Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “I’m just parking,” Dave said. “Where are you?”

  She couldn’t think, couldn’t speak: “I’m—I’m—”

  “Lexi?”

  “I’m okay,” she said weakly. On the final syllable, the fist appeared again, and throwing off its terrycloth cloak the baby let out a full-throated cry of protest.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?” Covering the baby again, squeezing it close to her to try to stifle its wailing, the phone squashed between her ear and shoulder, impossible to disconnect.

  “That baby.” The word itself was like a key, opening some kind of lockbox in Dave’s mind where all the clues had been sequestered, the suspicions discarded, the incomprehensible what-ifs abandoned. She could almost hear the clack of his thoughts behind his dazed, heightened breathing. “Oh Christ. Oh Jesus of course. Lexi where are you? Lexi don’t hang up just—”

  She snatched the phone from her cheek and pressed END. Almost immediately it came alive again, glowing and shuddering, and she slipped it into her waistband and let it quiver madly against her hip. “Fuckfuckfuck,” she said, because she’d been so so close, so fucking close to putting her future back together again, rebuilding it from all these shattered bloodstained pieces, but in a moment of fear and weakness she’d cried out for help, when she didn’t need help, when if she’d just waited—she cursed herself again, and in mining her body for strength she latched onto a vision of her father, whose desire for success she’d inherited along with his eyes and crooked grin, whose spectacular ambition had put him at his desk at the World Trade Center that horrible blue morning, which was the thing her mother still hated him for, refused to forgive him for, was the reason she refused to speak his name even all these years later. Nothing got in his way; that’s what everyone said about him. Uncle Robert most of all, he’d said it a hundred times: “Your dad never let nuthin ever stand in his way.”

  The hospital plan wouldn’t work now. She’d blown that by answering the phone. Dave was somewhere close, possibly at the Westervelt Hall Residence stand, ordering an RA to bust open her room. She had to get rid of it fast. She twirled her head, desperate for someone to just—to just hand it off to, and flee. But there was no one in the dim yellow-black service alley. No one but her.

  Her gaze fell against a row of dumpsters down the alleyway. There were three of them, two green, one black, the black one’s door propped open. Then she startled at a noise, and thinking someone—thinking Dave—was entering the alley she flung herself back against the wall in a lame attempt at hiding, hating that lifeless security light now, its empty bugless glow. She slid sideways against the wall, in the direction of the dumpsters, and then started walking, tender and hesitant steps that drew her closer and closer to the open dumpster and farther and farther out of the light. There was a kind of solace in the darkening, as though invisibility equaled nonexistence and nonexistence equaled absolution. This was all she had to do, she heard a voice telling her (a voice hers but not hers), and everything could be okay again. She could talk Dave out of his panicked conclusions, she wasn’t sure how but somehow. Guys were easy, as Chico had affirmed. Guys heard what they wanted to hear. This one small . . . act, which no one besides her would ever know about. Especially not her father, who she knew wasn’t in heaven because the men who’d killed him thought they were going to heaven, and that irreconcilable divide had for her negated the idea of heaven. Almost to the dumpster she stopped, deaf to everything beyond the drumming of her heart, which was thrashing against her ribs in mutiny, as if wanting to escape her chest for another one, and for that she didn’t blame it. She understood it. Her heart didn’t want her and neither did this baby; maybe no one ever would. Her formerly opposed realities had merged, in the incontrovertible fact inside the terrycloth bundle, but now a new split cleaved her mind: between what was and what could be. She was at the dumpster now, peering at its gnarled steel rim as though she were staring off the edge of a cliff. What was unclear to her was whether leaping was suicide, or staying put was.

  Now came another noise, just like before, but this one so close to her that she staggered backwards and against her will let out an ambushed yelp. From inside the dumpster a head popped up, and, pounded with terror, Alexis tried to run. But she couldn’t run. Her pelvis felt smashed, and her abdominal muscles were still scorched and smoldering. She tripped down onto one knee, almost dropping the bundle, but the knee wouldn’t hold, it buckled under her weight and she felt herself tipping forward. She yelped again, and rotating herself in the air was able to hit the ground on her back, the bundle bouncing securely against her chest, her arm tight around it. She rolled herself over, but couldn’t stand with the bundle weighing her down, and so instead she crawled away, one hand on the ground, grinding her knees into the pebbly asphalt, glancing only once behind her to see what was coming for her: a monster from the dumpster’s belly; an assailant, a rapist who’d been biding his time outside the dorm; Dave, hunting down her secret; her own writhing conscience; all of these, attacking her at once. She tried crawling more, but couldn’t go on, paralyzed by a horror that was coming at her from the inside as well as the out.

  “Sorry,” said a voice, with a weird and exotic melody to it. The voice was climbing out of the dumpster now, and coming toward her. Alexis was too scared to raise her head. What she saw were the creature’s feet, just like in the dorm, where she knew everyone by their feet. These feet were inside ratty Birkenstocks, hippie shoes, with rainbow-striped socks extending into the swirls of an ankle-length dress. She tilted her head up, blinking. She saw a woman towering over her, with dreadlocks, and a silver stud in her nose that was glinting in the distant glow of the security light. On the woman’s face was a sad and bewildered expression, but a gentleness too, blunting Alexis’s fright. The woman said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Micah stared down at this strange and collapsed girl wearing what looked like pajamas, and trembling like she’d seen a haint. Her eyes were puffed and her face was smeary, like she’d been crying hard, and her lips were seeping blood from several cuts. She was gripping a bathrobe (Micah could tell it was a bathrobe from the terrycloth belt dangling down) like her whole life was inside it, her hand shaking against the fabric. She wondered if the girl had just been beaten, and dropping down to one knee she asked her, “Are you all right?”

  You awl right? Alexis nodded, whispered yes. But the baby flailed again, throwing off its covering and bawling a long and infuriated scream, as though whatever patience it had was exhausted now. Alexis fumbled the robe back over it, and again tried to rise, to rise up and run, but the bundle wrecked her balance; she couldn’t get up.

  “That’s a baby,” Micah whispered, and stepped forward with an outstretched hand. “That baby’s—newborn. Is that your baby?”

  “No,” Alexis said, in a sharp threatened tone, but whatever power her voice carried immediately dissolved: “No,” she quivered. “No, it’s not mine, it’s not.”

  “Here,” Micah offered. She could tell the girl was traumatized, reeling, unfocused. “Hand it to me so I can help you up.”

  Alexis didn’t hesitate, but her body did; her arms resisted the handover, and she had to will her hands off the robe. She watched as the woman unfolded the flaps of the robe and broke into a wide, awestruck, and (to Alexis) unseemly smile, an expression of joy being the least imaginable response at this moment, the most inapt emotion possible. In fact it made the woman appear insane: How could she smile right now? Scrunching a robe flap in her hand, the woman brushed the baby lightly, cleaning it, and the baby cried even harder now, giant howls of discontentment that drew a laugh from the woman, another insane reaction. She told the baby shhhhh. “She’s a little girl,” she said to Alexis, with a look of amazement that this time didn’t strike Alexis as insane.

  Because Alexis herself hadn’t noted that essential detail, she realized. It had just been it. Not her: it. She’d seen without seeing, and something about this revelation crushed h
er with a pain worse than the pain of delivery had been, a deathblow of comprehension that drove her back toward the asphalt, all the feuding voices in her head going abruptly silent at the revealing of this one obvious and essential detail. Alexis thought she might vomit, but retched out only a sob.

  “She’s yours, isn’t she?” Micah said, waiting for the answer. When the girl finally lifted her head it was clear in her eyes.

  “No,” the girl pleaded.

  “What were you . . .” But Micah knew the answer to this, too. The baby was just minutes old, and with its drying crust of amniotic fluid Micah knew the baby hadn’t been delivered by a doctor, or a midwife, or by anyone else but the girl herself. And the girl was at the dumpster, where Micah had been scrounging for a change of clothes. The college dumpsters were always good for those, and Micah had nothing but the clothes she was wearing. But she had to ask anyway; she needed to hear the answer. “What were you gonna do with her?”

  Alexis felt the answer lodged inside her throat, choking her. It wasn’t a complicated or even satisfactory answer: She didn’t know. That was the answer. She’d been standing at a cliff, without knowing what the cliff meant. But she couldn’t say anything now, not even the empty-sounding truth, and for sure not the darker truth lurking behind it, the truth that was too heavy and unwieldy for her mind to carry: the truth of the skewed desires that’d led her here, desires she recognized now as unsayable, flimsy, plastic, chintzy, knocked-off, dead. “Help me up,” she begged, and the woman extended a hand. Alexis took it, uncrumpling herself skyward.

  “She’s yours,” Micah said, but it wasn’t a question now. It was a statement, a command.

  “No,” Alexis moaned, and backing away she wagged her head and repeated it, her cheeks streamed with tears. Frightened by the woman’s tone, and by the prospect of the woman forcing the baby back into her arms, Alexis spun around and tripped feebly to the service door, where she glanced back once before tapping the keypad beside the door. It didn’t work. Her sight blurry from the tears, she entered the code again, but again it failed. She flustered, then remembered: The outside code was different from the inside code. Amanda’s boyfriend had attempted the same trick. She looked back one more time, to where the woman was gaping at the baby, the baby’s fists flailing just beneath the woman’s jaw, and then floundered down the alley, in a drained and feverish welter, to where an open chainlink gate led to the street.

  On the other side of the chainlink she squinted at the freakish and dizzying spectacle: streetlights and taxis and motorcycles and shifting herds of people roaming the sidewalks as if nothing had ever happened, not to her or to them. It overwhelmed her, and she fell back against the chainlink, threading her fingers into the aluminum lattice to keep from collapsing, and with a vexed metal clatter the fence bowed and recoiled against her back. Like insects to a lightbulb, people came buzzing toward her, first a hand-holding couple, a decade or so her senior, and then a lone girl her own age, wearing strange and witchy-looking round eyeglasses, who stood off to the side, gawking. She heard one of them ask if she was okay, heard her ask if there was someone they could call. Alexis felt her cellphone vibrating; it had been vibrating the whole time, which she only realized when she lifted out the phone to give it to someone, and her hip ceased quavering. She heard coordinates being given; she heard herself described as “not so good.”

  The streetlights were bending down now, the taxis rising like airplanes off a runway, the people’s heads inflating and deflating except for that of the girl in the evil round glasses, who just stared in pale fury, knowing everything. Then she felt herself in Dave’s arms, though for a moment she didn’t know they were Dave’s. Slumping into the safety of his chest, she was seven years old again, and wrapped in her father’s arms as he went loping and shuffling around the living room to the mangled beat of his own a cappella, Long Island Irish-brogue rendition of “Thunder Road,” the greatest moment of her life intruding now on the worst. “It’s all gonna be all right but you gotta come clean, okay?” she heard Dave saying, and didn’t nod so much as throw her head back and forth, still dancing through a memory.

  “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 f
airy 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.