Ana
I arrive at the roadside diner just beyond the town limits, pull into the nearly empty parking lot, and wait. Through the
windows I can see the few customers inside, a waitress in a silly pink uniform shuttling between booth tables and the counter.
I park toward the far edge, near the exit in case I change my mind. Every nerve ending is buzzing—fear, excitement. Vera likes
to refer to these as my dark appetites. Says I’m happy where other people are unhappy. Maybe she’s right.
The last of the light is disappearing from the sky. I roll down the window a bit and the air smells like snow. I imagine it
falling and covering Paul’s grave. Probably if the predicted snow had fallen last night, the hikers would never have found
him. At least not until spring. He’d have been discovered missing of course. But his body would have stayed in the cold earth,
decomposing, his whereabouts a mystery.
The last time we were together, we made love on his living room floor. Afterward we fought—I don’t even remember about what.
That was how things were going—fuck, fight. A terrible, familiar dance that often ended in violence. He grabbed my arm, called
me a spoiled, vapid bitch. I threw a glass of wine at him, it hit him, spraying red everywhere, shattering against the fireplace
hearth.
Later I got a text. We’re done.
Relief and rage mingled. I’m the dumper, not the dumpee. But truthfully, I was already done with it, with him, with the person
I was with him. Vera’s not the only one in therapy.
Anyway, I already suspected he was seeing someone else. That lacy thong in his gym bag. Red flag, right?
As time passes, five minutes, ten, I start to get annoyed. The person I’m waiting for is not in the diner, vehicle nowhere
in sight. Have I been stood up?
I don’t even bother texting. I know when I’m being played with. I wait another few minutes, then leave, anger and annoyance
on simmer in my center.
My mood hasn’t improved as I turn into Iggy’s neighborhood.
Gawd, I’d rather die than live in a neighborhood like this with all its predictably pretty normie houses with their tidy lawns, bicycles twisting
on the driveway, basketball hoop over the garage. A husband and baby and this idiotic woke-mobile. If boredom could kill this
would be the zombie apocalypse.
I hum up the street thinking how different Iggy was when she and I first met. A wild child with her mop of white-blond hair
and ready smile. Her easy, devil-may-care approach to everything from boys to homework thrilled me after sharing a room all
my life with my drill sergeant of a sister. Honestly, it was love at first sight when I entered our college dorm room and
found Iggy smoking a joint out the window. There was a stack of her things in the middle of the room.
“Hey,” she said. “I waited to see what bed you wanted. I’m cool with whatever. Want a puff?”
I looked around for Vera, who had dropped me off and sped away, angry at me for something I’d said or done—as usual.
I was alone for the very first time. Vera had been this controlling, organizing presence in my life, even before we went to Agnes’s, the one who held us together while the adults around us made a mess of their lives and then the whole world fell apart.
I relied on her, but I couldn’t wait to break free from her.
I know she was just trying to keep us safe, but she was always—still is—such a bossy little bitch.
Iggy was bongs and belly laughs, stay up all night and miss class, eat pizza in bed, sleep with whoever, then ghost him. She
reminded me of my mom before, the person Sadie was when I was home sick from school and it was just the two of us, or when Dad was in a good mood. There
were happy times, which is weird to say given how it ended. Even Vera was happier once, less afraid and uptight. Iggy reminded
me what it was like to feel free, the way I felt before I understood that violence and murder were the flip side of love,
a coin that was forever being tossed by some unseen hand.
Now all Iggy thinks about is Brock and that stupid baby, who honestly I have only ever seen squalling and squirming. That’s your life now? Just tending to that thing?
As I turn onto Iggy’s tree-lined street I slow, trying to process what I’m seeing.
Flashing red and blue lights, a jam of vehicles, one of them a police cruiser, another an ambulance. Blood rushes in my ears,
my heart a tiny drumbeat in my chest.
As I get close, I realize that they’re gathered in front of Iggy and Brock’s place, the front door swung wide open. On the
lawn is the detective standing six feet tall, rangy and watchful as a wolf.
For the love of gawd. What now?
I pull the car to the side of the road and step out into the night chill, jog up the lawn. The detective puts himself between
me and the house.
“Ah, Ms. Blacksmith,” he says. “Twice in one day. What are the odds?”
“What are you doing here? What’s happened?”
I try to move around him, but he keeps blocking my path.
“911 call for medical assistance,” he says. “Small department. Dispatch alerted me.”
My mind is reeling, searching for data. Why are the police here? The ambulance?
“What’s happened?” I say again.
“Maybe you know better than I do?”
I shake my head at him, feel the heat coming up my throat, which happens when I’m angry. I have and suppress the very strong
urge to shove him hard out of my path. “What are you talking about? Get out of my way.”
With a slight smile, he lets me pass and I run to the house just as paramedics are coming out the red front door onto the
pretty brick stoop with a stretcher, easing it down the shallow steps.
“Iggy!”
Those blond tresses fan around her. She’s Sleeping Beauty, fragile, gorgeous, and deathly pale. Brock follows holding that
baby, who is, as usual, screaming his head off.
“What’s going on?” I demand.
Why won’t anyone answer me?
“I—I—I don’t know,” Brock stammers over the baby’s wails.
Ugh, it’s like a siren.
“She wasn’t feeling well after the brunch. Then she started to have really bad stomach cramps, like she was doubled over.
She passed out and I called 911.”
I take her hand; it’s ice-cold. I keep walking as the paramedics move toward the waiting ambulance. She’s so white she’s almost
blue, so slight she’s barely a bump on the stretcher. She’s not faking it, though I wouldn’t put it past her under the right
circumstances. She turns her head toward me. I think she’s opening her eyes, about to say something, her powder-blue gaze
filled with fear, locking with mine.
“Tell me,” I say, squeezing her hand.
But then she’s seizing, mouth puckering, back arcing, limbs flailing.
“Iggy!”
The EMTs rush her to the ambulance, Brock close behind, still holding the wailing baby.
“Let me take him,” I hear myself saying, almost as if I were a normal person. “So you can focus on Iggy. I’ll meet you with
him at the hospital.”
“Are you sure?” He looks deeply worried—about Iggy, about handing me the baby.
“Of course.” I reach for it, and then squirmy little Noah is warm in my arms.
“All his stuff is in the baby bag by the door,” says Brock. “There’s pumped breast milk in the fridge.”
Great. Shit. Maybe this was a bad idea. Noah and I lock eyes. What do I even do with it?
But it’s too late because Brock’s disappearing into the ambulance, the doors closing hard behind him and the vehicle wailing
away.
The world is spinning. None of this makes any sense. I have that same helpless feeling I’ve been running from since I was
a kid, when Sadie and Mac seemed hell-bent on ruining everyone’s life until they finally succeeded.
When we’re used to chaos in our lives, sometimes we seek to create it. Because it’s what we know. That’s what the shrink who Vera thinks is too young to know anything said to me last session. We see her as a family to work
on what Vera calls our generational issues. But some of us have individual sessions—Coraline and me, because we’re the ones who do the most acting out supposedly—with her. I suspect Vera sees the doctor alone, too, even though she pretends not to like her.
But I’m not creating this, am I?
Mercifully, inexplicably, the little monster goes quiet as the sirens fade away down the street. I look down at baby Noah, and he up to me. Weirdly, suddenly, there’s a connection. Those watery blue eyes are just like Iggy’s. I snug him in close up on my hip. It feels—dare I say it—natural.
Detective Bandeau has joined me to watch the ambulance speed away.
I think of our first encounter, not at the house today. How long ago was it? A week? More?
“I wouldn’t have figured you for the babysitting type.” I don’t like his tone, like he’s laughing at me even though his face
is stone still.
“You stood me up,” I say.
“Like I said, I got a call. Anyway, I guess that makes us even, since you snuck out the back door after our—encounter. I’m
trying not to take it personally.”
“It was personal.”
“You didn’t enjoy yourself.”
I flash on the heat of his body, the taste of his lips on mine. His strength, his presence, the gaze of those dark eyes. The
truth is I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him. How even though he was physically powerful, he was somehow gentle.
How even though our “encounter” was debauched and tawdry, he was respectful. My body betrays me, tingling.
“What was it about the concept of ‘no strings’ that eluded you?” I manage.
We lock eyes a moment, and I’m gratified to see color come up in his cheeks, his gaze drop. I win.
Noah chooses this moment to spit up on my blouse. I look down at the baby.
“Seriously, dude?”
He coos happily now, kicks his legs. I press back a smile. It’s almost as if maybe he likes me. But maybe he just feels better
after puking. He is soft and warm.
I push past the detective and move toward the house.