Want Not (56 page)

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” he said, and when she nodded again Dave felt the bottom drop out of something, and maybe everything.

“Did you—” It was unthinkable, but he’d heard the cry. “You had the baby?”

Another nod, more unfocused than the others. He was losing her now.

“Where’s the baby, Alexis?”

Her head wobbled, her lips fell open without sound.

Dave pushed her back against the chainlink, so hard that her body sank into the fence and charged back at him limply. The couple who’d spoken to him—the woman had—was still standing there, along with the other girl, and seeing this the guy intervened tentatively, saying, “Hey, whoa man, easy,” and placing a hand on Dave’s shoulder which Dave furiously shrugged off.

“Where’s the baby, Alexis?” he asked again, his voice choppy and strangled, and he shook her by her shoulders to eject an answer. He felt something filling him, not adrenaline but something thicker and more complex, a molten surge of emotion and comprehending that he sensed might drown him. A volley of what-ifs went bubbling through him, and with them came an understanding that this was his sin, too, if not in commission than in something more vague and amorphous but no less damning. He’d never visualized or even considered human consequences before—something so obvious in abstraction but foreign to his daily life, where what mattered was him, what mattered was more, what mattered was what he said mattered—and now here were those consequences, in stark and condemnatory relief; and filed directly behind this sin, he knew, were hundreds or thousands of other sins, a witheringly long line of human debts long out of statute but due just the same. All this went flushing through his mind in scarcely a millisecond, in an electrical impulse of black awareness; only later, in a hospital waiting room, as the emergency-room technicians pored over Alexis and the cops jotted notes and Sara texted updates of her grim 3
A.M.
progress across New Jersey on I-280, would he translate that shock of awareness into words, would he feel his myriad lusts curdling within him. Right now, however, he just needed the baby. “The baby,” he growled at her, yearning to pry open her drooping, bulged eyelids so that she’d look him in the eyes. “Where’s the baby?”

“A woman,” was all she could say, flopping her thumb back in the direction of the alleyway. “Over by the dumpster. I gave it to her. I gave her to her.”

Dave flung her aside to open the gate, and then took off running down the dim alleyway. He jogged to a stop at the dumpsters, sticking his head into the open one but seeing only big bags of trash overlaid with a banjo someone had thrown out; the other dumpsters were locked. He called out, “Hello?” The respondent silence made him feel stupid and powerless. He flung himself farther down the alleyway, to where it joined the sidewalk, and dashed right into the center of the street to search both sidewalks. A taxi came to a lurching overwrought stop in front of him, the driver throwing his arm out the window in the standard irritated manner. Dave ignored him, twirling on the pavement as he scanned the block, but this was a campus side street, anchored by the Richard Varick College bookstore which was dark and vacant, and the only people on the block were three lonesome-looking young men walking off their midnight cravings, their hands uniformly hidden in their pockets. He ran to the corner, the taxi driver issuing an appreciative note of “Fuck you, crazyguy” as he squealed the tires. Dave didn’t even know what street he was on; the streets were crazy in this part of downtown, all squashed and nowhere-leading. He ran one way, not even knowing what precisely he was searching for: woman, baby. He realized he was looking for a woman pushing a stroller, and the desolate ridiculousness of this brought him to an impotent standstill. He went hurtling into a park—what park was this? where was he?—but the park was empty, just a bleak gray statue ringed by a copse of trees whose sagging black-leafed boughs gave the impression of the dark forests of gloomy fairy tales, the places children ventured to be cooked and eaten. He jogged through the park, almost afraid for his own safety now, but one side looked like the other, and he circled back around it. At one corner of the park a homeless old man was sprawled on the sidewalk beside a cardboard sign advertising his destitution. Out of breath, Dave asked, “A woman . . .” But before he could draw the air to finish his question the old man cackled and proclaimed, “We all got our wants, friend-sir, we all got our wants.”

By this time, Micah was already at the twenty-four-hour Duane Reade drugstore near Times Square, just two blocks south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, hushing the baby as she unpacked an overloaded blue basket onto the counter—bottles, nipples, formula, four blankets, disposable diapers, flushable wipes, diaper-rash cream, and pacifiers, along with two cheap school backpacks, identically decorated with SpongeBob SquarePants, for carrying it all—and then fetched the envelope out of her bag, plucking two hundred-dollar bills from it. The young speechless cashier—who would later say, under police questioning, that he had no memory of the woman on the surveillance video—ignored her completely, passing back her change while idly monitoring a pair of drunk tourists who for their own soused reasons were trying on sunglasses in the middle of the night.

At the Greyhound desk at the Port Authority she peeled off another hundred, for a one-way bus ticket to Johnson City, Tennessee; she was just in time for the 3:45
A.M.
departure to Richmond, Virginia, where eight hours later she would transfer for Johnson City. As the bus rolled out of the city, swiftly through the Lincoln Tunnel and then out onto the New Jersey Turnpike, Micah ran a fingertip softly across the baby’s cheek as the baby suckled a bottle, whispering, “So hungry, little one,” and skimming the lightest paintbrush of a kiss onto her dark forehead. With the baby on her shoulder Micah congratulated her for a burp, then cradled her against her chest and draped her with two blankets, the baby drifting effortlessly off to sleep, soothed by the diesel thrum of the bus engine and the lullaby being sung to her by the giant, southward-spinning tires.

Micah peered out the window, New Jersey passing by in a Turnpike blur of tollbooths and scrolled iron bridges and all-night refinery flames burning sacredly in the low distance near smokestack ruins and the enormous, mantis-like gantries of the industrial ports, her reflection superimposed upon all this, her eyes sometimes watching her eyes as the hours slid by and New Jersey turned briefly into Delaware and then became Maryland, and dawn fuzzed the horizon. Soon they’d be home, Micah and the girl. She could almost smell it approaching, beckoning her onward: the caramel scent of freshly split pignut hickory, the wintry char-smell of woodsmoke haze, and out in the woods the springtime onion-odor of wild leeks giving way to summer’s grape-soda perfume of mountain laurel along with the musty, vibrant, fern-rot funk of the stream bank, beside the water’s distilled silver chill, where as a little girl she’d lured a trusting fawn within six feet of her, a record her father called unchallenged in the history of mankind. She watched her reflection dissipating in the blooming sunlight. What John Rye had done wrong, Micah would do right. And what John Rye had done right, she would do better. This was all the remaking of the world she could do, for now. The tiny sleeping girl in her arms, she thought, could dream the rest.

T
HE CALL CAME TO
Elwin after he’d just unburdened himself of the very last of his Craigslist offerings: the remaining venison in his deep-freeze. He’d posted the ad as a lark, a tongue-in-cheek farewell to his Craigslist odyssey, never for a moment expecting a response. “Ten-month-old roadkilled venison, frozen. About 20 lbs. left, predominantly roasts. Competently butchered (I hit it myself), packaged, and sealed. Have eaten plenty of it myself, with no ill effects, but it’s not on the new diet and frankly I’m tired of it. Free to first taker. Serious inquiries only. (Ha!)” Within four hours he’d received a dozen inquiries, at least half of them serious or at least convincingly deadpan. The first claimants turned out to be a pair of unsmiling brothers from Morristown by way of Honduras, and they came to pick it up on a Monday evening, saying little as they mined the meat from the bottom of the deep-freeze and dumped the brown, frost-gilded parcels into recycled plastic ShopRite bags. Elwin shook his head in droll bewilderment as he watched them drive away, then immediately called Christopher.

Christopher had his own place now, an efficiency apartment in a complex over by the mall. The apartment was within theoretical walking distance of the AutoZone where after just three weeks Christopher had been promoted from customer-service rep to parts sales manager. The store manager liked Christopher parking the Jeep out front, instead of behind the store where the other employees parked, on the grounds that the Jeep was good advertising. A girlfriend was also said to be in the picture, though Elwin hadn’t met her. Kelly at the bar said she was “nice enough,” dropping her voice a notch, however, when noting she didn’t take her gum out when she drank beer. This struck Elwin as an entirely forgivable flaw, and from Kelly’s wounded tone he surmised, improbably, that Kelly had something of a crush on Christopher. Stranger things had happened.

“You’ll never believe this,” Elwin said to him. “Someone took the deer meat.”

“You really posted that? I thought you were shittin me.”

“I did,” Elwin said, and pricked by Christopher’s incredulity he added, “I mean, there wasn’t anything wrong with it . . .”

“Punk, Doc. Super punk.” An interjecting series of beeps from Elwin’s phone clipped off the rest: “That’s—whole new—punk.”

“Hold on, Chris, there’s another call coming in. Okay?”

Happily, confidently, Christopher said, “I got nowhere to go.”

On Elwin’s other line was the director of the Roth Residence. Elwin’s father was dead. “He went peacefully, during a nap,” the director said. The voice was consoling but robotic, the inflections corroded by over-routine. “We think his heart just stopped.”

Elwin said, “I’ll be there in an hour.”

“There’s no rush . . .” the director said.

En route to the city he called his sister Jane, whose audible tears came as a surprise to him. He didn’t think he’d heard her cry since the time she’d come in third, despite being heavily favored to win, in the five-hundred-yard freestyle at the Greater Essex Conference Championship; his impression, from having observed her through two divorces, financial semi-ruin, and the death of their mother, was that she’d given up competitive swimming and crying on the very same day. He certainly didn’t expect this particular loss to break that streak, considering the peculiar grudge she’d been holding against their father for all these years, but there she was, honking exotic sobs into the phone, then briefly collecting herself before smithereening into sobs all over again. His call reached her in St. Lucia, where she was vacationing with husband number three, the anesthesiologist, and for some reason—perhaps the strange imbalance he felt on the line, with Jane reduced to tears by precisely the same loss dry-eyed Elwin was suffering—he apologized to her for ruining her vacation. “Oh El,” she said warmly, “don’t be such an ass.” Jane volunteered to tell their brother David, wondering aloud if the number she had for him in China would actually ring all the way over there. “Well, it’s supposed to,” Elwin said carefully, chalking up the ditziness to her unfamiliar emotional state. This led them into a reminiscence about the time as children they’d tried digging to China through the backyard, all three of them, unearthing a hole deep enough to swallow David whole, and how in discouraging their expedition their mother had cited the earth’s volcanic core while their father had urged them ever downward. Elwin remembered it oppositely—their mother had been the lover of digging, their father the lover of fact—and this, coupled with the warbly timbre of Jane’s voice, suggested to Elwin that it might be cocktail hour in St. Lucia. He reconsidered Jane’s tears in light of this, though not uncharitably, his only conclusion being that Jane would always be a mystery to him, as perhaps he was to her.

Next he called Sharon, and reaching her voicemail instead he found himself stammering, because calling her in the first place was a bit odd, and to leave her a message about his father’s death odder still. So instead he claimed to be calling about the Waste Markers project, which was a less-than-sturdy lie since their work on that was all but complete, their report on its way to a government printing office. Two months after the flirty languor of the shore trip, their chumminess—he was beginning to loathe this word but had yet to find a replacement candidate—had developed a pressurized edge, awaiting one or the other to address it. The poor but persistent analogy that came to Elwin’s mind was a Saran Wrap–covered bowl of leftovers heating in a microwave, with the plastic ballooning dangerously from steam; if you didn’t vent the Saran Wrap, you got a messy microwave. The closest they’d come to venting it, he supposed, was while drinking away the aftershocks of the Markers panel’s most rancorous day, when Sharon grasped Elwin’s hand across the table in a gesture of sympathy for the point he was making. The touch had stalled them both, because it felt so powerfully conjugal, almost fated, and they’d let out synchronized sighs while gaping dumbly at their enjoined hands. “We’re such old goobers,” Sharon finally said. “Let’s just let what happens happen, right?”

This had come at the end of a rough three days, when the panel met in San Francisco to draft its final recommendations. Elwin had stayed to the side of the debates on what they called physical messaging—how to use architecture to scare future generations away from the sixteen-square-mile radioactive site. One doomed but popular idea was to construct a “landscape of thorns”: sixty-foot concrete spires jutting from the desert at randomly jagged angles, with sharply tapered branches, to evoke a 240-acre briar patch. Cost projections, however, killed that one, along with the odds-making of how a proposal like that would fare in Congress—even its fiercest proponents could envision the concrete thorns showing up in negative campaign ads, the perfect visual for wasteful government boondoggles. The consensus idea was to propose massive earthen berms, like river levees, surrounding an assortment of twenty-five-foot granite monoliths which the materials scientist Carrollton assured them wouldn’t be as cryptically Stonehenge-ish as they sounded. Engraved upon those monoliths would be a varying series of warning messages, which was where Elwin—and the rancor—had come in.