HIS BABY’S KEEPER

by Evelyn Glass

  “I’ll get it,” I muttered, forgetting in that instant that Mona didn’t live here anymore. She followed me with her eyes as I paced across the floor in front of her, and I knew something was going unsaid between us—I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

  When I opened the door, I found myself faced with two firemen, flanking Mary. She had tears streaming down her face; I supposed that what had just happened was beginning to sink in for her. I gave her a sympathetic nod, and reached out to pat her arm.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked earnestly. I might not always have got on great with Paul, but Mary was a sweet woman and she didn’t deserve this. Nobody did.

  “Jazz, it’s…” She trailed off and I felt my heart leap into my throat. What the fuck was this? I stepped aside, and gestured for them to come in. The firemen exchanged a look, but did as they were told—and it was only then that I noticed what they were holding between them.

  A mangled sheet of plastic—that’s what it looked like at first glance. The fire had mutilated it, whatever it was, and I squinted at it, trying to figure out what they were doing with it in my house. Mona squeezed Mary’s shoulder as she approached, but she seemed distracted and shrugged her off without thinking.

  “They found this, in the attic.” Mary’s voice cracked, and that’s when it sunk in. I grasped for the counter to hold myself up as the firemen laid the object out in front of me.

  Now that I could get a better look at it, in the light, I could see what it was, or what it used to be. A few brand logos, a couple of discernible cartoon faces—children’s toys. And not just any child. Ella’s.

  My head began to spin as it registered to me what this really meant. No. It couldn’t be. Of course it couldn’t be, because then…then she’d have been up there too. And I saw that house—it was hollowed out, completely and utterly. Nothing was making it out of there alive.

  I gasped for air, and a sob bubbled up out of my chest and seemed to stick in my throat like a shard of bone. Mona led Mary and the firemen back to the door, thanked them, and sent them on their way; I could hardly register what she was doing as my eyes blurred and the room swam in front of me.

  “Jazz,” Mona murmured, her hand on my back. “Jazz, look at me.”

  I didn’t move, knowing that if I made eye contact with her, then all of this would suddenly be real. If I met her sympathetic gaze, I would have to acknowledge that this was really happening. I stared at the ground, and, in a snap decision, pulled myself upright and made for the garage.

  “Jazz!” Mona called after me. “Jazz, come back!”

  She hurried after me but I was pretending she wasn’t there, pretending none of this was happening. Ella. Ella had been there. There was no body yet, but did there really need to be one when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was up there when it happened?

  The knowledge she had been so close was the worst part. That I could have practically reached out and touched her—maybe she even watched me, distraught, going in and out of the house. How did they get her toys? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to—maybe they’d replaced them for her, or they’d snuck in and grabbed them when I wasn’t paying attention. Both options made me want to throw up. A wave of nausea passed over me, and I did my best to ignore it as I opened the door to the garage and reached for my bike.

  “Jazz, where are you going?” Mona called from behind me. I ignored her, but she wasn’t going to let me get away that easily. She pushed herself in between me and the bike and glared into my eyes.

  “Jazz.”

  Her voice was firm and centering, and for a moment all of it hit me. A tidal wave was too soft a description for the feelings that cascaded down over me in that second—grief, anger, fear, a tiny flicker of hope that somehow I was wrong and none of this was really happening. I wanted to collapse into her arms and try to forget all of this, but I knew that wasn’t how it worked. I needed to get away from her, get away from all of this—from the reminders of my daughter, from anyone who knew her. I’d start again somewhere else, break up the Marauders and be done with the whole thing. I had tunnel vision, my only thought on getting away from here, as though putting some space between myself and this house would be enough for me to forget her.

  “I’m going,” I informed her firmly. I reached around her and climbed on to the bike. “I need to get away.”

  “Jazz, we don’t even know what happened to her,” Mona pointed out desperately. “Please. Come on. Please.”

  Her voice was imploring but I didn’t want to hear it; I was done, out, over, ready to move on. I kicked the bike a couple of times, trying to get it started up, but it wasn’t co-operating. I was being too rough, my brain too frazzled to do much else.

  “Jazz, I need to tell you something.” She grabbed my arm, but I refused to look up. Anything that could come out of her mouth—it wasn’t enough to change my mind. She must have known that. She scanned my face for a reaction, any reaction, and I gave her none. The bike finally roared into action beneath me, and Mona stepped away at once. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but I could barely see them.

  “Listen to me!” she yelled over the sound of the engine, but I was already gone. She was backed against the wall of the garage, hand on her stomach once again, as I glanced over at her—and burned her face onto my mind one last time. I wasn’t coming back. Not for her, not for anyone. I pulled out of the garage and on to the street, and past the smoldering remains of the house that had once contained my daughter.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Thanks for coming round,” I intoned, my voice completely free of any emotion. I was genuinely happy to see Lucy, but it was hard to express that when it felt as though my soul ached with every breath I took. I just didn’t know how I was meant to get over this.

  No body had been found as they excavated the rest of the house; they had rung me up a couple of times in the hopes of straightening everything out, but I couldn’t give them much. I mean, I wasn’t even Ella’s mother; what did I know about her? I had been able to confirm that the mangled toys found in the attic were hers, but that was about it. Fuck, I hadn’t even been around there because of the fire—I had taken three days to pluck up the courage to tell Jazz about the baby, and it just so happened that some twisted cosmic joke played out in my timing.

  I had decided to keep the baby—or, at least, that had been my plan before Jazz vanished off the face of the Earth. What had it been, a week, and I’d heard nothing from him whatsoever. I was terrified to think about what he might have done in response to this. He was hardly the most temperate guy at the best of times and now…well, I just hoped no one else had been hurt in the process.

  Except me, of course.

  I had no idea what I was going to do now. I had spent those three days convincing myself that I was making the right decision—that no matter what, Jazz and I loved each other and we could work through this pregnancy as partners. But instead, he fled, without even finding out that I was carrying his baby. And who could I talk to about it? Not Amanda or anyone from work—they had taken his fleeing to hint towards his guilt, no matter how much I tried to convince them to the contrary. If they found out I was having his baby, they’d just tell me to get rid of it or give it up for a adoption—neither of which seemed like particularly enticing alternatives. Even though I had only known about our child for a few days, I was growing to love him. But I would have to consider other options now—now that Ella seemed to be gone for good, and her father had no intention of coming back.

  I had never seen him as he was that day. I had seen him mad—scared, angry, guilty, any combination of the above—but I had never seen him like that. It was hard to explain the emotions that radiated off him in waves, thick and strong and heady. He seemed as lost in them as I was, struggling to process even a little bit of what had happened. Of course he ran—because if he ran, he never had to face up to the fact that this had really happened at all. I couldn’t blame him. If I could have done
the same, I would have.

  So I called Lucy, and bawled down the phone to her about what had happened that day—Ella’s toys, the fire, the baby, all of it. She listened in silence and, as soon as I was done, told me that she was coming round to stay with me for a few days.

  “No, you don’t have to—” I protested, instantly feeling guilty that I had burdened her with all of this. But she cut across me, not hearing a word of it.

  “I’m coming over and I’m sorry to say there’s nothing you can do to stop me. You’re off work, right?”

  “Right.” I nodded, dabbing at my eyes and wiping my nose on the back of my hand. Amanda had given me more time off when she heard about the latest development in Ella’s case—I wondered if I would ever truly start working for her, judging by everything that had gone down over the last few months. It felt as though the job I’d been promised had turned into a kind of nightmare where at every turn something traumatic happened. If my first case hadn’t been Jazz and Ella, maybe none of this would have occurred. Well, at least I wouldn’t be aware of it—and I wasn’t sure if that was for better or for worse.

  “Well, I’m not dumping you there in the city by yourself,” she replied. I could hear her gathering herself, probably already planning her route into town to make sure she could get to me as fast as she could. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “Thank you,” I sniffled, feeling pathetic, and she hung up the phone. I tidied as best I could, doing away with the takeout wrappers that littered my floor. I’d have thought that with everything going on my appetite would have dropped through the floor, but it seemed that my baby was a hungry one. I laid out some covers on the couch for Lucy, already feeling better knowing that she was on her way.

  I knew she couldn’t fix it all, but she could at least provide me some company to guide me through all of it. She’d been there since the start, after all—she knew what was going on. She’d met Jazz, knew how I felt about him. I would have gone to my family, but that would have involved filling them in on everything when I had only been giving them the vaguest details in our monthly calls. The thought of catching them up on everything now wasn’t just exhausting but depressing. Recounting every detail, of how I’d failed and given in and given up—I already felt like a big enough pile of crap as it was. No, I needed my best friend—and thank God, because she was here for me.

  She hugged me as soon as she was in the door. Lucy wasn’t a hugger, so I knew it must have been serious. I smiled into her embrace, remembering in that second just how much human contact seemed to make all this easier.

  “I can’t believe any of this.” Lucy shook her head as she sat down on my couch, dumping her bag next to her and stretching her arms up over her head.

  “Me neither,” I sighed heavily and flopped down into the armchair next to her.

  “So, do you know how far gone you are?” She nodded towards my stomach.

  “No idea. Maybe a month, at the most?”

  “And…” She hesitated, and I knew the question that was going to come out of her mouth next. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “The baby?” I patted my stomach protectively, and shrugged. “I don’t know. I wanted to keep it, but I don’t want to be a single parent. And with Jazz AWOL…”

  “Have you stopped by the club house? That biker thing that he’s part of?” she suggested.

  I’d called earlier in the week, but there had been no answer—and I found it highly unlikely they would tell me where Jazz was even if they knew. They were loyal to him, at the end of the day, and not me. I wondered if they even knew what had happened, or if Jazz had dumped them the same way he had me.

  “I called, but nothing, and I don’t want to actually go down there without him.” I sighed. “I don’t know where he would have gone. If he’s gone anywhere.”

  “Huh?” Lucy furrowed her brow.

  “Maybe he just…went for a drive?” I shrugged, groping around for some kind of answer. I hadn’t felt obliged to find one for myself, but now that Lucy was sitting here in front of me, I couldn’t help but feel even more impotent than ever. “Maybe he’s back at the house?”

  She leaned forward. “Have you checked?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I…I’ve gone by there every day, and no one’s been home. Or at least no one’s answering the door.”

  “Moan,” she began gently, and I knew what was coming next. Lucy wasn’t a coddler, so when that tone of voice came out I knew she really, really meant it.

  “I know, I know.” I waved my hand, not needing to hear it. “I know he’s probably gone. I just…fuck, I just needed to think he was still in this with me, you know?”

  “Well, now I’m in it with you,” she replied firmly, and I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. Despite everything that had happened, someone was still on my side. And that was priceless.

  “If he’s gone, what are you going to do?” She nodded towards my stomach again.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess I’m waiting to see if he’s really gone or if this is just…I don’t know, if this is just panic or something.”

  “You know that even if he comes back, things aren’t going to be the same,” she warned me. “I mean, he loves you, and you love him, but he’s never going to get over this.”

  “I know.” I bowed my head, conceding her point. I knew she was right—that even if Jazz were to walk through that door right now and tell me he loved me and wanted to raise our baby together, it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Ella would haunt us, hanging over our heads, the ghost of the child he once had. Life would never be the same—and not in the overdramatic way that most people used that term. No, our lives had been changed irrevocably by what had happened. Though I still held out some small hope that Ella was alive, I knew that the chances were slim, and that moving past that would be almost impossible.

  “But…you still want to be with him?” she pressed.

  I cocked my head at her, not sure exactly what she was getting at. I nodded again. “Yeah, I do. I know it’s crazy, but I have to know whether or not we could make this happen.”

  “You love him?”

  I nodded, unable to get the words out. But she didn’t need to hear them. She reached over and squeezed my knee.

  “Then we need to go out and find him,” she murmured, a small, slightly sad, smile on her lips. I raised my eyebrows at her.

  “The fuck?”

  “Everything that’s happened…” She hesitated, as though trying to make sure this was coming out how she wanted it to. “You deserve a shot at something you want. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life wondering what would have happened if you’d done things differently.”

  “Neither do I,” I sighed. “But where do we start?”

  “We don’t have to think about that now.” Lucy waved her hand, dismissing me. “But I just want you to know that I’m here for you, and that we can figure this out, the two of us.”

  “Girl detectives.” I managed a grin. She flashed one back at me in return, and for a second I forgot about all of it—all that mattered was that my best friend was here, and that she and I were going to put the world to rights. I found myself welling up once again—Jesus, I was like a fucking faucet in the last few days. I dabbed at my eyes and lay back in the seat, finding myself suddenly exhausted. I hadn’t been sleeping all that much in the last few days thanks to my thoughts bouncing off the walls of my head endlessly when I lay down at night, but now that I had passed them on to someone else, I felt able to relax again. It was as though someone had stuck a pin in me and let out all the tension that had accumulated since last week.

  “Tired?” Lucy smiled at me gently, and I nodded. My eyes were already drifting shut as she tucked an arm around my waist and pulled me to my feet. She guided me through to bed, pulling off my shoes as I flopped down on top of the covers.

  “Thank you for all of this.” I propped myself up on my elbows in a moment of lucidity. “I don’t…I don’t
know what I’d do without you.”

  “Anytime,” she replied sincerely.

  “And hey, you know I want to hear that gossip about the guy at your work when I get up tomorrow.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “Promise?”

  She laughed, the sound almost sounding odd to my ears it had been so long. “Of course!”

  “Are you okay to get yourself set up on the couch?” I yawned, rolling under the covers and shimmying out of my jeans. “I put out the covers—”

  “Of course I am,” she assured me. “Seriously. Now will you just go to sleep?”

  “Whatever you say.” I peered over the edge of the covers at her, and she went to switch out the light. I felt like a kid again, coddled and tired and taken care of.

  “Goodnight,” she called softly.