The Embryos #2
“I need a drink,” Norman confessed, and they drove in circles around a strange city until they found the only thing open, a health food store that didn’t carry alcohol but had kombucha and a tea with St. John’s wort.
They drank them silently in the car, Jesse picking at the label on his tea as he read it.
“Imagine being John the Baptist and to honor you they lend your name to a wort.”
Norman wiped kombucha from his lips as the fermentation tickled his stubble.
“I’d rather be forgotten than remembered for a wort.”
“He’s remembered for baptizing Jesus.”
“I don’t think so. At least not anymore. It’s this wort.”
“They were cousins, or something.”
Norman’s latent Catholicism surprised Jesse whenever it surfaced. Jesse didn’t have any religion, but the church was very much part of Norman’s Italian upbringing. “Cousins. One got an entire religion, the other a wort. Imagine the family reunions.”
Their contact from the agency, who no doubt by this time had heard an earful from Valentina’s family, called Jesse’s phone to make sure they were safe.
Jesse put the conversation on speaker, but only he spoke.
She said there was still hope, that sometimes cooler heads prevail and emotions always ran highest during delivery.
Hope? She hadn’t been there; Jesse and Norman knew there was none, that this gorgeous, curious infant, who drank them in without blinking, was not to be their daughter, even though they had been the first to hold her when she was born.
“What does St. John’s wort do, anyway?” Norman asked after the phone call was over. It was warm in the car, but neither would roll down his window. They somehow found safety in a sealed bubble, as if everything that had just happened could not touch them.
Jesse read further down the label. “Cures mild depression.” He then handed the bottle to Norman in disgust, who chugged it until the bottle was dry. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Another several crates of these and we might be in business.” Jesse laughed, and then so did Norman. Mild. The whole thing, ridiculous. When the car was quiet again, Norman confessed, “I’ve been thinking maybe it was a cow.”
“What was?”
“The mural.”
Jesse face-palmed. The mural. “It had horns.”
“Bulls have horns.”
“It’s not the bull jumped over the moon. It’s the cow. Cows are female bovines.”
“Okay, but aren’t yaks just hairy cows?” Norman produced his phone. “Hey, Siri. Aren’t yaks just hairy cows?” Siri informed them that yaks are not cattle; they have horselike tails and are sometimes referred to as grunting ox. They’re closely related to the water buffalo of Asia and Africa.
“How much do you think we would have to pay the guy to paint over the whole thing before we get home?”
Norman shrugged. “Let’s just sell the house.”
“Where would we go?” Neither of them had discussed leaving L.A., not seriously anyhow. But perhaps it was time.
Tired of Melissa, Jesse punched the car stereo and the CD ejected, replaced by the radio, and while the song playing was immediately familiar, Jesse couldn’t place it.
When he did, he swung his arms like he was waving away a bee, no one having warned him that that one Richard Marx song they played at his high school prom would be a trigger for the rest of his life.
He turned the radio off, and silence enveloped them. Until Norman laughed.
“What?” Jesse asked. Norman held up his bottle of kombucha, pointing at the label.
“You shouldn’t drink this if you’re pregnant.
” Norman laughed even harder this time, and then Jesse did, too, until neither knew if their tears were from laughing or the trauma they’d just been through.
Norman wiped his eyes with the back of his hand so he could see the label more clearly.
“But it may reduce the intensity of menstrual cramps.”
Jesse flipped the radio back on because why not and Richard Marx was still right there waiting.
Jesse could picture the video still clear as day from afternoons home alone watching VH1 once he’d outgrown tagging along to the Toybox.
Richard bathed in a blue spotlight sitting at the piano looking plaintive, his stupid mullet gleaming.
Who just sits in a spotlight? Norman offered his kombucha to Jesse, since he’d finished the tea, but Jesse refused and so Norman took one last sip before breaking their seal by lowering the window and spitting it out in a disgusting, fermented spray.
“THIS SUCKS!” he screamed into the void of the parking lot, finding a napkin from a previous outing to Chipotle in the center console and using it to dab his mouth.
He then threw the bottle out the window; it smashed against the concrete base of a streetlamp in the center of the parking lot.
Jesse grabbed his own bottle, then opened the car door and likewise smashed it on the ground, shattering it in all directions.
“I don’t think I can do this again. We held her little body in our hands.
” Norman could still feel the way her tiny torso had radiated heat and life force, as if she had been his incubator.
Jesse had wiggled all ten of her toes, taking careful inventory before a nurse swaddled her in a blanket; they had teeny-tiny nails.
“I’m not sure I can, either.” He then peered out the door at the pavement; they’d really made a mess of the ground beneath them.
Jesse switched the radio back to the CD and Melissa sang three more tracks before Jesse returned to the health food store and sheepishly asked for a dustpan and broom.
If only all of their messes were cleaned up that easily.
“I have an idea,” Norman said as they drove back to their Airbnb.
That night they called Lally.