Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Bax
“It’s a baby,” Bea stated simply, like that explained away the fact that there was a baby in my house.
She looked like a completely different woman than the one I’d made love to early this morning. I saw real fear etched into her usually confident features.
“He was in my cabin alone. The car. The car from the other week and the man with long hair, he just left him! Clay and I watched him drive away. I bet that’s who took the key, but he couldn’t leave through the front door because of the crew.”
“ Him ? What key?”
Just then, the baby let out a cry, and he opened his eyes. They were the same blue I’d seen in my youngest brother’s eyes my whole life. The same blue I saw when I looked in a mirror. The kid was the spitting image of Dixon.
“I think it was your brother, Dixon. Is that possible?” Bea lifted the kid and tucked him into the crook of her arm.
He whimpered and cried harder as she swayed from side to side, shushing him.
“Bax, look in the basket. There’s an envelope.
I didn’t notice it till now.” When I didn’t move, Bea stepped closer to the basket. “It’s addressed to you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.” Like she knew instinctively not to get too close to me with the baby in her arms, she held the note out to me and waited for me to take it from her hand.
The letter had been sealed in a thin, nearly see-through, white envelope, and my name had been scribbled on the front in Dixon’s chicken-scratch handwriting.
Panic swirled in my chest, and the sight of Bea comforting a baby wasn’t helping.
Somebody else needed to come and deal with this. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop shaking. I whispered, “Can you call my sister?”
Afraid she hadn’t heard me, I looked up, and finally Bea said, “Of course.”
I hadn’t hid the panic as well as I’d hoped. Bea had no clue what was wrong with me, but she knew it was something if the worried look on her face was anything to go by. She fumbled her phone, trying to unlock it and search for Abey’s contact while she bounced the baby.
Trying not to crush it in my hand, I pulled my own phone from my pocket and leaned on my crutch. I swiveled on my foot, turning away from Bea, and opened my contacts. I hit Dixon’s name with my thumb so forcefully, I was surprised the screen didn’t crack.
For more than a year, my family’s and my calls had gone unanswered, but today, surprisingly, my brother answered, and my temper got the better of me. “What the fuck, Dixon!”
It took him a minute, but he said, “You can take care of him, Bax. You’re a good dad. I’m not. I can’t do it.”
I lowered my voice so Bea wouldn’t hear. “You knew what this would do to me. Goddamn you.”
“I’m sorry. I know, but I love you, brother. You’ve always looked out for me, but now I need you to forget about me and look out for him.”
“It doesn’t work that way, asshole.”
“I’m not worth your worry, Bax. Take care of him. He needs love, and you got lots of that to give. I owe this to you.”
“You can’t owe a child , Dixon,” I seethed through clenched teeth, my voice getting louder and louder as my heart thundered inside my chest. And fuck Dixon. I knew exactly how he’d ended up in this situation. “How fuckin’ high are you?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I know you don’t believe me, but the minute he was born, I got sober. But I dunno if I can keep it up. Better to stay away. Everybody’s better off without me.”
“Dixon,” I pleaded, falling forward under the weight of the panic now, but I caught myself on the edge of the kitchen counter and leaned on it. “I-I can’t.”
“Everything you need’s in the basket under the blankets. He’s healthy. They detoxed him in the NICU and he’s had all the shots they said he needed. I left you his birth certificate, and Kel and I signed a paper that says we give our rights to you. It’s notarized.”
“Kel?”
“Kellie, she’s the mama. She’s in bad shape, Bax. I tried to keep her sober as much as I could durin’ the pregnancy, but once he was born… I’ve tried gettin’ her to go to rehab, but she won’t go. She wants nothin’ to do with Stu, but her parents are dead, and she doesn’t have brothers or sisters.”
I couldn’t remember ever being so goddamn mad, but all that came out of my mouth was, “You named your kid Stu?”
“It’s short for Stuart. It means he’ll always have a guardian lookin’ out for him.
It’s just a nickname. You and Athena can name him whatever you want.
She’s good at that. And I met that new chick you been hangin’ with.
She seems nice. Maybe she can help out, but don’t give him to Merv.
I put that in the paper. I love her, but she’ll ruin him.
“It’s also written in the paper that if you don’t take him in, he goes to foster care.”
Motherfucker!
I wanted to scream at my brother, but the inevitable heartbreak made me whisper. “How can you do this to me?”
A scuffle sounded at the end of Dixon’s line. “I gotta go, Bax. Don’t try to find me. I won’t be in Wyoming.” He got quiet for a minute. “I wish Candy could see him.”
“This ain’t the same k?—”
“I know that,” Dixon said. “But he can be. He can heal that part of you I broke.”
Hearing the guilt in his voice exhausted me.
My wife’s and child’s deaths had nothing to do with him.
Dixon had just happened to be in the truck with Candy when she had the aneurysm.
I’d said it till I’d gone blue in the face, but he wouldn’t listen.
He’d blame himself till the end of time. “Dixon, it wasn’t your?—”
“I gotta go,” he said, and he cut the line.
“ Fuck .” I shoved my phone back in my pocket. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
“Bax?” Bea tried to get my attention as the baby screamed. She was freaking out, the strained sound of her voice like a blaring siren. “Abey’s on her way, but why’s he cryin’ like this? Is somethin’ wrong with him?”
“He’s probably hungry.”
“You have milk.”
“He can’t have cow’s milk yet,” I said woodenly. “He can’t be more than a few months old. He needs formula or breast milk, neither of which we have.”
Fuck. I couldn’t think with the kid wailing like that. It filled up my whole house, and it nauseated me.
“Bax? Look at me.”
I couldn’t. I made my way to the table and fell into a chair.
Still rocking from side to side, Bea slipped her pinky into the kid’s mouth, and he latched on. I knew that wouldn’t work for long, though, once he realized no milk was coming out.
Devo. Devo had said they kept baby formula at the community center for mothers who couldn’t afford it.
The baby opened his mouth and let out another wail, and Bea groaned miserably as I pulled my phone from my pocket again. I pounded my finger over the sensor till it unlocked, found Devo’s contact, and called her.
“Bax? What’s up?”
“I need formula.”
“What’s that noise? Is that… a baby?”
“Yeah,” I yelled over the incessant crying. “Abey’s on her way, but he’s hungry and I got nothin’ to feed him. You said you have formula at Ace’s House?”
“I’m on my way,” Devo said, and she hung up.
“Oh God, Dixon, what have you done now?” my sister said as she looked over my shoulder at the baby sitting on my kitchen table in a fucking picnic basket that looked like it was ready to unravel and fall apart.
Bea held him as long as she could, but the wailing hadn’t stopped once, and she was more than freaked out.
Abey raised her voice over the crying. “He didn’t even come to the house?”
I shook my head and looked at Bea, who happened to resemble a little girl, scared and worried, like Athena when her favorite lamb sprained his knee.
“No,” I said, “but he’s been around. Like a goddamn skulkin’ cat for weeks! I knew it. I felt it. Bea thinks he snuck in here and stole the extra key to her cabin.”
“The baby was alone in there this mornin’,” Bea said.
“I wasn’t plannin’ to go inside, but I… forgot somethin’, so I ran in real quick, and thank God I did.
I think your brother was lurkin’ around in the trees, makin’ sure somebody figured out that the baby was in there, but as soon as I carried him out the door, Dixon took off in his car.
“Clay tried to get the license plate number, but it was too late.” Bea shook her phone in the air.
“One of the guys from the cabin crew just texted me and said it was an older, silver Honda Accord, but he has no idea what year and he didn’t see the plate.
He said he saw it parked off the edge of the road where not a lot of people would notice it.
Hell, I didn’t even notice and I drove right by it. ”
“ Goddamn you, Dixon.” He had the thing I’d spent the last three years mourning, and he just left it? Gave up his kid just like that? “What the fuck is wrong with him?” But I knew the answer. His and my fates had been intertwined the day Candy and Duo died, even more than they had already been.
My good knee jumped so fast beneath the table, I thought it might launch me to the moon right alongside Red Pepper the bull. “He did a good job of hidin’,” I said. “And the long hair probably kept any of the guys from recognizin’ him. He went to school with half of ’em.”
“He doesn’t look exactly… healthy , either,” Bea added.
“Bax?”
I didn’t answer Abey. I couldn’t. There wasn’t anything I could say that would help the situation.
No matter how hard I’d tried, I’d never been able to fix my brother.
He’d been a fuck-up his whole life. Our dad did a good amount of the fuck-up himself.
Dixon was confused about who he should be.
He always had been, and Merv hadn’t made that better by coddling him and excusing every stupid thing he ever did.
He'd been drinking heavily since he was sixteen years old, but the drugs hadn’t started until after Candy and Duo died.
“Bax, look at me, please?”
When I finally did, my sister saw the anger and the devastation on my face.
“Breathe,” she said.
Clenching my fists around my crutch handles, I stood and screamed, “I can’t! I-I don’t understand. I need to get out of here.”