2. Tess
Tess
Icarry Sadie out because I’m not watching this alone and I’m not leaving her down the hall either.
She wakes enough to complain, then settles with her ear over my heart, and I stand there swaying without having decided to.
They’ve lit him beautifully. Key from the left, a little fill, a rim on his shoulder that separates him from the fake window behind. Somebody good is running that board.
Shane sits the way he always sits, one ankle up on the other knee, a chair turned into a couch by a man who’s never once been nervous in one. His hands are laced over his shin and the thumb is going.
“You’ve seen the story.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Is it true?”
He breathes in through his nose. I’ve watched him take that breath in a hallway in Tulsa before telling a promoter he was fine to go on with a sprained ankle.
“No.”
The audience murmurs, a low pleased sound that makes my skin crawl.
“Flatly. This child is not yours.”
“I haven’t talked to her in over a year.
And when your name’s worth something, people find ways to attach themselves to it.
” One shoulder goes up. “It’s not the first time something like this has happened.
It’s the worst, I’ll admit, because there’s a baby in the middle of it, and I hope somebody’s looking after that kid, but it’s not mine. ”
I hope somebody’s looking after that kid.
Her hand is fisted in the neck of my shirt.
She was born five weeks early in a bathroom at a wedding venue in Wimberley and the first thing she ever did was not cry, and I spent nineteen hours down the hall from her learning words like cannula and reflux and we’ll know more in the morning.
“You and Tess Broderick were in a relationship.”
“I know Tess.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He smiles, and it’s the record store smile, the one he can run while thinking about absolutely nothing.
“Whatever happened between us wasn’t what she imagined it was,” he says at last.
Kendra makes a noise behind me like she’s taken an elbow.
“That’s a careful sentence.”
“It’s an honest one.”
“Did she ever try to reach you? About a pregnancy, a child, anything?”
And he looks off camera. A quarter of a second, barely a flicker, the kind of thing you’d never catch if you hadn’t spent a year learning a face in bad light. Somebody’s standing where he’s looking, somebody is feeding him answers.
“Not even once,” he says.
The lie about the baby isn’t what takes me apart. A DNA lab in a strip mall can settle the baby question in under a week.
It’s the other one. Fourteen months of my life through a wood chipper in a single clause.
Because if I imagined it, then I imagined the entire relationship.
I imagined driving to Marfa. I imagined the dog we almost took.
I imagined sitting in a hospital in Tulsa before dawn with his ankle in my lap, and him saying into my hair, behind closed curtains, that I was the only place he ever stopped pretending to be fine.
If I imagined it, I’m a woman who spent over a year building a private life inside her own head and put a stranger’s face on it. And I know I didn’t, I know it was real, I know it happened.
I was once the most important person in Shane’s life, and he was the most important person in mine. I know this, the way I know my heart will continue to beat after he breaks it, and the sun will rise tomorrow morning even if it feels like I’ll live in darkness forever.
I don’t cry as I think about it all, those months we had. I sway my daughter and I watch it all the way through, and when it cuts to a truck commercial I turn the set off and set the remote down gently, and Kendra says my name and I say, “Don’t.”
The onslaught begins before the show is even over.
Follow requests first, then comments, hundreds a minute on a business account that mostly posts newborn sessions and the occasional dog.
My studio address is on that account because it has to be.
It’s on Google. It’s on the little painted sign out front that a friend made me as a housewarming present.
By the time I get Sadie down, someone has found my personal account, which has eleven followers and is entirely photographs of my mother’s garden. Later, somebody posts my street.
I go through the house pulling curtains shut, looking outside to see if I can spot the paparazzi. I feel like I’m back in Shane’s life again, hiding from them, hiding our love.
Kendra follows me room to room offering things, water, her spare room, her cousin’s place in Kyle, and I don’t answer because if I open my mouth I’ll say something I can’t take back and I don’t have the strength to end a friendship correctly tonight.
In Sadie’s room I stop. Somebody has posted a photograph of this window. Shot from the alley, from below, using the streetlight. You can see the elephant decal and the top corner of the crib.
Whoever took it stood in the alley long enough to frame it.
“Tess, what is it?”
I hand Kendra the phone instead of explaining.
Then I lift my daughter out of the crib and carry her to my bed and lie down with an arm over her and listen to the house.
The messages keep arriving with the sound off.
I can feel them landing on the nightstand.
At some point I read them, because there’s an animal in me that has to know what’s out in the dark.
Liar.
Stalker.
Groupie who couldn’t take a hint.
Somebody wants to know how many men were in the rotation that month.
Somebody else has done confident math on Sadie’s birthday against a tour routing and concluded she belongs to a bartender in Denver.
A woman with a cross in her bio hopes I lose custody.
A man tells me what he’d do to me and he’s specific about it, and I put the phone face-down and lie in the dark with my heart twisting and flipping like something caught in a trap.
My mother calls twice and I don’t pick up, because if I hear her voice I’ll come apart and I’ve got a baby asleep on my arm. The third time I answer.
“I’m not going to ask you anything,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I’m going to talk about the tomatoes.”
And she does. She talks about the tomatoes for a while, and about a woman at her church who’s had a hip replaced, and about a dog that keeps getting into her yard, and I lie in the dark and say mm at the right places and hold my daughter and let my mother do the only thing anybody can do.
The studio alarm goes sometime after midnight.
I hear it from across town, which is impossible, so what I actually hear is the alarm company asking whether I’d like them to dispatch.
The officer meets me there. He’s young and he’s kind and he keeps saying ma’am, and he walks me in with a flashlight even though the lights work.
The brick is in the middle of my floor with the glass fanned out around it like water off a stone.
There’s a rubber band doubled around it, holding paper.
He picks it up gloved and unfolds it enough for me to see, because I ask him to, because I tell him I need to see it, and I’ll be sorry about that for the rest of my life.
It’s the market photo. Cropped down to her.
Printed at home on cheap paper. Somebody has gone over her eyes in marker.
NOT HIS BABY
I feel sick, I want to throw up.
My life is ruined, all because my best friend thought I needed the money.
The worst part of it, though?
We do need the money. But not like this.
The room spins, and I feel like I’m going to faint.