She was halfway up the steps, and he hadn't even noticed she was climbing. All he had to do was stay there, and she'd come and take the baby out of his arms.
For a moment, that sounded to him like the most natural thing in the world.
Then he knew that it was the most terrible thing he'd ever thought of. Because if she ever got control of this baby, she'd stuff his tiny body down the drainpipe in that little park and he'd never be seen again. Maybe she meant to do that all along, and the only reason she couldn't was that he found the baby and carried him away.
"I saved this baby," said Ceese. "I don't want him dead."
"You don't?" she asked. "Not even a little curious about what it's like to watch the life go out of something?"
She was two steps down, and her head was almost even with his, and if she wanted to take the baby from him, she had only to reach out. But she didn't reach.
"I don't like you," said Ceese.
"Nobody does," she said. "It's a lonely life, being too cool for this world."
And at that moment, the baby started making noises. Not crying. Little soft cooing babbling noises. Like he was trying to talk babytalk to them.
"Except this little baby," she said. "He likes me fine. He knows me."
"You are his mama," said Ceese.
"Maybe I'm his girlfriend, you ever think of that? Or maybe he's my papa. You just never know how people are going to fit together in this world. Give him to me, Cecil. Your mother would tell you to do it."
He wanted to. He could feel it, this longing to hand the baby to her, rising in him like hope. And yet he knew it was wrong, that it would be the death of the baby to hand him over. "I won't do it," he said. "Don't you worry."
"I wasn't worried," she said. "Just hoping."
"I was talking to the baby," he said. "I'm not going to let you have him."
The door behind him opened. It was one of the neonate nurses. "Who you talking to out here?" she asked.
Ceese was going to say, Her, but when he turned back around the motorcycle woman wasn't on the second step down anymore. For a second he thought she was entirely gone, but then he looked down and she was at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, where if he called to the nurse to come and see, the motorcycle woman would be gone before she could get there to look.
"It's dangerous by these steps," said the nurse. "What if you dropped him?"
Below him, the motorcycle woman held out her arms. But despite her promises, Ceese knew that if he tossed the baby to her, she would step back and let the baby hit the stairs and spatter his brains everywhere and she'd be gone and they'd think Ceese went crazy and killed the kid and they'd lock him up until he admitted that there was never no motorcycle woman holding out her arms.
"I won't drop him," said Ceese.
"Still, come away."
"Sure," he said. "Wanted to look out the window is all."
"All that's out that window is a parking lot and a lot of hot asphalt trying to cool off in the darkness," said the nurse. "Want another Coke?"
Yes he did. So he could get the baby to drink it.
"No thank you," he said.
Was this what it was like for everybody? Did they all keep thinking of ways to poison or drop or otherwise kill their babies?
Not my baby, he reminded himself. Not mine at all. But that means, not mine to hurt, either. Not mine to give away to motorcycle women. Not mine to kill.
He belongs to himself, that's what. And nobody's got a right to steal his whole future from him.
Am I crazy, to think of ways for this baby to die? Was there really a motorcycle woman on those stairs? How would she know my name was Cecil? She called me Cecil and she didn't make a sound when she went down those stairs in a couple of seconds when my back was turned.
He sat on the bench between the elevators for the rest of the shift. When Miz Smitcher came to him and woke him, the baby was still in his arms, and still alive. And sure enough, even though a different desk lady had lots of things to sign at the desk when they got there, none of them gave Miz Smitcher permission to turn the baby over to the hospital. She had to take the baby home.
"All right then," said Miz Smitcher, "if I'm going to be his foster mother, I'm going to name him."
"Might as well," said the new desk lady. "Got to call him something."
"Mack," she said.
"First name or last?" asked the desk lady, poised to write something on a form.
"Short for something?"
"That's the whole name. The whole first name."
"Last name Smitcher?" asked the desk lady.
"No way in hell," said Miz Smitcher. "Bad enough I'm stuck with Willie Joe's name, I'm not going to impose it on a poor little baby who with any luck will never meet him. Last name Street, that was my name when I was growing up. My daddy's and mama's name."
"Mack Street," said the desk lady.
"Just like that?" asked Miz Smitcher. "Don't need permission?"
"There's countries where you can't give a baby a name without the government's okay, but here, you just pick a name."
"What if this baby already had a name?"
"The person named him went and left him in a field somewhere," said the desk lady. "I'm betting there's no birth certificate. He still had amniotic fluid on him, the doctor said. He was born and laid in that grass and that was it. So this is the first name he ever had, count on it."
Miz Smitcher turned to Ceese. "What do you think? Mack Street okay?"
"Mack's an okay name," said Ceese. "Better than LeRoy or Raymo," he said.
"I agree with you there."
"Way better than Cecil."
"Cecil's a good name," said Miz Smitcher. "Every Cecil I knew was a fine man."
Not all. Not if you knew the sick crap that was going through my head this afternoon.
"But we got a Cecil in the neighborhood," said Miz Smitcher. "Near as I can tell, we got no other Mack."
"Mack Street is a good name," said Ceese.
And then it was done. Papers signed. And in a few minutes, Ceese was sitting in the car beside Miz Smitcher, holding little Mack Street in his arms.
They went home by way of a Kmart, where Miz Smitcher bought a baby seat and some cans of formula and some baby bottles and baby clothes and disposable diapers. "Stupid waste of money when the baby's going to live with somebody else in a couple of days," she said.
"What you say?"
"Nothing," said Ceese.
"I know what you said."
"Then why did you ask?"
"Wanted to see if you had the balls to say it twice."
"Keep him," said Ceese. "You know you want to."
"Just because you want to doesn't mean everybody else does. He's an ugly little baby anyway, don't you think?"
Ceese just stood there watching while she finished belting the car seat into place. By the time she was done, she was dripping with sweat. "Give him to me now," she said.
Ceese handed the baby in to her.
"More trouble than you're worth, that's what you are," she cooed to the baby. "Use up all my savings just to put food in one end and out the other."
Ceese looked out across the parking lot toward the street. Under the bright streetlights there was a homeless man standing on the curb, watching him, or at least looking toward Kmart.
Ceese heard again the thing that must have made him turn and look: the sound of a motorcycle engine revving.
A black-clad woman bent over the handlebars of a black motorcycle that rode along the street.
She wasn't looking where she was going, she had her head turned toward Kmart, and even though there was no way to see her eyes, Ceese knew exactly who she was and what she was looking at.