3. Lori
Lori
I read it again. Then a third time. The handwriting does not change.
I love you. I can't come back. Please take care of her.
The dusk fades, it’s dark now outside. The cedar by the mailbox rattles in a wind I cannot feel through the dress. No taillights down the gravel drive. Just one of Mrs. Ferris's hens half a yard over, clucking at her chain-link.
I look down at the basket.
A baby. A real one. In a yellow swaddle, in a Moses basket on my welcome mat. The basket is split-rib weave, rougher than the kind they sell at the stores in this town. Around a month old, by the size of her.
My knees fold.
I sit down hard on the porch. The basket is at my feet.
The note is still in my left hand. The E curls the wrong way, just like the E on a homemade birthday card Ella signed for me when I was twelve, and has never stopped curling wrong since.
I get my phone out of the dress pocket. Dial.
Four rings. Voicemail. Hey, it's Ella, leave a message after the beep. The recording she made years ago, back when she still had a voice that thought everything was funny.
I dial again. Voicemail.
Again. Voicemail.
A fourth time. Somewhere between the second ring and the third, I understand she has gone somewhere a phone won't reach.
I put my phone back into my pocket.
I do not, exactly, remember reaching for the baby, but here she is, against my chest, her entire weight on my arm. She is lighter than I thought a person could be. I am not sure I have ever held a baby this small in my life.
The baby looks at me. Blue eyes, like her mother's and mine. I trace a finger on her chin — Ella's chin, I think. One tiny hand floats up between us. A fingernail the size of a sesame seed. She does not let go.
She starts to fuss. A small breathy complaint, building.
Pulling my pinky off her grip, I shift the baby higher, carefully, and try the diner-mother pat I have seen a thousand times. It either works or it doesn't.
Before I run the list of why taking in a baby is a bad idea considering my bank account and my lack of baby stuff, I hear the low cough of an engine downshifting onto the gravel. A maroon F-150 nosing past the cedar at the end of the drive.
The headlights swing across the porch.
In the four seconds it takes him to park, I become acutely aware of the following items. My hair is down for him.
A baby that is not mine is against my chest. A folded note from my missing sister is in my left hand.
I am wearing the navy A-line dress I save for special occasions, and this is supposed to be one if it were still going to happen at all.
The engine cuts.
Cadie is out of the passenger side before her father has touched his own door. Both rainbow boots hit the gravel at once. The dress she picks from her own closet. Lavender drawstring purse over her shoulder. A slick of someone's lip gloss, applied with the joyful incompetence of a six-year-old.
"LORI!" she calls, like I'm three states away.
She comes to the porch. Not at it. For it.
Carson is two steps behind her, longer legs, hat on. He puts on that same smile he gave me back at the diner. But this one looks more anticipatory. Like half a warning, that he is about to deliver a line he has been working on since Saturday.
"Sorry we're early. Cadie's been ready since lunch, you know how she —"
He stops.
He has reached the bottom step. He has caught up to what his eyes are seeing.
He sees my face first. Then he tracks down to the baby on my chest. Back to my face. Then to the folded paper in my hand.
He goes still.
I stand up with the note still in my hand and the baby in my arms. The baby's tiny hand curls around my finger.
"Carson — I'm so sorry. I have to cancel." The words trip over themselves. I try to call. Something happened, I — you don't need to be here for this, please. Cadie, sweetie, hi — I'm so sorry, your daddy and I are going to have to do dinner another night." The words trip over themselves.
I look down. Cadie has stopped on the second step, watching. She looks like a girl who has been told how to behave at funerals.
"I'm so sorry, your daddy and I are going to have to do dinner another night. I'm so sorry."
I’m talking too fast.
The armor goes up. I can feel every plate of it. The polite voice. The small busy smile. The sentence I have used on Jason, Tonia, the bank, and the landlord — and on Ryan, before I stopped using it on him entirely.
I'm fine. I've got it. Go.
Carson isn’t moving. He stands at the bottom of the steps just like he stood at the diner on Tuesday night. In no hurry. Taking the scene in, with his hat pushed back the same.
His eyes go to the baby again.
Cadie has gone very quiet. She does not bolt or ask things, watching her father's face that has dropped her into one of the rare still places of her small loud life.
Carson comes up the steps.
He does not rush or say anything. He stops in front of me at arm's length, looking down at the baby because that is the safest place to put his eyes.
"Hey," he says. Low.
I don’t have a word back. My mouth opens but nothing comes out.
"May I?" he asks.
He lifts the baby out of my arms. His hands come up between us slowly, with the careful approach of a man putting a hand toward a stray dog. The heel of his palm finds the back of her wobbly head before mine has left.
For half a second, our forearms cross. He is holding her as I am holding her. I let go once I’m sure she’s safe in his arms.
She lifts off my chest and into his, and the place she was is suddenly, unexpectedly cold.
"Hey, sweetie," he says, to the top of her head.
I hear the voice he uses for Cadie. Quiet and careful, with no business coming out of a man his size. He kisses her small downy head, quick and exact, the press of a mouth a man has done a thousand times to his own daughter.
He tucks her into the crook of his arm. Her free hand has found his shirt. She fists the cotton.
He lifts his eyes to me as his free arm comes up.
It goes around the small of my back. In one fluid motion, he pulls me into his side and I get every inch of him at once. My shoulder under his arm. My temple at his collarbone. His hip, in line with mine. His thigh, warm, against my thigh through the dress. The baby tucked between us.
He bends his head and presses his mouth to my forehead.
His breath first. Then his lips. Then the press.
His mouth lingers half a second past comfort, his whole side warm down mine.
I feel the small caught breath he takes after.
The half-second his mouth does not lift.
There is a place at the base of my throat that wants me to turn my face up, just to see what happens, and I refuse to acknowledge it with the last working piece of my dignity.
The note is in my hand against his ribs. His heartbeat is right there, under my knuckles, through the cotton of his shirt. The trained steadiness of a man who runs into fires for a living and has taught himself to hold a baseline.
Twenty-one minutes ago, I was certain I would die alone in a rented house in Hill Country. And now there is a stranger's mouth on my forehead and my sister's baby in his arms, and I do not have a word for what is happening — so I let him hold me.
That’s when Cadie walks up.
The thud of a rainbow boot. The brush of a sleeve at my dress. She stops at her father's hip and tugs his coat. He looks down at his daughter.
She studies the baby in his arms. Studies me. Studies the note in my hand, which she cannot read but which she has, on some level, fully understood.
She whispers it, dead serious.
"Daddy. Does she not have a mommy either?"
The porch quiets.
I feel Carson against my side. His ribs shift a fraction, taking a breath. The arm at my back tightens. The hand cradling the back of the baby's head does not so much as twitch. He holds perfectly still — careful not to startle the baby.
I tilt my head up.
He’s already looking at me.
He holds his eyes on me. Past the polite-man look. Past the flirty-cowboy-makes-a-joke look.
His mouth opens. His voice goes low and rough, almost a growl because Cadie is right there, so he holds the volume down.
"She does now," he says.