hits my face, warm and faintly sweet, and his eyes are enormous and fixed and he's been obsessing over this, I can see it in him, constructing this story in a private room in his head where it kept growing until it was the only real thing he had left.
"I think you should come with me," he says. "We should — "
He doesn't finish the sentence.
He's ripped away from me.
The grip on my arm vanishes so fast the absence feels like a sound.
One second Greg is in my face and the next he's gone, pulled backward and sideways, and I see Jackson's hand in Greg's collar, the whole enormous fact of Jackson between us, six foot seven and absolutely still in the way that has nothing to do with calm.
I have never seen his face like this.