Natty, “We’re taking good care of your dad, okay, buddy?”
I blinked. The fireman thought we were together, me and Natty and William. We were three things that looked like one thing. Like a family.
I thought Natty would correct him, but instead he turned and looked up at me, a wide-eyed, questioning look.
I looked back and thought, Destiny. Why shouldn’t me and Natty get to have him?
Could a man like this belong to me? Today I’d sat on my ass, clutching my child and waiting my turn to be shot like a good little rabbit. How could I do otherwise? I had such practice being weak. I’d been practicing for about four years now, from the second I decided to take my lovely Natty as a gift, unconnected to the awful night I got him. No, even before that, when I’d made Walcott take me home and snuck inside and kept my mouth shut.
Natty had a human father. When I tried to imagine him now, I saw a golem with a lumpy face of red Georgia clay, rising from the earth around the beanbag chair, leaving streaks of himself on my clothing. I’d let him stay faceless, stay anonymous and unaccountable. That was not okay. I should never have allowed that. I should have gone after him, found him, laid him out. But instead I had pretended that it didn’t happen at all, until Natty made that particular pretend more complicated.
Even then, I did nothing. Didn’t call the cops, didn’t try to stop him from doing it again, if he wanted to in his clay heart. Didn’t grieve. Didn’t learn. Never made him pay. Hell, I never even had to tell anyone I was pregnant.
Walcott did that for me. He came over with his momses, who looked at me with concern and reassuring love while Walcott spoke. They’d treated me like a favorite niece since I was five, when Walcott and I went running back and forth between their B and B and my house nine times an afternoon. Walcott sat between me and them on our toile sofa, telling Mimmy about finding me drugged and half-naked behind a frat house on the Emory campus. He spoke all halting with his face the color of the reddest red Crayola.
I didn’t even listen to him tell it. I couldn’t bear the kind gazes of his mothers, or watch my own mother’s face. Instead, I tried to stare right straight through Mimmy’s closed drapes. I pretended a meadow on the other side, full of all kinds of fairy-tale things: talking squirrels and little fauns and tree nymphs. I imagined opening the drapes, stepping through them, going into the butterflies and sunshine while Walcott finished up my dirty work. I could lie down in the magic grass and call up some unicorns. Why not? I was ten weeks along, but I still had everything I needed to make them come to me.
Mimmy sat across from us in the matching chair, all alone. She heard him out, and I was so safe in my meadow that I barely registered it even when she started yelling.
“What poop, what poop, what utter poop!” Even in a state, Mimmy’s vocabulary didn’t lose its sugar. “You did this. You did this!”
Walcott’s taller mom, Aimee, put her hands out, like she was surrendering, and said in her kindest voice, “Charlotte, I know how upsetting this must be, but Walcott is telling you the truth. We drove Shandi to see my gynecologist. She confirms that your daughter is pregnant, and also that her hymen is intact. Dr. Kaye believes that the boy who drugged your daughter might have ejaculated prematurely at the . . . oh dear. At the gate, as it were. Close enough so that—”
My mother was positively gawping by then, her jaw unhinging and swinging up and down about nine times before she could get it under control and form words. “You took my daughter to the doctor? You did?”
“Drove her, yes. She asked us to.”
I stayed in the sunshine place, pretending a meadow full of fairy mushroom rings where nothing any of them said had one damn thing to do with me. The magic yellow motes of cheery pollen in the air had probably made the baby happen, but I felt
I blinked. The fireman thought we were together, me and Natty and William. We were three things that looked like one thing. Like a family.
I thought Natty would correct him, but instead he turned and looked up at me, a wide-eyed, questioning look.
I looked back and thought, Destiny. Why shouldn’t me and Natty get to have him?
Could a man like this belong to me? Today I’d sat on my ass, clutching my child and waiting my turn to be shot like a good little rabbit. How could I do otherwise? I had such practice being weak. I’d been practicing for about four years now, from the second I decided to take my lovely Natty as a gift, unconnected to the awful night I got him. No, even before that, when I’d made Walcott take me home and snuck inside and kept my mouth shut.
Natty had a human father. When I tried to imagine him now, I saw a golem with a lumpy face of red Georgia clay, rising from the earth around the beanbag chair, leaving streaks of himself on my clothing. I’d let him stay faceless, stay anonymous and unaccountable. That was not okay. I should never have allowed that. I should have gone after him, found him, laid him out. But instead I had pretended that it didn’t happen at all, until Natty made that particular pretend more complicated.
Even then, I did nothing. Didn’t call the cops, didn’t try to stop him from doing it again, if he wanted to in his clay heart. Didn’t grieve. Didn’t learn. Never made him pay. Hell, I never even had to tell anyone I was pregnant.
Walcott did that for me. He came over with his momses, who looked at me with concern and reassuring love while Walcott spoke. They’d treated me like a favorite niece since I was five, when Walcott and I went running back and forth between their B and B and my house nine times an afternoon. Walcott sat between me and them on our toile sofa, telling Mimmy about finding me drugged and half-naked behind a frat house on the Emory campus. He spoke all halting with his face the color of the reddest red Crayola.
I didn’t even listen to him tell it. I couldn’t bear the kind gazes of his mothers, or watch my own mother’s face. Instead, I tried to stare right straight through Mimmy’s closed drapes. I pretended a meadow on the other side, full of all kinds of fairy-tale things: talking squirrels and little fauns and tree nymphs. I imagined opening the drapes, stepping through them, going into the butterflies and sunshine while Walcott finished up my dirty work. I could lie down in the magic grass and call up some unicorns. Why not? I was ten weeks along, but I still had everything I needed to make them come to me.
Mimmy sat across from us in the matching chair, all alone. She heard him out, and I was so safe in my meadow that I barely registered it even when she started yelling.
“What poop, what poop, what utter poop!” Even in a state, Mimmy’s vocabulary didn’t lose its sugar. “You did this. You did this!”
Walcott’s taller mom, Aimee, put her hands out, like she was surrendering, and said in her kindest voice, “Charlotte, I know how upsetting this must be, but Walcott is telling you the truth. We drove Shandi to see my gynecologist. She confirms that your daughter is pregnant, and also that her hymen is intact. Dr. Kaye believes that the boy who drugged your daughter might have ejaculated prematurely at the . . . oh dear. At the gate, as it were. Close enough so that—”
My mother was positively gawping by then, her jaw unhinging and swinging up and down about nine times before she could get it under control and form words. “You took my daughter to the doctor? You did?”
“Drove her, yes. She asked us to.”
I stayed in the sunshine place, pretending a meadow full of fairy mushroom rings where nothing any of them said had one damn thing to do with me. The magic yellow motes of cheery pollen in the air had probably made the baby happen, but I felt
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