by Hannah Tinti
Hawley brought the flask upstairs and poured himself a glass. He threw the whiskey back in one shot and exhaled loudly. The baby’s sobs grew softer, and her eyes seemed to focus for a moment. Hawley examined her blotchy face. Then he poured another shot, dipped his pinky into the glass and stuck his finger into his daughter’s gaping mouth. She stopped crying instantly. She sucked on his finger and her eyes locked on to his face. Her tiny hand came up and wrapped around the side of his hand and she watched him and she sucked the whiskey off his skin.
The room vibrated with the silence she had left behind. Hawley took a breath. He took another. Then he collapsed onto one of the kitchen chairs. He kept the shot of whiskey nearby. When the baby fussed he dipped his pinky into the glass again. As soon as the finger was in her mouth she went to work, her tongue pressing against his nail. The pull was wildly strong. A dark, animal need.
When he heard Lily come in the front door, he grabbed the shot he’d poured and threw what was left down his own throat, then quickly tossed the flask into the garbage can. His daughter was sound asleep, heavy in his arms. He’d kept his finger in her mouth for over an hour, not wanting her to wake and start crying again. The baby’s face was peaceful, and Hawley felt as if he’d earned that peacefulness, as if he’d made all that haunted them both disappear.
He wiped the inside of the glass with his pinky and slid it back inside the baby’s mouth. The baby breathed for a moment, then her reflexes kicked in and her lips closed around his finger. It was the first secret between them.
Lily came around the corner of the living room, carrying her shoes. Her face was tired, her makeup worn off, her hair loose around her shoulders. She lingered in the doorway, watching Hawley and the baby.
“You smell like cigarettes,” he said.
“I bought some. But they don’t taste as good as I remember.”
“Where’d you go?”
“To a meeting, down at the church. Then I drove some more and then I had some ice cream.”
“Did you bring me any?”
“Nope.”
“She’s been screaming all night,” he said. “The least you could have done was bring me some ice cream.”
Lily walked up to the table, picked up the glass and lifted it to her nose.
Hawley said, “It’s not what you think.”
“Tell me, then.”
He didn’t know how to answer. He knew only that the whiskey had worked. And now the pride he’d felt at getting things right with their daughter was draining away.
“You need to step it up if you’re going to be a parent. You can’t keep living like a criminal.”
“Is that what the folks at your meeting told you?”
“This group is full of midwesterners from the Wisconsin Dells. A priest and a librarian and a ballet teacher and a guy who does commercials on the radio. I couldn’t tell them the truth about why we moved here. I can’t talk about our real life, about you disappearing and getting shot somewhere out in the wilderness and almost dying. I know it was hard but I took care of you afterward—don’t you remember? And now I take care of her. And I’m so tired I forget who I am sometimes.”
She sat down at the table. She bent over and smelled Loo’s head.
“That’s what I do when I want a drink.”
Lily picked up the shot glass and walked over to the counter. She turned on the water, washed the glass with a sponge and set it on the dish rack.
“You regret this,” said Hawley. “Coming back for me at the diner. Getting married.”
Lily turned off the faucet.
“You like being the bad guy. But our story—it isn’t only about you, Hawley.”
She dried her hands on a towel, then came and sat down next to him again.
“I’m going to tell you what I shared tonight at the meeting. What I could share,” she said, wiping her lips. “When you went away on that job in Alaska, and you didn’t call and you didn’t come home, I thought you’d left me. I thought you didn’t want a baby and weren’t ever coming back. So I went to a bar. I went to two bars. But nobody would serve me because I was pregnant. I was waiting for the liquor store to open when you rang from that guy’s truck.” She reached over and took his hand. “You think you’re alone. You think you’re the worst. But you’re not.”
Hawley shook his head. There weren’t any words he could say and not start choking.
“Go on,” said Lily.
He leaned over the baby. He pressed his face into her soft, black hair. She smelled of orange blossoms and sweet, freshly churned butter.
“I thought she’d never stop crying.”
“Well, she did.”
“You can’t ever leave like that again.”
He tried to hand the baby over. Lily wouldn’t take her.
“You’re just scared,” she said. “I am, too.”
They watched their daughter sleeping. Then Lily leaned on his shoulder and closed her eyes. Hawley could feel himself dozing, too. He slipped his finger out of the baby’s mouth and then he carefully lifted her and carried her into the living room and set her down in the bassinet. She startled for a moment and he froze, terrified. Then she threw her arms over her head and turned her face toward the wall. He covered her with a blanket. Then he picked up the baptismal certificate that he’d tossed on the floor earlier that night.
“ ‘Louise’ makes her seem old,” he said.
“You got another idea?”
Hawley peered down at their daughter. The baby was still asleep, her mouth open in a perfect pout, her tiny hands clenched in tight little fists.
“Lou.”
“That’s a man’s name.”
“Then we’ll make it prettier,” said Hawley. “Switch the u with an o.”
“Loo,” Lily said. “I like it.”
Hawley sat down on the couch and took Lily’s hand. Just above her wedding band there was a tiny callus, a bit of skin worn tough from the pressure of the ring. It seemed like this hardened part of her had always been there, though Hawley knew there was a time when it wasn’t.
“You still want to be a mother?”
“I don’t think I’ve got a choice.”
“What about a wife?”
Lily ran her fingers through his hair. She sighed, but the sigh was light, with hardly any anger left. Hawley lay down and pulled her down beside him. They pressed against each other on the couch. Lily tucked her head underneath his chin, and Hawley stroked the back of her neck, feeling the bones there, thinking of the rounded pieces of spine, linked and holding his wife together.
“You’re not mad,” Lily asked, “about the ice cream?”
Hawley took her face into his hands and kissed her forehead, her eyes and then her lips, slow and grateful and brimming with the hundreds of ways he wanted to touch her.
—
IN THE MORNING Hawley woke to the baby fussing. Not crying yet but getting fixed to start. One of his legs was off the couch, tangled in the mess of clothes on the floor. Lily was curled naked beside him, her skin on his skin, her breath warming his chest, her arms tight around his waist, a thin blanket over them both. Hawley closed his eyes and waited. Then the cries began again. He peeled away from his wife. He slipped into his jeans and leaned over the bassinet. The baby was wearing different pajamas. Lily must have already been up with her in the night. Changed her and fed her and put her down again while he’d been sleeping.
“Troublemaker.”
The baby looked at him and waved her arms.
“Yeah, you.”
He picked her up and brought her into the kitchen. He found the bottle from before and warmed it up again on the stove. This time Loo latched on as soon as he placed the nipple near her mouth. With one tiny hand she touched the side of the plastic, bending and releasing her fingers. When the milk was half gone she started to go heavy in his arms again, her eyes fluttering.
Lily came into the kitchen with only the blanket wrapped around her. If she was surprised at
Hawley feeding Loo, she didn’t show it.
“What time is it?”
“Around six.”
“Let’s go to the beach.”
“Now?”
“Right now,” she said. “Memorial Day isn’t until next weekend, and most of the summer cabins should still be closed up. I like going when nobody else is around. It makes me feel like the whole lake belongs to us.”
They got some towels and their suits from where they were drying in the bathroom. Lily packed the diaper bag with everything they needed and Hawley put together a cooler of drinks and some sandwiches and chips and some apples and two slices from a peach pie Lily had made the day before. It was nice out, so they decided to walk. They strapped the baby into the stroller and Lily pushed her and Hawley carried the cooler down the road and through the woods to the shore of the lake.
It was still early and the beach was empty. The sand was warm and the air unusually muggy, more like August than the end of May. The dock that ran out into the water had an aluminum canoe tied up but no paddles. Someone had made a bonfire the night before near the woods. There were charred logs piled up, blackened in the middle of a ring of stones. A lawn chair had been left behind, with a webbed fabric seat. Lily sat down right away. She dug her feet into the sand and leaned back and closed her eyes.
“This chair is my chair,” she said.
Hawley unbuckled Loo from the stroller. He helped Lily put sunblock on the baby’s skin and then Lily put a sunhat on top of Loo’s tiny head and carried her out into the water. The baby was wearing a tiny polka-dot bathing suit. She liked to bend down and slap at the surface, at the places where the sun caught and flashed. Lily had on a green one-piece with straps that tied around her neck. She was shy about wearing the suit in public, shy about the way her body had changed since she had the baby, but Hawley thought she looked great.
“Is it cold?” he asked.
Lily shook her head but he could see goosebumps running across her back. She never admitted if the water was cold, even if it was freezing. She’d been taking the baby into the lake for over a month already. Loo had fussed at first but now she’d grown used to the chill. Hawley stretched out on their blanket and put his hands behind his head. He listened to the breeze coming through the leaves. He felt the early-morning sun warming his skin. He turned his head and watched Lily bending into the water, dipping the baby. They were making a game of it. Lily whistled low and then high as they dropped deeper. The baby squealed, then clung tighter to Lily’s neck.
Hawley got up from the blanket and walked over to the dock. He stood for a while looking out at the wooden planks leading into the lake, at the canoe drifting from the end of its rope and at the water, which stretched out smoothly before him like a piece of glass. Lily turned to watch him from the shallows, ripples going out in circles from her waist, the baby still in her arms. Hawley saluted her. Two fingers straight from his brow. Then he went to the end of the dock and sat on the edge and dipped his feet in.
The water was ice-cold. He looked down through the surface, past schools of fish and minnows toward the bottom of the lake, where shadows lurked among dark tendrils of old vegetation. Hawley held on to the edge of the dock and slid the rest of his body into the shallows, next to the metal canoe. He clung to the float at the bottom of the dock and kicked his legs out behind him, practicing the different leg movements Lily had started to show him.
“You’re getting better,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Yes,” she said. “Now watch this.” And she let go of the baby.
Loo sank under the water. Lily took a step back and the baby swam toward her. Then Lily picked their daughter back up again. Loo didn’t look bothered at all. She pumped her legs, her eyelashes dripping, and rolled her tongue around in her mouth.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” said Hawley.
“Everyone is born knowing how to swim,” she said. “You just forgot.”
She had been giving him lessons since they moved to the lake. The first few times he’d been so nervous all she could get him to do was dip his feet in. But eventually she got him to go chest-high, explaining that the more air he got into his lungs, the higher he’d float. Then she stood beside him in the shallow water and stretched her arms out and told him to lean back. He was twice her size but she held him like he was a child, just like she held the baby now. Hawley hadn’t made much progress, but he could hold his breath underwater and he was starting to float on his own.
Lily let the baby swim a few more times, and then she got out. She wrapped a towel around Loo and one around herself and then she changed the baby’s diaper and Hawley watched her putting more sunscreen on the baby’s legs and arms. She sat in the lawn chair and fed the baby a bottle. Then she walked up and down with her on the beach and finally she put the baby into the stroller and pulled down the shade to keep off the sun and Hawley could see that the baby was asleep. Lily stretched out next to the stroller on the blanket and soon she was asleep, too.
Hawley watched them from the end of the dock. When Lily put her head on the blanket, he turned over and tried to float, keeping one hand grounded on the edge. Overhead there was light coming through the hemlocks and dappling the water. Hawley took a deep breath and felt his body lift higher on the surface. Then he exhaled and he began to sink, just enough for the water to rise around his face and slide inside both ears. He couldn’t hear the trees anymore. The only sound came from inside him—his own heartbeat, and his lungs taking air, and the tiny splashes of his hands and feet, magnified as the waves rolled over them and the movement of the current broke and slid around his body and then came together on the other side of him and continued on, just as it passed through everything else, gently but surely in the same direction, past the dock and the fish and the stones below.
And then Hawley heard someone calling his name. Through the echo of the water. A voice was saying his name over and over and it was Lily.
Hawley righted himself. He felt for the floor of the lake but he’d drifted too far out. Some water got up his nose and he coughed and tasted the warmth of algae and rust. His hand grasped for the dock. He got hold and steadied himself. He looked toward the shore.
There was a man sitting on the lawn chair. Resting on one of his knees was a pistol with a suppressor attached to the barrel. On the other knee, nestled into the crook of his arm, was Loo. The man was wearing dark jeans tucked into boots, a flannel shirt and a fishing vest. The pockets of the fishing vest were stuffed with ammunition. At least fifteen loaded magazines. He looked like an old biker, bristly gray hair and sideburns down to his chin. His body had become thin beneath his fishing vest. His skin pulled sharply over the bones of his face, but Hawley knew him at once.
Talbot said, “Sure took me awhile to find you.”
All Hawley could think was that he didn’t have a gun. How could he not have brought a gun? He watched the old man slide the pistol back and forth against his leg. Overhead, the leaves stirred and shadows played across the lawn chair and across the face of the sleeping baby. Just a few feet away, Lily was kneeling Japanese-style on the blanket in her green bathing suit. Her shoulders were twitching and her hands were palm down on the sand in front of her like they’d been nailed in place and her eyes never left Loo.
“I’m just going to enjoy this for a minute,” said Talbot. “I’m going to sit here and take in the scene.” He rocked back and forth in the chair, and each rock drove him a bit farther into the sand, until there were two furrows around the aluminum legs. The baby slept on in his arms.
“What do you want?” Hawley asked, but he already knew.
Talbot scratched his knee with the back of the pistol and Hawley inched forward, staying low in the water, feeling for the bottom of the lake. It was there, soft and rotten beneath his toes. He planted both feet deep in the muck and stood. He tried to catch Lily’s eye but she only stared at Loo. He could see her lips moving, stringing one word after another: Please,
please, please, please, please, please, please.
“Let them go. And we’ll settle things. However you want.”
Talbot shifted his boots in the sand. He seemed intent on this for a moment, his jaw set. Then he stopped and squinted up at the sun. He wiped his brow with the back of his arm, the one not holding the baby. “You got any sodas in there?” He pointed at the cooler. He was talking to Lily but she didn’t answer.
“I’ll get you one,” said Hawley.
Talbot lifted the gun. He kept the pistol on Hawley but his head turned toward Lily on her knees, her arms still spread across the sand.
“I’ve been watching you for weeks. I’ve been watching you live your life. I’ve been sleeping in my car and watching you and it made me miss having a wife to serve me a cold drink when I wanted,” Talbot said. “You can move those hands now.”
Lily clawed her fingers into the sand and leaned slowly back on her heels, drawing her palms to her knees. She blinked her eyes like she’d been released from a trance. The cooler was sitting between the blanket and Talbot’s lawn chair. She shifted on her knees, then lifted the lid, and took out an orange soda, opened it and handed it across to Talbot.
Talbot took a long sip. “It’s been years since I had an orange soda.” He took another drink and some of it spilled on the baby’s face. Loo woke up, pushed against the elephant blanket wrapped around her and started to fuss.
There had to be a second gun. That was what Hawley was hoping for. That Talbot had brought a second gun or even a third. He watched the old man drink his soda. He took a step forward. And then another. His toes sinking into the silt of the lake. He could tell Loo’s crying was screwing up Talbot’s nerves. It was the cry she did when she was hungry.
“She’s only a baby,” said Hawley. “She never hurt anyone.”