by Carol Devine
She seemed to like it though. She murmured, lifted her head and stretched like a willow, swaying, arms above her head, grace and strength combined. She still wore her bra, scraps of see-through material that hid nothing but held her firmly for him to capture and explore.
He didn't bother to remove it. She felt too good in his hands. He cupped her breasts, silk and lace and sweet flesh, heavier with the blossoming of pregnancy.
What he thought at that moment was that he'd created her new body and the baby she carried inside, and this act of creating, of making love with Mariah, was a holy thing.
The movement of her spine shifted and she sat on his lap, opening her lower body to him the way he had opened his to her. She smiled and angled her hips to rub her intimate places against his. Blood rushed there, engorging him, surprising him. Feeling it herself, she rocked in place until he slipped inside her center, hot and wet, a woman's secret place, a place where creation happened.
Their coming together was profound for him. They breathed in unison, kissed and moaned and shuddered in unison, until the legs she'd wrapped around his hips began to spasm. He drove deep, pushing her over the edge. She couldn't stop herself then.
Her eyes widened, sharpened, reached inside his heart, pushing him beyond the edge to the bonding of spirits. She must have felt it coming because she rode it with him, like a tidal wave that went on and on and on. Finally, she wreathed her arms around his neck and stilled her body. So did he.
He couldn't speak for awhile, which happened often with her. He held her and stroked her and listened for the air in her lungs, in and out, in and out. She laid her head against his chest and he believed that she was listening too, listening to his humbled and happy heart.
CHAPTER THREE
The doorbell rang after dinner. Shane, passing through the hallway from stairs to kitchen, opened the front door.
Bird stood there, on the porch, battered hat in hand. Despite the waning evening light, Shane could see his hair was freshly combed and his face, clean-shaven. He wore the best of his own clothes, which meant the only holes he had on his jeans were at the knees, his t-shirt was clean and the jacket he wore wasn't ripped at the seams.
"Hey, Shane. Good to see ya. Sorry to stop by so late. I was hoping to speak to Mariah?" It came out a half question because Bird shifted his weight side to side like he might jump out of his skin any minute.
Shane gave him a long, hard look. "Are you sober?"
"Got out of the tank three hours ago. Haven't had a drop for two days."
"Whoa. What's the occasion?"
"I heard Mariah's having a baby."
"That she is. My baby. She's more than four months along. Is that the reason you're here?"
"Uh... I want to make sure she's okay. Her mother... her mother... Mariah's okay, ain't she?"
"Yes, she's fine. Healthy. The baby's healthy, too."
"Can I see her?"
Shane stepped onto the porch and drew the door closed. "I don't know if that's a good idea, Bird. Some of the things you say are pretty upsetting to her, to both of us. You won't be talking to her unless you can convince me you're going to behave yourself."
Bird backed off the porch and down the steps. "That's fair, that's fair. I just wanted to make sure she was okay."
"You should know I asked her to marry me and she said yes."
"Heard that, too. I'm good with that, good. She needs someone strong, bright like you."
"We're going to set the date soon. Maybe I should have gone through the formalities and asked you beforehand but…"
"No, no. Don't worry about the asking. Gave up the right. I came by to say, to say… congratulations. Will you tell her? That's what I came for, really."
He put his hat on his head and turned on his heel, walking in a straight line for once. Shane let him go, measuring the distance to make sure he really was leaving the property, disappearing into the night. When it came true, Shane retreated inside the house. He leaned against the closed front door, thoughtful. Then he went to find Mariah.
She was sitting at the kitchen table, searching social media for one of her cases. Shane extracted a bottle of beer from the fridge, drank some and lounged against the kitchen counter, appraising her, persuading her to pay attention to him by sheer willpower alone.
Mariah took notice and stretched her arms above her head, ready for a break. "Thanks for getting the door. I'm trying to finish this research before my first attempt at brownies comes out of the oven."
"It turned out to be Bird."
Her stretching froze, stilling her body. "What did he want?"
"He heard you were pregnant. He wanted to see you."
She rubbed her scalp, resigned. "Thanks for sending him away. I knew he'd get the word at some point. But I thought he'd know better than to drop in here. He usually comes by my office."
"You see him regularly?"
"Part of the perks of having a storefront in the middle of town. But he usually hangs out outside, panhandling on the corner, and scurries away when I leave. He doesn't give me a chance anymore to tell him to get lost."
"He said he wanted to make sure you were okay."
"He did, did he? Lovely."
"He mentioned your mom and it got me thinking…"
She instantly returned her focus to her computer screen. "You can't take anything he says seriously. I would have thought you knew that by now."
"He was sober, Mariah."
"You got taken in by a master."
"Maybe. But he mentioned your mother and it occurred to me that you may be thinking about her, too." He took the chair next to her to better gauge her feelings. Her face was stubbornly blank. She wasn't giving him much.
"I hardly think it's strange that I think about her once in awhile. Don't you think about yours on occasion?"
"Mine didn't die giving birth to me."
She glared at him, aghast that he'd put it so baldly. "I'm not having this conversation."
"We don't have to. But I do want to talk to the obstetrician about it."
"It's none of her business."
He scooted his chair closer and clasped her hand in a gesture of support, refusing to be deterred. "Yes, it is her business. We want to keep you safe, Mariah. None of this baby's life comes before the mother's crap."
She tore out of his grasp, scrambling away. "Don't you dare say that." Her voice broke but she held her chin high. "I wouldn't be here if she hadn't done that. I wouldn't be here if she had not sacrificed her life for mine."
Approaching slowly, Shane rubbed her shoulder, her back. When she seemed receptive, he gathered her within the circle of his arms. She pressed her head into his shoulder, her body trembling.
"I'm sorry," he murmured. "I wish I hadn't said anything."
She clutched his shirt, emotional fists knocking his chest. "But you're right. I'm too scared to tell the doctor. The baby must come first. I don't care what happens. I don't care how you feel, Shane, and it makes me feel terrible because you mean everything. But you have to agree to save the baby if the worst happens and it comes to that. Promise me."
"No, I won't promise you. I get to have a say."
"No, you don't. Not when it comes to this. I get to decide and I couldn't live with myself otherwise."
"You can't think this way. This is complete speculation."
Desperation tinged her eyes, underscored by the fierceness of her belief. "I have to be prepared. I need you to be prepared. I've done the research. Statistically, the odds of anything bad happening to me or the baby are extremely low. But how I feel about this is a big part of who I am and where I come from and how my life came to be."
"How can I put you in second place? It's an impossible thing to ask, to demand, to make promises about."
"But I'm scared."
"And I have foot-in-mouth disease. I shouldn't have brought it up."
"You did and I know why. You don't want to end up like Bird."
Shane was floored, stripped t
o where he felt naked. "How do you know that?"
Mariah struggled to explain her reasoning. He could see the wheels turning in her mind. "It makes sense. There's a family history of alcoholism on your side, too. But you are not him. You wouldn't allow yourself to be him. That's what I truly believe."
"Put yourself in my shoes. It's bad enough that I can't predict what will happen to you or the baby or what might happen in the future. But if we, if you, if I don't have you, what will I have?"
"You'll have my child, our baby. Promise me you'll pull yourself together and stay strong, or I swear to God, I will reach up from the depths of hell to wring your scrawny neck, Kellen Shane." She shook him by the shoulders. "Swear to God!"
He put his hands up in surrender. "I get the message, Mariah. I'll never be rid of you, will I?"
"That's a good way of looking at it. And if, God forbid, anything happens to you, I have a feeling you won't be cutting me any slack, either, whether it's from heaven or hell."
"Talk about hell. This is exhausting." He gathered her in, tucking her head beneath his chin. "Who brought this up? I'm ready to slip him a mickey and put him to sleep for a good, long while."
"I know how to put you to sleep in a very efficient manner. I'll race you upstairs."
"Not tonight, dear. Seriously, Mariah, I'm plumb tuckered out. I may have to skip dessert and go straight upstairs to sleep."
"Hmmm." Mariah removed the brownies from the oven and turned it off. "I'm feeling rather exhausted myself. Why don't we both go to bed early and see who falls asleep first?"
Shane offered his arm. "What, a new position we haven't tried?"
Mariah squeezed him as they headed upstairs. "We'll hold hands and dream sweet dreams, my love. No more night terrors for us."
But that night, Mariah couldn't sleep. She cuddled against Shane, feeling his furnace-like heat and hearing him breathe, sensing they were sweet dreams by the steadiness of his rising and falling chest.
Meanwhile, she tossed and turned. Memories filled her head rather than dreams, true memories which were nightmarish when she thought about them now.
She was a little girl, lying on the top bunk, faced by the camper ceiling. She could touch it with her small hands. She'd taped paper cutouts of the moon and stars there for comforts' sake, since the windows in the camper didn't stretch high enough to see outside from her place in bed.
At five, six, seven, eight years-old, she'd suck her thumb and trace them with her fingers, listening to Bird read bedtime stories straight out of the greatest book ever written, he said. The Bible, the only book he owned.
He liked to skip around reading the text, making a mess of chronology. Even in adulthood, she wasn't certain how far the generational span between King David and Jesus Christ actually was, or who came first, Noah or Abraham or Job.
But Bird did read stories to her. He read them until the moral structure of good and evil was pounded into her brain. The only thing her developing mind couldn't quite comprehend was why those lessons applied much more to her and the people who lived in Grizzly Springs, rather than Bird himself.
He liked quoting the Old Testament best, thundering about judgment and temptation and people enslaved by fate. Hoarsened by rot gut and unfiltered cigarettes, his voice imitated the Lord God Almighty's lofty tones. She covered her head with her pillow to shut out his fire and brimstone pronouncements about the treacherous road he was taking, the treacherous road to hell.
In quieter moods, he would recite psalms as though they were songs, for Bird got his nickname because of his musical bent. He owned a guitar, a Johnny Cash baritone and a well-tuned ear. He gave the psalms a rhythm that lulled her to sleep.
For fun he made up rollicking tunes of begettings, ancient names of people who had truly existed. Even in death, their names continued on, begetting new names and old, some she'd heard of, some not, some given and used in present day, living on through history, generation after generation.
Mariah pictured in her mind's eye her excitement after taking the bus home from school and finding him there for once. She showed him the A on her book report and the penciled drawing her teacher had put on display.
She found both in the garbage the next day.
One of her pen-and-inks did impress him to the point where he persuaded a local restaurant to display it for all the world to see. He wanted to prove her talents, artistic talents similar to his.
But he didn't want her talents hung inside the camper. Those walls belonged to her mother, Bird's first and only love, displayed in photographs laid end to end and up and down each wall. Grade school, middle school, high school, poses in front of the camper, the mountains, the old-fashioned sign outside of Las Vegas, a pretty girl/woman with red-gold curls, smiling, always smiling, seemingly without a care in the world.
Her most solemn moment was the picture she made at the age of twenty-one, wearing a white veil and a princess-like dress, pregnant, standing at the doorway of a tiny wedding chapel. Bird stood next to her proudly, wearing a ruffled shirt and Elvis coat, the height of Las Vegas couture. Maybe they'd done a singing gig there, on their way to other honkytonks where Bird claimed he had a following, once upon a time.
It must have been a fairytale because after buying the camper and the piece of dusty land he settled on, there wasn't any money left.
They must have been happy, though. Happiness existed on the walls of the camper, forever smiling at her. Even today, she had a problem with people who smiled too much. It was as if they were too unreal to be believed.
Maybe that was why she held Shane at arm's length for so long.
She synced her breathing with his and focused on getting a good nights' sleep for the baby, for the tiny bit of uniqueness growing in her womb. She prayed she had the fortitude to go through the birthing of her child with high hopes rather than a dying dread.
Even so, she wasn't looking forward to it.
* * * * *
Shane blasted down the stairs after taking a shower, towel wrapped around his waist. He found Mariah cratered in a corner of the sofa, her open laptop balanced in front of her five-month-old baby bump.
"Mariah, I need to ask you something."
She took in the sight of him half-naked and impatient, with his hair damp and uncombed, and a tiny piece of bloody toilet paper on his chin, and returned her gaze to her work.
"How about getting some clothes on first?" she suggested. "Unless this is a booty call."
Since it was Sunday, one of the few days he didn't jump for the stables at dawn, she appraised him again, checking for the anxiety he'd confessed. But she was right the first time. He was typical Shane, a man-sized tornado with a new idea.
"This is important," he said, plopping on the sofa, taking her laptop away.
"No! You can't do that!"
"I'll save it." He tapped the save button. "See?"
She grabbed the laptop but he held it out of reach. Her belly was swollen enough where it was becoming harder to leap into instant reaction. Plus she'd finally found the right pillow combination to make her back feel supported against the cushions. "Shane, sometimes I need to work. I just can't drop everything whenever you take a shower or wake up in the morning."
He jiggled the laptop above his head, his eyes sparkling with neon blue intensity, damp hair falling over his brow. "Do you believe in God?"
"Uh… Can you put my computer down before I answer? You look like Tarzan attacking a Mackintosh apple."
He held it higher. "Answer me and I'll give it to you."
"Yes, I believe in God."
"Good. I do, too." He delivered the laptop, returning it to the original screen. "What do you think about a church wedding?"
She studied her website, scrolling through messages. "Since I haven't been in a church for years, it seems sacrilegious to me."
"But you have been to church a few times, maybe when you were young?"
She heard his seriousness and studied him. "Young and old. I live in the U
nited States of America, which means I am familiar with Christianity and respect its practices. But it seems to me, if you want to get married in a church, my belief system could prove to be quite an obstacle."
"What is your belief system?"
Mariah finger combed his hair. "This kind of discussion requires clothes. Meanwhile, I'll finish my emails, then you'll have my full and undivided attention."
"You sound like my mom. It doesn't matter whether I'm wearing clothes or you have email. This is important. With the baby coming, we need to find a church to get married in and we're running out of time."
Sighing, Mariah closed her laptop and took the time to remove the scrap of toilet paper from his chin, allowing her fingers to linger there. "I was thinking we should have the ceremony in a garden or some pretty pastureland or park. Personally, that's where I see God the most."
"My parents go to the Presbyterian Church in the middle of town. Sometimes I do, too. Have you ever been inside?"
"No. The only time I went to a Grizzly Springs church was with Ana's family and they're Catholic. Why is getting married in a church important to you?"
"It seems like the right place. It seems like it's the only place where the promises we make to each other will be cemented for life."
"Cemented? I'm sorry but it sounds demented to be cemented for life."
"Tell me you understand what I'm saying. You're making me feel like a doofus."
Mariah laid her head on his shoulder, rubbing her cheek against his bare skin. "I hear you. You want it to be special. Special, to me, means standing under a big blue sky with you, saying vows in front of God and family, heaven and earth."
"I have to admit, the way you say it sounds pretty good. But I want it to be great, Mariah. I want us striving for perfection. I want everybody to know what we have is forever. And forever feels like it should be in God's house where people pray for help and guidance and learn about how important love is and what it means."
She smiled into his eyes. "I promise I'll think about it. Is that good enough for now?"