OUR SECRET BABY

by Paula Cox

  “Do you want me to take you back to your bike, or—”

  “Let’s get breakfast,” I say, not wanting to leave her just yet. I’ve spent an entire year thinking about her. One night isn’t going to satiate that. I don’t think one-hundred would.

  “I have to get back, but, well, uh . . . I guess we could get breakfast at my place.”

  I shrug. “Works for me.”

  I look across at her as she weaves through the sparse traffic, brown eyes fixed straight ahead despite the ease of the drive, as though she cannot bear the thought of even glancing in my direction. I lean back, chewing on the toothpick, wondering what’s gotten into her. A few hours ago, we had the best sex either of us has ever had, long-time-waiting sex, fucking-hell-finally sex, and it was worth the damn wait, and now she sits there like there’s ice in her bones.

  “You alright?” I ask, thinking as I say it that she’s changed me. I never would’ve asked a question like that in the pre-Kayla days.

  “Yeah, fine,” she mutters. “Fine, just . . . you know my employer, Macy?”

  I nod, waiting for her to go on.

  “Well, Macy, she’s . . . uh . . . she’s seventy years old.”

  “Right,” I say.

  Kayla lets our an exasperated sigh. “You’re not connecting the dots!”

  “Connect them for me, then. Goddamn—this is a fancy place.”

  Kayla drives through a snow-wreathed gate, down a snowy driveway, and toward what looks like a ten-bedroom house. It looks like one of those old houses from movies about the aristocracy, way too big, the sort of place you could imagine being converted to apartments when the current owners are gone. I reckon around thirty of Sandra’s trailers could fit in this house. As we get closer, I realize something is wrong. You get that sense in the life. It creeps up your neck like ghostly hands before finally squeezing down on your neck. Now, when it squeezes my neck, I see that the tall, stately door has been kicked in, and that an old woman wearing nothing but a bathrobe is limping out of the house.

  “Macy?” Kayla says, more bemused than panicked. She stops the car, climbs out. I climb out with her. Kayla stands completely still for a few moments, and then screams, “Macy! Where’s Sandra? Macy! Where the hell is Sandra! Sandra! Sandra! Sandra!”

  Sandra . . . and this woman is seventy years old, and Kayla had a little baby with her yesterday, and we both know the name Sandra; that name is meaningful to both of us. Kayla lied to me. Kayla lied to me yesterday in the supermarket. This old woman is not that child’s mother. Kayla is. And if Kayla is the child’s mother, and if Kayla has named the child Sandra . . .

  “Kayla?” I say.

  She wheels on me. “Yes! Yes!”

  And that’s all the confirmation I need.

  She doesn’t need to say anymore. She nods rapidly, chin smacking her chest, eyes pleading with me to find our daughter.

  “Fuck.” I take out my Eagle. “See to the old woman.”

  The timing makes sense; yes, yes, the timing makes all kinds of goddamn sense. And the name makes sense. And it would explain Kayla’s awkwardness in the car just now. She was trying to tell me the truth. My baby is unsafe. My child is unsafe. Dammit. Goddamn it! I point my Eagle in front of me, heading for the door, and call over my shoulder: “Where is her room, Kayla?”

  Through waves of tears, she manages to tell me.

  I head through the house quickly, checking the corners, listening for sounds of the invader. But I don’t hear shit, and when I finally reach Sandra’s room, it is a mess, the crib smashed in the corner, the baby mobile thrown onto the floor, wallpaper ripped away. But no blood. No sign of death. I look around the room carefully, looking for any sign of who did this, and when I see it my chest tightens.

  There, resting on the pile of debris which was once a cot, rests a flower. A thorny flower. Exactly the kind of flower which was there that night I saved Kayla . . . and exactly the kind of flower which grows just outside the clubhouse.

  I take a step back, reeling, head spinning.

  The flower was not just similar. It did not just remind me of the flower. It was the flower. It was the flower. It was the flower.

  “It was the flower,” I say, realizing that I’ve been saying it aloud this whole time.

  Somebody in the clubhouse . . . Jesus Christ. It all begins to slot into place and I can’t believe I was ever so stupid, so naïve, so absurdly trusting. I can’t believe that the day I learn I have a baby is also the day I learn that Ogre has kidnapped her. Because it has to be Ogre, doesn’t it? Who else amongst my men would kill Silvertongue and the Wraiths without my say-so? Who else would kidnap a child? That was why Ogre killed that guard, because he was going to say too much. It wasn’t just some Ogre thing. All this time, I took his efficiency for loyalty, seeing in his squashed face a semblance of loyalty to the club, to the life. But no, no—

  And he has my kid. And he killed the Wraiths. And he is most likely the one behind kidnapping Kayla in the first place.

  I take out my cell straightaway and call Dogma. It rings for half a minute. I cancel the call, and dial one of the other guys. No answer. Another. I dial the club and one of the pledge’s answers.

  “Where’s Ogre?” I bark.

  “Um, don’t know, Boss.”

  “Dogma?”

  “Not sure, Boss.”

  “Have you seen them this morning, though?”

  “Yes, Boss. Ogre was in early, around eight, and Dogma was in before that, around half seven. But they’re both out now.”

  “How did Ogre seem, kid? Stranger—stranger than usual?”

  “Difficult to tell, Boss. You know how he is. He said something about a land flowing with milk and honey and some shit. You know, one of his Bible things.”

  “Alright. Call me if you see them.”

  I dial Ogre, but of course he doesn’t answer.

  I pick up the flower and return to Kayla and Macy. Kayla is trying her best to be brave, but when she sees the flower, and when she sees I don’t have our daughter, she breaks into tears and begins to shake, her face bright red with the pain. She says to me through sobs: “It happened late in the n-n-n-night, D-Dante. Around f-f-f-four o’clock. But G-G-G-G—” She keels over, clutching her chest, crying violently.

  “I was too scared to come out of the closet where he put me,” Macy says. “But when I heard the car . . . Oh, it’s all my fault!”

  “What did he look like?” I kneel down next to them. They are sitting in the snow, seemingly not feeling the cold.

  “Big, scary, ugly,” Macy says. One of her eyes is a purple welt, and blood drips down her neck. She trembles as she talks.

  “Did he say anything?”

  Macy swallows. I can tell she wants to turn to Kayla, who is weeping now as though her body is about to erupt. She claws the snow with her fingernails, dirt and flakes of snow getting beneath them, and her sobs are so loud Macy has to raise her voice.

  “Just something strange about lambs, I think it was from the Bible.”

  “Son of a—”

  I rise to my feet, take out my cell, and dial 911. “Ambulance.” I give them the address and then hang up.

  Ogre, one of my men, all this time working under my nose. I think back over this past year and a half, since I started looking for the Silvertongue’s killer, since I started looking for the man who now owes me his debt. Ogre, sitting right there, most likely sabotaging my leads. Yeah, he was efficient alright, efficient when it came to returning emptyhanded and telling me he’d had a good look. And now he has my child. My child. It doesn’t seem real. I can’t have a kid, especially not the kid I saw at the supermarket: she was too precious. I cannot have made somethin’ that precious.

  I go to the car, crank the heating up, and then return to the women. I pick up the old lady and help her limp to the car, laying her in the driver’s seat. Then I go to Kayla, but when I try to grab her, she shrugs me off, staring at the ground and pulsating with sobs. Tears steam continua
lly down her cheeks and her chest vibrates. She clutches handfuls of snow, over and over, until she has torn through layers of dirt.

  “I c-c-c-c-c-can’t—”

  I kneel down in the snow next to her, prying her cold hands away from the snow and looking into her eyes. “Kayla,” I say. “I know you can hear me. I need you to listen to me, for your daughter.”

  That gets her attention, I can tell, but it isn’t enough to stop the panic.

  “I want you to close your eyes, alright? Can you do that for me?”

  She manages a nod, and then closes her eyes, though tears still squeeze out of her closed eyelids.

  “Now . . .”

  I think. I don’t know what to do. She’s either having a panic attack, or she’s on the urge of a panic attack. I search my mind for ways to help her. I hate to see her like this, especially after seeing all her hard-won strength. I hate to see her hurting. The mother of my child . . . that adds a fresh significance to our relationship, and it is a relationship now, I reflect. The mother of my child is hurting. I need to help her.

  I feel like the world’s biggest moron as I take a toothpick from my pocket, take her hand, and place the toothpick in it.

  “I want you to chew on the end of this, Kayla. I want you to chew on the end of this and just keep chewing, alright?

  She manages to nod again, takes the toothpick, and starts chewing.

  “The chewing is all that exists, Kayla,” I say, feeling like the biggest fool who ever lived. I need to calm her down, ’cause I need to get back to the clubhouse and find Ogre. So Ogre stole the kid around four in the morning, drove back to Missouri. To what? To make it seem like he had nothing to do with it? But then, why leave the flower? I know the answer even as I ask it: because he’s a fuckin’ psychopath and he couldn’t resist it, and he had no way of knowing I’d make the connection with the thorny flowers outside the club. All this time, he’s been playing me.

  “The chewing is all that exists,” she says, as ambulance sirens fill the air. “The chewing is all that exists.”

  After a minute or so, the end of the toothpick snaps in half, and Kayla is able to look up into my face.

  “You need to save her, Dante,” she says, struggling to hold back another wave of tears.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kayla

  I focus on chewing the end of the toothpick, make it like Dante says, that the toothpick is all that exists, and after a while I manage to calm down. But when the toothpick snaps and sirens fills the air, the snow making my body wet and cold, I can’t stop my mind from darting ahead into the future: a future in which Sandra is dead, or in the hands of the man who put the flower in my hair over a year and a half ago, put the flower in the hair of rodent Kayla, scared Kayla. That Kayla had nothing to live for except survival. Me, I have so much to live for, and somebody has her.

  Dante helps me to my feet and leads me to the car. Macy sits forward, dabbing at her bruised eye, panting, looking half-crazed with her silver hair in disarray. Dante lays me down on the passenger seat.

  “Find her,” I say, but it’s more like I hear myself say it. Everything is hazy; the torture in my mind is more real than everything out here, in the cold. “Find our daughter, Dante. Our daughter needs you. I should’ve told you.” Tears threaten to break me again. I swallow them back. “I should’ve told you. I know that. I know. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was scared and now—I am a terrible mother. What sort of mother leaves her daughter to fend for herself? She could be dead, Dante. Our daughter could be dead.”

  “Ogre has her. She’s not dead. If he wanted to kill her, he would’ve burnt the house down like he did the warehouse.”

  “Ogre . . .” I can’t fight the tears at that, can’t hold them back any longer. They explode from me. Dante tries to put another toothpick in my hand. In a voice wracked with sobs, I scream: “Get that fucking thing out of my face and go save our daughter!” I smack the toothpick away. It lands in the snow.

  In my head, I see Sandra, tiny, vulnerable, in Ogre’s too-big hands, and I remember when Mom would read to me from Of Mice and Men, Lennie and the rabbits and the puppies, Lennie snapping the too-small-things’ necks with his too-big hands. And I think about how Ogre is just the same, and how he could easily do the same to Sandra with his too-big hands. Yes, he wouldn’t even have to try. He would just squeeze his massive fingers a little too tightly—and—and—

  I begin rocking back and forth, hardly knowing what I’m saying, delirious, terrified, desperate for Sandra to be in my arms.

  “Our daughter is gone and you need to save her. Please, please, please, Dante, please. I am sorry I didn’t tell you. I am sorry. I am. I am. I am very sorry. But save her. Save her, Dante. Please save her. Please save her. Save her. Save her. Save her.”

  “Quiet,” Dante says, and there’s an edge to his voice which reaches me. Looking up through bleary eyes, I see his face harden, take on a business aspect, a killer’s aspect. “Macy, ma’am, do you have anything faster than this old rust bucket?”

  “There’s a sedan in the garage,” she says, voice weak, as though on the verge of sleep.

  “Alright. I’m taking it.”

  “The keys are—”

  “Won’t need the keys. Kayla, I need to get out of here before the ambulance arrives. When you give your police report, tell them about Ogre, ’cause if they find him, good. But don’t tell them about me. I don’t need their hasslin’ when I’m about my business.”

  He makes to stand, and then reaches out and touches my face. His hands are rough and cold, but they remind me of last night, which already seems like an age ago. Did we really just have sex and laugh and talk like there were no troubles in the world? Did we really just hold each other and open ourselves to each other? How could we be so naïve?

  “Stay strong, Kayla.” He kisses me on the forehead, and then stands up.

  I hear him breaking into the garage, and then smashing the sedan’s window. But I barely hear it over the sound of Mom in my head, reading the same passage from Of Mice and Men over and over on a loop: “‘I pinched their heads a little and then they was dead—because they was so little.’” I shiver, the image too much for me to handle.

  Dante has to save her, he has to. I don’t think I’d ever forgive him if he didn’t. And even if I know that isn’t fair, it doesn’t matter. It isn’t fair that my daughter is gone, either, that one of his men has taken her, that it was one of his men who put that flower in my hair to begin with and turned my life down this road.

  Dante drives the sedan out of the driveway, and a minute later the ambulance pulls in.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dante

  The winter wind lashes in through the smashed window, whipping snow into my face, into my mouth. The snow melts and water drips down my skin like the tears Kayla was crying not too long ago, melts into my beard. I speed down the highway, dodging between cars, not giving a damn about anything but finding Ogre and my baby as quickly as possible. Anger grips me like the devil, making me squeeze the steering wheel so hard my knuckles are like four white marbles beneath my skin, bulging out. I clench my teeth so hard that I think they might just shatter; they’re damn cold enough to.

  A child . . . I have a child. It hits me afresh over and over as I drive. I have a baby. I think back to the store, to when I saw Kayla and the baby in that baby-holder thingy. I wasn’t paying much attention to the baby at the time, but I saw enough to notice her age, and I even thought about it being mine. But she lied to me, didn’t she? She told me it was the old woman’s. Maybe I ought to be angry at that. But I’m not—I just want to find the kid. The questions can come later. I just need to find the kid, for Kayla’s sake.

  I am about halfway when the engine begins to cough. I glance at the dashboard. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  The gas is empty, the dial past zero, the engine coughing and huffing. I turn onto the side of the highway just in time for the engine to die completely, and for a s
econd I just stop, hands on the steering wheel, as white cold rage moves through me, the sort of rage you feel just before you kill a man, the sort of rage I felt all those years ago with that perverted old man, the sort of rage which takes you just before you smash in somebody’s head, before you become a killer. I want to tear the steering wheel free and throw it through the window and grip shards of jagged glass and stab. I don’t care what. Just fuckin’ stab.

  No fucking gas. If there is a God, he’s laughing at me right now, I know that much.

  I force myself to calm down. At least, calm down as much as I can. It’s already past three, though, and each second that passes is a second in which Ogre could be doing some horrible shit to my daughter. At least Kayla would have told the police, which means they’ll be on the lookout for him; maybe they’ll even put him on some watch list. I don’t know. But that doesn’t matter when I’m standing at the side of the highway, face moist with melted snow, a chill creeping into my bones.