He Denied Our Baby to the World (Crawling Back #16)

1. Tess

Tess

The Ferris baby wants nothing to do with me and he’s not hiding it.

Every time I get him upright on the fur he goes over sideways, and his mother comes into frame to catch him, and her hand crosses the light and puts a bar of shadow across his face.

Eight months old in a knit pumpkin his grandmother made. He’s not fussing at the pumpkin. He’s fussing because she’s hovering just outside the frame with her arms half up.

“Mrs. Ferris, can I ask you to do something that’ll feel wrong?”

“He’s usually so good, I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

“Go sit on the couch behind me and act as relaxed as possible.”

“He’ll fall over.”

“A tiny fall onto sheepskin. Then he’ll be furious, and furious is the best thing that can happen to us today.”

She laughs the way people laugh when they can’t tell if you’re joking.

But she goes, and she sits, and I hear her pick up her phone, which is the actual goal.

He hunts for her until curiosity wins. Then he finds me instead, his hands drift into his own sightline, and his mouth drops open at the fact of them.

There.

The moment his mother looks away, he forgets to be careful.

That is the photograph I wanted. My phone starts on the counter behind the backdrop draped on the counter.

One buzz, then another, then it stops being separate buzzes and settles into a low grinding, the sound of a group text going off, except I’m not in any group texts.

I keep shooting. A wide, and then his fist closed around my lens cloth, which will be the one his mother cries at.

Mrs. Ferris says, “Someone really wants you,” in that bright helpful voice, and I say uh huh and keep working, because the window light is doing something on his left cheek that will not last.

Sadie sleeps through it in the back. She can sleep through a strobe going off across the room, then come up screaming over a car door in the lot.

She picks her own noises and doesn’t consult me.

When the light goes I walk the Ferrises out, promise proofs by Thursday, lock the front, and turn my phone over. Forty-one missed calls.

My first thought is that somebody died, because that’s what a number like that means.

My mother. My brother in Beaumont. I’m already pricing flights in my head when I see the notifications aren’t from anyone I know.

They’re follow requests, hundreds, still landing while I hold the thing.

Then a text from a number I don’t have saved.

Is this you?

A link.

I know better the way you know better about checking the stove twice. I open it.

SHANE DANNER’S SECRET DAUGHTER?

They’ve led with a photo of me at the farmers market on Barton Springs.

Long lens, shot from across the parking area, focus soft on the front of the frame where somebody’s shoulder cuts in.

Sadie’s on my chest in the carrier with the strap that’s fraying at the buckle.

I’m laughing at something I can’t remember.

I look happy, and that goes through me like something cold.

Then four more, and these aren’t long-lens.

Shane asleep in my lap in the dressing room in Los Angeles, boots on, one hand curled up by his face.

Shane in the hallway outside that room, his mouth at my temple, my palm flat on his chest to slow him down.

Shane on my couch in a shirt of mine that didn’t fit, laughing at how it rides up over his perfect abs.

Shane eating cereal out of a mixing bowl after midnight, hair messy, looking up because I’d said his name.

I know the exposure on every one of them.

I know which were shot wide open because the room was dark and I didn’t want a flash in his face.

None of them have ever been online. They lived on a drive in my closet and in one shared album, and one other person on this earth has the password.

I sit down on the floor of my own studio.

I think about the wild months I spent with Shane Danner, rock god and sex symbol for millions of women around the globe.

It had been in a studio, not like this one, but similar enough. There had been me, my cameras, his cocky smile and an obvious chemistry that had led to numbers exchanged, a night I never thought I’d forget.

And another, and another. And eventually a full blown relationship, love even, living together when he was in town, flying out to visit him all over the country and even the world.

He was busy the shipping companies are busy, always scheduled to the second, always planning months in advance.

There hadn’t been much room for me in his life, but he’d made it. We didn’t want to go public at first, I’d been too shy and he’d been too uncertain.

And then we did, but there was always a reason not to. It was bad timing for a new album release, too close to a tour, he was protecting me from insane fans.

The excuses had grown stale after a while, and my insecurities had become too much for me to bear. I’d ended it with him, kind of a soft launch in reverse. Longer between texts, visits, nights together, until there was nothing at all.

Except that one last night. That fateful night.

I’m still on the floor of my studio deep in memory when the glass at the front rattles. I get up because it’s a glass door and my daughter is asleep in the room behind it, and Kendra, my oldest friend, is on the sidewalk with her arms crossed hard over her stomach.

She’s standing the way you stand when you’ve already decided to take it. Weight back. Chin up a little. I know before I get the lock turned.

“Tess,” she says, her face telling me everything I need to know.

“How much?”

“Can I come in?”

“How much?”

She comes in anyway, because I’ve stepped back, and my body did that without me. Thirteen years of letting this woman into my life even when I’m not sure if she’s wanted. She looks at the backdrop and the light stands and the sheepskin still crumpled where the Ferris baby left it.

“Forty.”

“Forty?” I ask, astonished that’s how cheap she sold my life for.

“Thousand.”

“I know what forty means.” It comes out pleasant, which is worse than if I’d screamed. “I want you to say the whole thing so I’m sure I’m not making it up.”

“Forty thousand dollars.” She drags the heel of her hand across her cheek.

“And before you say anything, will you actually hear me for one second, because you’ve got a hospital bill on your counter that you turn face-down every time I walk in.

You went back to work at five weeks. You were pumping in the car between sessions and telling me it was fine. ”

“So you sold my daughter out for forty grand.”

“I sold a story about a man who owes her something.”

“You sold a picture of her face.”

“He was never going to help you. Not ever, not unless everybody was watching him not do it.” Her voice climbs and breaks in the middle.

“You wouldn’t sue. You wouldn’t take my money, you wouldn’t take your mom’s money, and I have sat there for a year watching you go under financially and be perfectly polite about it. ”

“You couldn’t watch it anymore.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s what came out.”

She stops. Something crosses her face that I’d feel sorry about if I had anything left to feel it with. I put both hands on the counter because they need somewhere to be.

“I tried to tell him.”

“You said you called once.”

“I called. I emailed. I mailed him an ultrasound with a signature required and somebody in that building signed for it.” My hands are shaking so I press them flatter.

“I left a voicemail on his private line where I said the word out loud twice so nobody could pretend they misheard. Then I wrote him a letter I’d rather die than have you read.

Nine months, Kendra. I stopped because I ran out of ways to be humiliated, not because I was proud.

I couldn’t stand any more rejection, and I can’t stand it now, not for me or my daughter. ”

She stares at me.

“You never told me any of that.”

“You’d have told me to try again.”

The room goes quiet. Behind the wall the little machine in Sadie’s room does its ocean noise.

“Then it’s fine,” Kendra says, smaller. “If you can prove it, then it’s fine, he’ll have to say so.”

“Say so when?”

She looks at the floor.

“Kendra.”

“He’s on Alana Chu tonight. It was booked for the record months ago and they didn’t pull it.” She’s talking fast now, uphill. “And that’s good, that’s actually good, because it’s live, so he can’t hide behind a prepared PR statement. He has to sit there and answer her, and you know she’ll ask.”

The interview is about to begin. I don’t remember deciding to walk into the back.

I do remember standing over the pack and play with my hand across my mouth, watching my daughter sleep with her fists up beside her ears, while Kendra finds the remote in the other room.

The applause reaches me first, a crowd clapping for a man I used to feed cereal after midnight.

Then Alana Chu, warm, unhurried, the voice that has closed four careers I can name.

“Shane. There’s a story out this afternoon that you know I have to talk about. Did you know about this daughter you supposedly have and have never acknowledged?”