Six Feet Under (Mad Love Duet Book 1)

by Whitney Barbetti

  Another nurse appeared out of nowhere from behind me and placed the baby in my arms before I could react, as another nurse instructed Brooke where to cut.

  She was small, with bright red skin and dark eyes. The doctor hadn’t been wrong about her hair—there was so much of it. The baby opened her mouth to emit a scream, but nothing actually came out. Almost instantly, the baby settled, blinked, and reached an arm up in the air like she was fist pumping her own arrival. Her fingers curled into a baby fist, and even though they were practically microscopic, I could still make out the faintest lines in her knuckles.

  I’d never held a baby before. I kept lifting my elbow, making sure her head was fully supported, but I wasn’t sure if that was what I was supposed to do.

  A nurse brushed past me, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder to keep me from moving backward, into her. I squeezed the baby tighter to myself, her warm little body warming me up too.

  She made a sound, like she was trying to learn how to use her voice, but it came out quietly, like a toy whose batteries had run out.

  She had a shock of dark hair creeping out from under the pink and blue cap, and without thinking, I grazed my finger over it. It was silky soft, didn’t even feel real. Her skin, too. It was so smooth, despite the red color, that I found myself splaying my fingers over her face, her tiny button nose and the perfect cupid’s bow on her lips. Her perfect, unmarred skin. Skin so thin, you could see the veins that carried her blood to her heart.

  Despite having just been birthed, she was remarkably clean. And, somehow more surprising to me, she was beautiful. But I supposed it was easy to think a baby beautiful. It hadn’t had time to grow up into a shitty person.

  A person like me.

  But, right then, as she existed in my arms, she was beautiful. A perfect little creation.

  “Is mom ready to hold her?” a nurse asked from behind me, startling me out of the trance I’d been in while holding the baby.

  As soon as the nurse took her from me, it was like the sounds around me came back, and I shook my head when I felt a little bit of annoyance at having the baby plucked from my arms. She wasn’t mine, after all.

  But when the nurse placed the baby into her mother’s arms, I felt … changed, somehow.

  I’d been the first one to hold her. If any kind of magic existed from a moment like that, there was no doubt I’d take a bit of it for myself.

  I knew it was selfish. I mean, at least I acknowledged that much.

  Brooke’s attention was on the baby. Her lips trembled, and tears spilled from the corners of her eyes, unbidden. This was her baby.

  “What’s her name?” I blurted, not wanting to call her just a baby anymore. She was here, real, breathing; a human deserving of a name.

  Brooke didn’t look at me, just traced her daughter’s features the way I had only seconds earlier. “Norah.”

  I looked at her, and then the baby, and tried the name on for size. “Norah.”

  “With an ‘h’ at the end.”

  “Like Brooke with an ‘e.’”

  Brooke nodded, a tremulous smile tugging her lips to the sides of her face.

  I could see it. “Okay. Norah.”

  “I’m going to bathe her, if that’s all right?” Harriet asked, her arms out for Norah.

  Brooke handed her over with more aplomb than I would’ve. But then again, I hadn’t spent the last several hours trying to expel a human from my uterus. She was probably exhausted. But her cheeks were bright, her lips in a lazy smile.

  I looked back at the sink, where Harriet was cooing to Norah as she gently bathed her and felt now like I was an intruder.

  “I guess that’s it?” I said.

  Brooke blinked, the contented and sleepy smile fading from her lips. “What?”

  I lifted a shoulder. “You don’t really need me anymore, right?”

  It was brief—maybe a flash that lasted less than ten seconds—but I saw the panic cross her features.

  “I mean, here, in the hospital.” Had she thought I was about to kick her out of my life completely? Congrats, here’s your baby! Now you’re homeless. Bye.

  “Oh.” She was quiet, and her fingers fretted with the blanket they’d covered her stomach with. “Yes, of course. If you want to go back home…” Her voice drifted, and I could see her trying to work out what to do next.

  “How long will she be in here?” I asked the nurse closest to me. “Couple days?”

  “As long as all goes well, she and baby will be able to go home Sunday.”

  It was Friday, so that gave me part of the weekend to be alone … for the first time since Six had walked into my life.

  “Okay.” I looked at Brooke, unsure of how to handle this goodbye. Perhaps, under normal circumstances, a hug would suffice. But I didn’t want to, not then. Something had shifted in that hospital room, and it’d happened as I’d held little Norah, her pink rosebud lips and dark eyes looking up at me. Her warm weight in my arms, and the unnamed something that had unfurled within me as I’d cradled her tiny body against mine.

  So, I raised a hand and gave her a tight smile before ducking out into the gray hallway, toward the gray elevator that carried me down to the gray hospital entrance, until I was all the way outside, under the blue sky, fresh air filling my lungs.

  What the fuck was that?

  “You and me, both, buddy,” I said to the voices. And then, I went home.

  22

  I stayed glued to the television the forty hours I had to myself. It’d been easy to forget about Cora when I’d been in the hospital.

  But the moment I’d walked back in the door, the television had still been on, and two news anchors were volleying back and forth about the girl missing from a small Michigan town.

  Cut to shots of the police dragging a lake near her house.

  Cut to shots of people in suits carrying nondescript cardboard boxes out of her home.

  The one thing I noticed was that not a single person was on the news asking for her whereabouts. In most missing person cases, a distraught mother would tearfully plead for her daughter’s safe return home as a troupe of sad faces surrounded her, nodding in agreement to her every plea.

  But with Cora, there was nothing. She had no one.

  Well, that wasn’t true. She had Six. And, because his face wasn’t on the news anywhere, I had to believe that this was part of the plan. He’d warned me, hadn’t he? Before leaving. That something might happen. He’d been vague, but he’d seemed convinced that I would see something. Maybe this was that something.

  I wanted to call him. But he hadn’t called me. So, I didn’t. Instead, I glared indignantly at my ever-silent phone, willing it to buzz right across the kitchen island.

  But it never did.

  Instead, I analyzed everything I could get my hands on about Cora. Various news outlets talked about her disappearance with that undercurrent of speculation that someone knew what happened to her. She was underage after all. No matter what happened, someone knew. She was, essentially, an orphan. Here or there, there’d be a cut shot to her uncle, a gray-faced man with a receding hairline. On one program, where speculation was ramped up by a hot-headed opinion-based journalist, she’d discussed the exclusive interviews she’d had with school officials, that hinted that there was tension between Cora and her uncle. Tension that hinted at abuse.

  My mouth was dry, so I gulped water like there would never be enough.

  If what I guessed was true, Six had pulled Cora from an abusive environment, but made it look suspicious enough that the suspicion would land on her uncle, and not her—or, rather, whoever could’ve possibly helped her escape.

  An hour before I was supposed to leave to get Norah and Brooke, my phone rang. The number six flashed on the outside of my phone and I snatched it up, flipped it open, and said, “Six,” all before it could ring a second time.

  “Mira.” His voice was gruff—sleepy. But it was nearly three in the afternoon. “Hi.”

  P
art of me was angry at him, angry that he had ignored me for as long as he had. That he’d been able to. When all I’d done for the last few months was think of him nonstop, my thoughts skipping toward him whenever I had a chance to think about anything else.

  “Have you seen the news?”

  I looked sideways at the tv. “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Okay.” He heaved a deep sigh, and something more than curiosity had me squeezing the phone as close as I could to my head. That sigh. How could I miss such an inconsequential noise as Six’s sighing? But just hearing it made me long for all the mornings with him in my bed that I’d taken for granted. I hadn’t appreciated them. “It’s pretty bad.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I’ll talk to you when I get there. Not sure when that’ll be just yet. But, I’m hoping soon.”

  I closed my eyes. I could hear it then, the thing I wanted to know that he felt too: the longing. For me. My hand loosened so much that I nearly dropped my phone. I hauled myself into a seat at his island and leaned over, my hair falling like a curtain around my head as I held the phone to my ear.

  “I miss you.”

  At first, I wasn’t sure who’d said it. It was a feeling that was as real as a limb for me, something that hung from me so solidly that it’d need an amputation to remove itself. But the silence on his end told me it was Six that had said it, before I could.

  I wanted to punish him, that was my first instinct. Despite whatever pleasure I had from hearing his voice, there was a part of me that still held anger tight. Anger at the way he left, anger at his silence. Rationally, I knew he had an excuse for that. But irrationally, which was my default, I was mad that it was so easy for him. So I kept my lips shut and squeezed my eyes tight, even though my hair made my surroundings dark anyway.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Better now.” His voice was low, which meant she was near. “You … haven’t said anything, right?”

  “I’m not a snitch.”

  “I know you’re not, Mira.” He sounded exasperated. “But the natural inclination to hearing news like that might be to say something, to anyone.”

  “Who am I going to tell?” My eyes flicked to my fish tank, which was empty and in the sink. “Henry’s dead, so he ain’t hearing shit.”

  “He died?” Six’s voice changed a little then, and I grit my teeth to keep from reacting to it.

  “Yeah. Whatever.” I feigned casual, but judging by the silence on the other end, he’d seen through it. That stupid fucking fish—there was nothing special about him—but he’d been mine. Even if I’d been a terrible fish owner, he’d still been mine. And now he was buried beneath a pile of purple plants.

  “I’ll try to come home, soon, okay? Take good care of yourself, Mira. I’m counting on you to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I want you to take care of yourself. Because I care about you. Because I’m not there to physically care for you. Run, paint, go to the diner around the corner for some motherfucking bacon and eggs, if need be. But take care of yourself. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” But I rolled my eyes. “But they don’t make it as good as you do.”

  “That’s because there’s an art to making motherfucking bacon.”

  “And eggs,” I added. I cupped the receiver in my palm and wanted to hold the phone tight all over again.

  “I miss you,” he said again, and the fabric around my heart came loose again, just a few stitches. “I’ll see you soon.” And then he hung up.

  When I brought Norah and Brooke home, I realized how woefully unprepared we were to care for an infant. When I’d taken Brooke in, I hadn’t thought about things that should have been obvious, like where the baby would actually sleep.

  Brooke’s mom had finally showed up to the hospital with a car seat. I wasn’t sure how that conversation had gone over, the whole, “Oh hey, I’m not with my baby daddy anymore and I’m living with a stranger, but it’s good,” conversation, but I wasn’t sad to have missed it, either.

  When we set little Norah’s car seat down, Brooke turned to me. “I have a bassinet, I’ve just remembered, at my old house.”

  I shook my head. “Nuh uh, no way. We’re not going back there. We’ll get you a new one. Anything else?”

  Brooke set down the bag bulging with diapers and wipes and brand-new pacifiers. “My mom says I’ll go through onesies like they’re water.”

  “Okay. Onesies.” I dragged a pad of paper across the counter. “Write down the pertinent information I need, because I’ve never been around one of those.” I waggled my fingers at the car seat Norah snoozed in.

  “You mean, baby? You’ve never been around a baby?”

  “Only child.” I shoved a pen into her hand. It was easier to refer to Norah indifferently, even if I wasn’t actually indifferent to her. My time away from Norah at home hadn’t dulled the haze I felt around her. I’d wanted it to, because I didn’t wanted to look at Norah and want to hold her. I hadn’t even analyzed why I would have wanted to hold her.

  I turned back to Brooke when she handed me the list. “Great,” I told her. “I’m going to grab this stuff, and then I’m going to the Dry Run tonight.” It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her if she wanted to come along, but then I remembered that she was forty-eight hours fresh from pushing a human out of her body.

  “That’d be good.” Brooke yawned and stretched, her shirt rising up to show her much flatter but still rounded belly. It was weird to me that the thing lightly snoring in the car seat had resided under Brooke’s skin not too long ago. “I’m going to catch up on all the sleep I missed in the hospital.”

  “I thought babies cried all night?”

  Brooke nodded and placed her hands at the base of her spine, the way I’d seen her do in the last few days before going into labor. “But I’ll still get better quality sleep, since I’m not in much pain anymore.” She turned to the car seat and lowered to her knees. I didn’t want to watch her pull that baby out, so before I could have another strange desire to hold Norah, I left.

  When I returned hours later with Six’s account depleted a couple hundred bucks, Brooke was asleep on the sofa, Norah between her and the cushions. She was flat on her back, wrapped up in a hospital blanket like a little baby burrito. Her lips were open just barely, and a tiny little sound breezed in and out as her tiny chest rose and fell.

  Without really meaning to, I reached out and brushed away a chunk of hair that wasn’t long enough to be in Norah’s face. But, I’d wanted to touch her again. Even in such a small way.

  Brooke stirred and started upon seeing me hovering over her.

  “Sorry,” I said automatically and snatched my hand away from Norah. I gestured to the bags by the door. “I got everything on the list and a couple other things that looked maybe necessary.”

  Brooke eased away from the couch as softly as possible, slowly, like she was navigating through quicksand. When she was free from the cushions, she rubbed her eyes and grabbed the box that contained the bassinet. “This is great,” she said, a smile waking up her tired face. “Thanks.”

  “Yep.” I shoved my hands into my pockets, my eyes darting to Norah before I turned to Brooke again. “I should head over to the Dry Run now.”

  “You showing off any pieces?” Brooke asked as she slid a knife across the taped seal.

  “No way.” I shook my head vehemently.

  “One day, you should.”

  I never wanted to. Art was subjective, I knew that. Of course it was. But when I stood in that space, surrounded by other artists, my art felt like a fraud. The other creators, their pieces transcended what I knew about art. It was like an extension of their bodies, made whole onto canvas or skin or via sculpture. My art was born of feelings, but they were feelings I let go of once transferred to canvas. They didn’t live with me, and therefore, my feelings for them died once they’d passed from me to my paintbrush. An artist should feel thrilled by their work,
right? And after I finished a painting, I shoved it under my bed or behind another one. I didn’t take it in, didn’t feel anything. And if everyone else that showcased their pieces in Dry Run could make me feel, but my own art couldn’t do the same, then what else was I than a fraud.

  The Dry Run was dead when I finally made it across the city. Jacob was smoking outside the entrance again when I let myself into the yard. The smoke rings he blew were the only artistic things I’d ever seen him produce, which I hadn’t really realized until that night.

  When he saw me, he shoved his shaggy hair into a beanie and extinguished his cigarette to follow me in. “Is Brooke with you?”

  “Does it look like she is?” I asked as I poured myself a cup of coffee from the little kitchenette.

  “Is she okay?”

  Jacob knew that Brooke had moved in with me, but it’d been so long since Brooke had ventured to Dry Run that every time Jacob saw me without her, he assumed the worst.

  “She’s fine. Had the kid. Is home.”

  Jacob nodded quickly and handed me sugar as he poured his own coffee. “Baby okay?”

  She’s beautiful. She’s perfect.

  “The baby is a baby, Jacob.” I shrugged and lifted the coffee to my lips, blowing across the top. “Healthy.”

  He nodded again, and mimicked cooling off his own coffee. “That’s good.”

  “Sure.” I looked over his shoulder, to the hallway that opened up the gallery space. “Anyone new tonight?”

  “No one. It’s been a little dead. It’s October. Everyone is in Tahoe.”

  I shrugged, not understanding the appeal. “I guess I’ll mosey around then.” I moved around him.

  “You ever going to bring your work in here?”

  I turned. Had he talked to Brooke or something? But at least with Jacob, I could throw the question back at him. “Are you ever going to bring your work in here?”

  Jacob averted his eyes, looking at the brick wall behind me. “I don’t think that’d be appropriate.”

  “And why not?”