He nodded and grinned at her, and he thought she laughed. It looked that way, her eyes crinkling at the corners, her shoulders heaving back and forward. And in his head he heard Woody Woodpecker. He closed his eyes and saw the crimson bird, speeding along in a car with Shaquille O’Neal. Then the basketball player disappeared and Denise was there, laughing Woody’s laugh.
Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha. Ha-ha-ha-
HA-ha.
A Pepsi commercial he saw when he was—what?—four, five years old.
Some sounds he had locked inside him, from television mostly. Not many. But sometimes he would see the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle and remember a siren he’d heard on
CHiPs
reruns, or he’d watch a dog bark and the
woof-woof
of a black-and-white Lassie would come back to him. Didn’t matter if the dog was a German shepherd or a poodle, he heard the same bark.
Woof-woof. Timmy’s
in the well.
He opened his book, read about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the two brilliant men who independently discovered calculus, and the battle of pride and plagiarism that ensued as a result. Calculus, the study of change. He lived that. Revolving homes, men coming and going—first in his mother’s life, then his aunt’s—new medications, new aches and pains. He clung to the God who was unchanging, the God of mathematics. The God of pi.
He remembered in middle school learning about pi, and it fascinated him. He read books, spent hours working the Brent-Salamin Algorithm, watching pi grow longer and longer, marching into infinity. He memorized pi to a thousand places—give or take—and found himself praying the numbers when he had no words.
Three point one
four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three
eight four six two six four three three eight three two seven five zero . . .
In pi, he saw the reflection of God. Pi was constant, always the same—today, tomorrow, and forever. It was irrational, like the cross, foolishness to those who didn’t believe. It was transcendental; no finite sequence of operations on integers could ever create it.
It never ended.
When his eyes tired, he leaned back on the padded seat and dozed, but not deeply enough that he didn’t feel Denise check his blood pressure every thirty minutes. Finally, after three hours, the needles came out. The nurse covered his punctures with a gauze pad, and he pressed his hand over it. Two vampirish spots of red seeped through.
He was weighed again—lost five pounds, all excess fluid removed from his body. His temperature taken again, still normal. His blood pressure, standing and sitting. His pulse.
He climbed back on the bus, waited for the others to shuffle on. He felt a little weak, stiff from being tied to a chair for so long. And tired. Just so tired. He hoped the apartment was calm when he got home—no blaring television, no arguing over stupid things, like Jaylyn using his aunt’s perfume, or Sienna twisting the heads off Lacie’s Bratz dolls. Doubtful, he knew. There always seemed to be some sort of crisis at home, and if there wasn’t, one of the girls found a way to make one. Nobody was happy if they weren’t hurting each other. He wished they would just quit. He hurt enough for all of them.
Benjamin stared at a pile of letters—some opened, some not—stacked high and wobbly on his desk, the way he imagined the mattresses in that children’s fairy tale
The Princess and the Pea.
He had more peas than he could count—Abbi, the baby, the case, his memories—those hard, insistent predicaments that poked at his soft places when he slept, and continued to follow him around while awake.
The letters came from everywhere—donations, offers of adoption, little prayer cards and notes of encouragement. Nothing captivated like the suffering of children. People were more likely to open their checkbooks for little, bald chemo heads and distended African bellies than—
What’s wrong with me?
He’d never been a cynic, and he hated feeling the undertow at his feet all the time, battling to pull him down. So far, he had been able to keep his head from sinking beneath the crashing surf—barely sometimes—but each day he found himself struggling more. If he wasn’t such a coward, he’d give up.
He scooped the letter into a manila envelope and took the stairs by twos and threes to the second floor, the family services office. Cheyenne Donaldson typed at her desk, twinkling in the fluorescent lights, cheap rhinestone rings layered on each finger. Thumbs, too. She wore her lavender blouse ’80s-style, collar starched up, gold-tone fairy necklaces jangling against strands of pastel pearls.
“More mail,” Benjamin said, spilling the letters onto a table next to her.
She sifted through them, picked one up, and tapped one end on brown laminate. When the letter settled, she tore off the other side, squeezed both edges of the envelope, and shook. A folded sheet of paper slipped out, and a check. Cheyenne skimmed the letter, stuffed it back in the envelope, and opened another. “Want to help? Mail in one pile, money in another. We opened an account for all the donations coming in.”
Benjamin dug under the loose end of an envelope flap and yanked, and then stuck his index finger into the hole, sawing the paper open. He found four five-dollar bills in a glittery pink
Welcome, Baby
card and added the cash to the pile.
“No luck finding the parents yet,” Cheyenne said, more statement than question, more defeat than hope.
“I doubt we will.”
“She’s leaving the hospital in a few days, Monday or Tuesday.
Into foster care. You know.” She paused, her plastic bangles clattering as she plowed through the envelopes again. “We have three licensed families in the county. You’re one of them.”
He sliced through another envelope, more quickly this time. “Abbi can’t have children.”
“Do you want to take her?”
Now he stopped. “Cheyenne, I don’t think . . . There must be someone better.”
“This isn’t coming out of nowhere. You’ve been at the hospital, what? Every day? More than anyone else, she knows you.”
“She’s only ten days old.”
“She knows you.”
He couldn’t. What did he know about babies, especially ones who’d been abandoned by their mothers? He and Abbi thought they’d be adopting an older child, if at all. The way things were between them now . . . If Cheyenne knew, she’d not be making this offer.
He could hardly keep himself from coming apart.
But new fathers knew nothing of babies, either. They learned and stumbled through. They made mistakes, and their sons and daughters turned out fine. And he’d found her. He went to the hospital every day because he still felt responsible for her. He was her protector. She was his redemption.
Some part of him wanted this.
“I’ll need to talk to Abbi,” he said.
“Think about it a couple days, and let me know.”
He walked the unpaved quartzite of Lippman, the town east of Temple and smaller still. Benjamin had loved the sound of gravel roads as a child, closing his eyes and imagining great dragons gnashing the bones of their prey as the stones scraped and popped under car tires, or his feet. Of course he was the dragon slayer. The brave hero. Some boys grew out of this phase; that was what he heard his parents whisper to each other as he attacked giants in the tree trunks with twiggy swords and slept with his golden junior officer badge—his name engraved on it, a Christmas gift from Stephen’s family one year—pinned to his pajamas. Things would have been a lot easier if he’d gone on to middle school and left the cops-and-robbers games in his fifth grade cubby with his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box his parents made him buy with his own money. A lot different.
A lot better.
He bounced as he walked, partly from his naturally loose gait, partly because his hip twisted as he pushed off with the ball of his right foot instead of his toes. Each step jostled his desire to bring the infant home, settling it deeper. It had been there since the beginning, though he had refused to admit it until now. He still needed to ask Abbi, and he had no right to ask anything of her.
Lippman’s thirty or so houses clustered on less than six acres in the southeast corner of town, trying not to waste too much valuable field space. Benjamin started with the first house on the first street; many knocks went unanswered. He looked at his watch, the hour hand barely scraping two. Folks at work, kids at daycare. He left a preprinted note asking people to call if they knew anything. Those he did find home said they couldn’t help him. No one seemed to be lying.
Some children laughed and bounced on a corroded trampoline in one front yard. They saw Benjamin and ran to him, pleading for him to show them his gun. He unholstered it and let them run their dirty fingers over the metal. They poked at it and jumped away, as if worrying it might come alive and bite them.
He walked away from the last house and decided not to bother with the farms today. No more procrastinating. The gravel shifted as his Durango rolled over it.
Chomp, chomp, chomp
. The only dragons left to slay were his own.
“I wasn’t expecting you home,” Abbi said when he entered the kitchen. “I didn’t cook anything for you.”
Benjamin said nothing, and she didn’t turn around but kept chopping the cucumber into smaller and smaller pieces. He made her nervous, her knees locking forward, elbows drawn in against her sides. She brushed the cucumber into a bowl and from a green carton dumped tiny oblong tomatoes onto the cutting board. They collapsed as she tried to slice them, spitting watery juice and seeds over the counter. She mumbled under her breath, flinging the smooth-bladed knife into the sink before pulling a serrated one from the block.
“Abbi.”
She exhaled, tilting her neck backward until it crackled. “What.”
“I need to ask you something.”
“So, ask.”
“It’s important. Turn around.”
Knife still in her fist, she shifted, only half facing him. But that was Abbi—tell her to do something and she’d find a way not to.
“Cheyenne Donaldson wants to know if we would take the baby,” he said. “The one I . . . you know.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Forever, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s all up in the air, Abbi. She’ll need permanent placement. If we don’t find relatives, someone has to raise her.”
“Someone, you.”
“No. Someone, us.”
She rinsed the knife under the faucet and dropped it, blade down, into the dish rack. Swiped her hands on the back of her shorts. “There isn’t an
us
.”
It was the first time either of them had said it aloud, and the words stirred no emotion in Benjamin, no surprise. They were two halves now, no longer one flesh, put asunder not by man or circumstance, but by each other.
Abbi’s hands trembled as she swept her vegetables into the bowl of couscous on the counter. She took a bite, shook on some salt, pepper, and took another bite. Her back still toward him, he read its twitches. Should he press her or not? He rubbed his thumbs over his sweaty fingertips. “Abbi.”
“What, Ben? What? If you have something else to say, just say it. If not—” She shoved her bowl away. “I’m just . . . going to the studio.”
“Wait,” he said, jumping in front of her, and she flinched, a residual instinct from
that
day. Both their eyes found the uneven mango-sized spot in the living room wall. He had patched the hole with spackle and repainted it, but it still wasn’t as smooth as the surrounding Sheetrock, the white paint brighter. “I found her.”
“Oh, I get it. It’s, like, finders keepers?” Abbi snorted. “You’ve lost your mind. She’s not a quarter you picked up from the sidewalk. This is a life.”
“I saved her life,” he shouted. He didn’t mean to, but it bubbled out. This time Abbi didn’t back away; her gazed dropped to his waist. Hesitantly, she reached out and traced the silver buckle on the creased brown-leather belt he’d worn since before they met. It had become a joke between them. Every Christmas and birthday Abbi bought him a vegan belt to replace it, wrapped in the same-sized box so he knew what it was. After the first two times he’d figured out her routine, and he would shake the gift and make outlandish guesses—“Is it a bowling ball? Keys to a new Corvette?”—before untying the ribbon and acting surprised. He’d strap the belt around his forehead, or around his neck like a tie, and dance about the room, and they’d laugh together and end up in bed.
All those belts hung on the inside of the closet door—faux suede, jacquard nylon, canvas and hemp and vegetan—jingling each time someone opened it. He never wore any of them, each day sliding the battered leather through the loops on his pants. And now he watched her finger hop from one hole to the next; he was buckled to the seventh. The third hole was fat, a gaping wound from years of use. The next three were only slightly stretched. She lingered on the eighth and final hole. “And who’s going to take care of her while you’re at work?” she asked.
“I figured you could quit the grocery. And not go back to subbing in the fall.”
“You’re trying to bribe me.”
He smiled a little, shrugged. “Yeah.”
She dropped her hand, her face falling with it. “I guess we go see Cheyenne tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t,” she said, and went to her studio.
The smell of birth assaulted Abbi as she stepped through the doors of the maternity ward—a thick, sweet coat of lotions and latex gloves, and that pink toilet cleaner in the gallon bottles. She lagged behind Benjamin, passed by a glowing couple walking hand in hand, the proud papa lugging a blue-socked baby in a car seat, the wife still waddling with postpartum weight.
That’s how babies should go home
.
Benjamin didn’t wait for her. He waved to the nurse through the window and slipped into the nursery. The woman came out, holding the door for Abbi. “Go on in,” she said. Abbi waited, the door against her hip, and as the nurse swished down the hallway, Cheyenne clattered around the corner. “I’m here, I’m here,” she said. She crowded Abbi into the room. Benjamin hoisted the baby on his shoulder, one of his brown hands cupped under her diapered bottom, the other eclipsing her back. Her thin, purple legs wriggled like night crawlers against his shirt, and Abbi winced at her shrill bleating. He draped her over his forearm, her head in the crook of his elbow. She calmed as he rhythmically pounded her back.