“So it’s not Maynard’s baby?” Milo asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. Because that was really funny to me. Then I remembered that Milo did not know Maynard. “I met him at the bus station,” I said. “He hung around looking for girls like me. I know that sounds creepy, but it was just that he was too shy to meet people in the regular way. And I needed a place to stay, so it worked out for both of us.”
“And there were other girls there at the same time?”
“Oh no,” I said. “They’d left before I even got there. Your turn,” and I poked him on the arm. He was lying on his back in Stanley’s bed. Stanley was at his lab, and through the window we could smell the sweet smell of chemicals cooking. Milo turned and put a hand on my belly.
“Don’t you worry about Maynard coming to look for you?” he asked.
“Oh, he’ll find me,” I said. “I was hoping to get to Florida just because it would cost them more to look for me down there, but it doesn’t really matter. I’ll get home one day and he’ll be standing in the yard with Theresa. Theresa is his sister,” I added, because I couldn’t remember if I’d told him that. “She and Maynard look alike at first, but when you get to know them you realize that it’s just the shape of the face. I think he’d be willing to let me go, but Theresa wouldn’t let him. She’d say they’d spent too much money on me already.”
Milo lay with his hand on my belly, as still as if he were listening for a train. He was very dark and sad, and I knew that something bad had happened to him. He had run away to the loneliest place he could imagine, to a godforsaken mountaintop where his only neighbor was a crazy man who talked to Saint Peter as if he were right there in the room, but trouble had been seeking him and had found him, even here. I was that trouble, and it was not the first time. “So you walk into the yard and Maynard and Theresa are standing there,” he said. “What do you do then?”
“I was thinking they might like it down there with the car,” I said.
Milo’s hand stilled over my navel, and for a second I thought
I might have the baby soon, against my will. Up until then I’d always thought we had an understanding. He lay quiet, and then he jumped up and got dressed in the kitchen.
I wasn’t sure what I’d done. There is a time for saying things like that, just as there is a time for saying “I love you,” and I’d been pretty sure I knew when it was. “I was just kidding,” I called. In the doorway I saw Milo’s shadow waver, and I coaxed him back into bed.
What I realized is that the Bible never gives you enough information. Pulling the baby on the raft had been Stanley’s idea — he’d had a vision, but he left me to figure out how to make a raft of rushes, whatever those were, and daub it with slime and pitch. I thought about going down to the library to use the computer and see if I could find a little diagram or something, but I’ve heard that they keep track of what you look for.
I won’t lie: for a while I hoped that Milo would help me with the baby. I think if Maynard had seen me with a man like him, he would have turned around and gone right home. Or maybe Milo and I would have been in Florida by then, living not on the water, which would be too expensive, but close enough to it that you could hear the wind in the trees at night. That was what I thought at first, but I found out pretty quick that Milo didn’t want anything to do with a baby. Sometimes at night I would go and stand at the cliff’s edge and wonder what would happen to my body if Het myself fall — down into the laurel hell, coming to rest among the ripped empty packages of Sudafed and the wreckage of Maynard’s Cadillac.
Stanley stayed sober for a whole day to help me, and he cut the cord and cleaned up after, but when the baby cried that night I had to roll myself out of bed and crawl across the floor to get to him. A few days later I washed up and went down the mountain to get a job, and the first thing I bought with my employee discount was a little yellow life raft. I was hiding in the bushes when the old man with the dog found it, and I stuffed my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming.
But things get better. One of the girls from work helped me dye my hair in the employee bathroom. They had me working in lingerie, and while I refolded the underwear that people had to rummage all through before they decided not to buy it, I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and smile like at a stranger. When the police came up to Stanley’s, I felt enough like another person that I almost convinced myself when I told him that I had never been pregnant; I didn’t know what that man from the post office was talking about. If I’d had a baby, I said, what hospital had I gone to? They’d checked every one within a three-hour drive, and nobody had a baby at home anymore.
I could feel Stanley watching me, and when they were gone he picked me up and swung me around in his arms. Later I found out that Milo had lied too, telling them he’d never met a pregnant lady at the post office and Stanley’s cousin never had belly that he’d seen.
It was summer, and even when we kept the windows open we sometimes had to change the sheets twice in one night. Stanley wandered around in the dark and we could hear him babbling and praying. Sometimes sleep wouldn’t come at all, and we’d borrow Stanley’s car and drive down to the neighborhood where the baby lived with his new family. The people who’d adopted him were just the ones you’d expect: the husband was a minister; the wife was fat and made cakes for bake sales. They’d named him Joshua. The newspapers had called him Moses, and I guess before he was adopted his legal name would have been Moses Doe. I told that to Milo and he said it sounded like a blues singer.
It felt nice to have Milo beside me. It was on one of those nights, driving around the part of town where the rhododendron were trimmed and did not look anything like hell, that I told him why I’d really left Maynard, I mean the main reason. I was looking for Theresa’s cigarettes, and it was there in her underwear drawer — the list of all the girls who had lived with them before me. I knew that was what it was because my name was at the bottom, not my real name but the name they called me. They were all happy names: Jessica, Renee, Stephanie, and then mine there at the bottom, the only one without a line through it. “I don’t mean they’d done anything bad to them,” I said. “They probably just ran away like I did. But there had to be a reason why they didn’t work out, don’t you think? They’d all been there, and they’d all been pregnant, but there weren’t any babies in the house. So then I started thinking, what did they know that I didn’t? And then I started thinking that once my baby was born, Maynard and Theresa wouldn’t have any more use for me. I tried to make him love me,” I said. “It would have been safer, you know? But I don’t think he did really.”
Milo pulled me against him. He pressed against my hip, but even though it would have been okay probably — I mean no one would have seen us — I said, “No.” We were parked across the street, and I could see the window that was the baby’s window, which I knew because of the nightlight. On Milo’s shoulder I would be tall enough to reach the sill. Why not, I thought. The baby was mine anyway. I would change his name back to Moses, and we would live in the house where you could hear the ocean in the trees. But there is a time for doing things if you’re going to do them, and when it had passed we were still sitting there in the dark.