OUR SECRET BABY

by Paula Cox

  The water’s fully up at this time, and people are taking videos, and a few are starting to walk away which puts me on high alert. The thing about crowds is it doesn’t matter where you are or who’s in them—little old grandmothers or Chinese men with their pants lifted up to their sternum or two-hundred-pound bodybuilders with noses broken so many times you don’t know what the original shape is anymore. A crowd’s a crowd, and there’s nothing more dangerous in security than a crowd that starts to break up.

  The red alarm button starts to go off, meaning the water levels are equal. I give the comb over to each person who walks by and put my hands on my hips, so I’ll have a closer reach for the Item on my belt. And I’m so focused on each of the guys coming back from the gate that it takes me a second to realize someone’s yelling.

  I look up and see it’s coming from the guy on the yacht. He’s making these rapid X’s in the air with both arms. And then I notice he’s making them at Maya because the boat’s trying to pass through the bridge, which is going to separate any second now, and she’s holding her cell phone up and taking a video of all this going on like she’s not apart of any of it.

  “For Chrissake.” I have to run over to the bridge because I’m worried about that alarm, and there’s Maya who still hasn’t noticed a thing. I get her by the arm and reel her away, counting all this time to myself. One second. Two seconds. On three the bridge parts, more or less exactly where she was standing. The yacht glides through like it was skating on ice. The captain or whoever it was who was yelling at Maya waves at me.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Why didn’t you move? You trying to drown yourself or something?”

  “I was taking a video,” she says with this hard glint in her eyes. “I still had time to get off. It was all of, like, three feet.”

  “Bogus. You’d be swimming if I hadn’t grabbed you. What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  The glint gets softer. The little cut of Maya’s mouth gets fuller. I think she’s going to smirk which would just about put me over the edge. But it’s not that at all. Only an embarrassed, little smile.

  “I didn’t hear the alarm,” she says a lot meeker than before. “Really. Honest and truly. Actually, I thought it was my ringtone going off.”

  “And the guy yelling at you?”

  “What guy? I was watching the bottom—they had all these vents that were recycling the old water. It was cool.”

  I feel like shaking her, like telling her she’s an idiot and saying something really ugly to her, but for some reason, I don’t. That little smile gets me. The I’m-sorry-but-hey-we’re-all-still-here-so-let’s-have-a-drink-or-something sorry, which girls like Maya learn by habit for situations just like theses.

  “Just don’t scare me like that again,” I say, letting go of her arm. It feels stupid to be angry anymore. “You got it?”

  She shrugs and rubs her left shoulder where maybe I shouldn’t have gripped so hard. “Whatever you say, Daddy. I’ll be a good girl from now on.”

  She curtsies and does a little dip with her head before she turns on heel and whips me on the back with the umbrella she’s been lugging around all day. I feel I ought to say something else that doesn’t sound like a lecture, but when I try to find something to say, there’s nothing. Part of me hates her, but the bigger part of me just thinks Maya Butler is too damn cute.

  Chapter 8

  Two months into the job and I’m waiting outside the club Maya told me to pick her up at when I get a call from Palmer Glass.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jesus. You are alive,” Palmer says.

  “I told you I’ve got a gig. What’s happened?”

  “You in mob country still?”

  “What’s up?”

  I can hear the click of Palmer’s lighter over the line. “No one’s dead, if that’s what you mean. We want to know when you’re coming back.”

  “When the job’s done.”

  “It has been months. Got any idea when that’s gonna be?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t. Might be a year. I’m shadowing the guy’s daughter. Thought I told you that.”

  “Shadowing? Where?”

  “Wherever she feels like going. Five G’s a day. Things could be worse.”

  “I’ll say.” Palmer puffs down his cigarette so loud that the sound comes through like wind blowing. “My sister used to babysit. Twenty bucks a night but she had to cook the brats’ food and clean the house. Hope you’ve got it better.”

  “She’s not a brat,” I say a little defensively. “So far so good. She goes to museums and the docks. You ought to see the shit they keep in these galleries.”

  “Jesus, Quinn.” Palmer laughs. “You’re gonna be a cultured motherfucker by the time you cash your last check.”

  “I’ve never been so bored in my life,” I say because that’s more of the kind of thing Palmer expects to hear.

  Palmer and I go way back, thirteen years or thereabouts when he was a punk shoplifter everyone thought was on dope because of how thin he was and how pale his skin was. I was sitting in his room once, and we were listening to “Kind of Blue,” which he’d just lifted from the record store when his dad kicked down the bedroom door and made him show him his veins. He was drunk as hell and didn’t give a shit that I was there watching them—he’d just got it in his head that his son was on heroin and nothing was gonna stop him from checking. Almost twisted Palmer’s arm out of his socket. Palmer slept over at my place most nights after that, and we’ve been brothers ever since. The guy’s still pale and thin, but he’s never touched hard drugs in his life.

  “Listen, princess, sounds like you’ve got a good thing going there, so I’m not gonna waste your time with anything too sappy. Frankly, we don’t give a damn that you’re out raking in the good stuff. Just promise us you’ll keep a lookout.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean bad blood. Red flags. Severe Tire Damage. Danger.”

  “Who?”

  “No names right now but word on the street is that it’s just a couple guys, Eastern Europeans or something. Big motherfuckers from the sounds of it. Came over here to stir up trouble—they got into a pretty bloody scrap with Miles and his kids over in Easttown.”

  “How bloody is bloody?”

  “Three guys in the hospital. Another guy dead.”

  “Dead? Like dead dead?”

  “Look—this is probably an isolated thing. You know Miles and his crew are the shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind. We don’t go poking our heads down any snake holes unless we’re prepared to bite back. Just thought you should know, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  The little LED at the bottom of the phone starts to blink, and my phone asks me if I want to answer the new call. Maya’s face appears alongside Palmer’s number.

  “Hey—I’ve got to go,” I say. “You’re not thinking these guys are serious business, are you?” I say so that Palmer can tell me not to think too seriously about it. He doesn’t.

  “I don’t know. That’s being honest with you. Ask me my personal opinion, and I’d say that’s insane. If the fucking KGB or whatever the hell they’re called now were in Portsmouth, we’d be in all out war by now. Just keep your head up and hey.”

  “Hey what?”

  “If you get the chance to stick it in mob boss’s daughter, don’t you dare disappoint me.”

  I tell Palmer to go fuck himself and swap calls over to Maya while swinging the Mercedes over towards the entrance of her club. All I can hear on the other end of the line is music, amplifier, shouts and someone shouting, “Where are you?” over and over again. I tell her I’m just trying to find a park, but only get more shouts. How the hell are we going to find one another? Luckily, someone backs out three spots in front of me.

  I shuffle the Mercedes into place, switch off the call, text Maya that I’m goi
ng in to find her, and get out to have a look around. Maya might be small, but she’s not as difficult to spot in a crowd as you might think. It’s got something to do with the clothes and jewelry. Somehow, even when they look exactly the same, you can just tell the expensive stuff from the cheap.

  The bouncer waves me in after I show him the card Theo had given me. The thing works like a charm. Then there’s a long hallway the color of raw liver, and a big room at the end full of strobe lights and half-naked people packed together tighter than sardines. My phone blinks again with Maya’s text. U here?

  Hallway, I write back.

  Go 2 the end. And tell this guy I’m with to fuck off.

  I shove the phone back into my pocket and walk to the end of the hallway like she said. There’s a whole other room I hadn’t seen just to the left filled with couches, beanbag chairs, and tables, with people lounging around laughing and smoking hookah. Two scans of the area and I spot Maya right away. She’s wearing this bright yellow dress with the familiar high shoes, and there’s a guy wearing aviators and super tight jeans with his hand over her elbow, trying to kiss her shoulder and neck and anything else he can get close to. Maya looks ready to strangle someone.

  Then, something just switches inside of me, and I get that stupid, goofy grin on my face which tells me I’m about to do something I might regret but to hell with it because it’s a good idea right now. I go over and take the guy’s arm off her shoulder and twist it around. He tries to push himself away from me and throws his head to the side to try and worm out. The aviators go flying. I twist the arm behind his back until I feel the edge of tension.

  “Quinn!” I notice that Maya’s there in front of me, beating my chest with her fists. “Stop it, Quinn! Kirill’t break it!”

  I hear her but ignore it and twist a little harder, not at all hard enough to shatter the arm but enough that it’ll feel that way. When he starts to scream, I let go. He tumbles onto the table, upsetting several glasses of beer.

  I know I ought to say something to this guy, but Maya’s already flying out the door, and the best I can come up with is, “Kirill’t let me see you with her ever again,” and then I’m racing behind her to keep up. I hardly even see the faces staring back at us.

  Maya asks me a little woozily if I’ve parked out front and I show her where.

  “Over to the left.” I unlock the Mercedes and open her door.

  “Holy shit,” she says once we’re on the move and away from the eyes of the people staring back at us. “You scared the living shit out of that guy.” She sounds a little scared herself, and a little proud.

  “Wasn’t that the idea?”

  “Sorta. Is he gonna be alright?”

  “Fine. I don’t just go around breaking other guys’ arms.”

  “Sure seems like it.”

  “You ever seen someone break another person’s arm?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  I’m not expecting that, and it shuts me up for a second. “Well, okay. I’d have needed another three inches to do the job. It’ll hurt for a few days or so. I don’t like hurting other people just because,” I say. “There’s gotta be a reason. But I don’t like doing it even when there is one. Even if the guy deserves it. Doesn’t make it any easier.”

  Maya looks out the window at the lights and the buildings flashing by. I can’t tell if she’s listening or not or even if she wants to talk, so I don’t say anything.

  “I dunno,” she says, “Avery probably deserved it. Not because of anything he did with me. He just tried to grab my boobs and was kissing me after I told him to stop. Then he said that he was on his game and that I must be a lesbian if I didn’t like it and also something about his girlfriend being out of town and he only had this one chance and that I was ruining it. Then I laughed because it all sounded so melodramatic and dumb and I told him he was making pretty shitty dialogue. And then he called me a bitch, so I slapped him but not all that hard and then he grabbed my ass, and it was right after that that I texted you. Voila, the night.”

  “You know this guy then?”

  “Met him tonight. Why?”

  “No reason. Sounds like a pig.”

  She shrugs. “He’s just a boy. They’re all like that.”

  “Do they all say that kind of stuff to you?”

  “Not all of them, of course. I’d say forty percent are the Averys. Thirty percent are the nice boring guys and ten percent are the nice guys looking for an excuse to cheat on their girlfriends. Another ten percent for the unclassifiables. Kinda pathetic, right? What happened to the days of shitty pickup lines and straight rejections? The worst part is that it’ll take him a full fifteen minutes to find a girl who’s gonna eat all that stuff up. Makes me nauseous just thinking about it.”

  “So why go?” I direct us over to the highway, which is almost deserted. Not a lot of people leaving town at two in the morning. Rain spatters against the windshield. It looks cold.

  “Because it’s a place to go. Can’t spend all your time in museums unless you wanna go crazy.”

  “There are probably better places. Better clubs.”

  “Sure there are. But the guy who owns that one only owns it because Dad gave him a loan, and Dad likes to know the people I’m with.”

  “So he only lets you go there because he knows the owner?”

  “Yep.” She sighs and turns the sigh into a yawn, and then leans on her elbow against the door. “Welcome to my world.”

  “It sounds miserable,” I tell her.

  “Funny. I was thinking the same thing.”

  She goes quiet, and we pass a few more streetlamps. I count the seconds in between them and arrive at somewhere between three and four.

  “You’re lucky, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lucky that you’re free. No one tells you what you have to do. Where you have to go. What time you have to be home by.” She shifts to her left elbow and leans it against the center consul. “Goddammit. I sound like the Little Mermaid.”

  It occurs to me that I could tell her it’s not as simple as she thinks. That I’ve got to work to survive. That I’ve got the Stitches to think about, and that there are guys out there who would like to see me or some of my brothers dead. That none of us would dream of leaving our houses without an Item somewhere on our person. But I don’t say any of that because I know she’s right. I’ve always been free. More free than she’ll probably ever be.

  Her next words are a whisper. “And it’s not just that. I know he’s like a grandpa with you. He does that with everyone. That’s why people love him so much. He’s so good at hiding it.”

  I say nothing. Six lamps. Seven.

  “I’m afraid of him, Quinn. Honest to God afraid. I even tried to run away when I was sixteen, but he had goons in the next town over. You can’t imagine what it feels like to have someone who’s always watching over you. Someone who tells you he wants the best for you but then keeps you locked in your room for days ‘for your protection.’ Someone who says that they love and protect you and who you think—really think sometimes—must be exactly what he says he is. The nice old Dad everyone thinks is so charming and kind. And then to hear about the kind of things he does to his enemies—to hear all that and to try and tell yourself that it didn’t really happen when you know that it did. To have to live in both places at once. You get so—so tired.”

  “But you’re trying to get away,” I say because I know I’m supposed to say something now, she looks so weak and desperate. “You’re trying to take control. You’re trying to start your own life. If you believe in it, you’ll have your own life one day. Your father will have to see that then. He’ll have no choice.”

  Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The little pools of yellow light are filled with even littler pools of freezing rainwater.

  “You know,” she states and scrubs a palm over her eyes, which I pretend not to notice. “You know you sound just like a high school coach in one of those teen movies.”r />
  She smiles. I smile. She takes her elbow from the consul and lays her arm down alongside mine. Her palm cups the top of my hand on the gearbox. Her fingers are tiny, bony, and freezing cold, and suddenly I want to warm them up between my hands. I want to tell her more cheesy things and remind her that there’s more in the world than her father or club punks like Avery or this tiny, miserable city with its bleak winters and crabby fishermen and old fishermen’s wives. I want to say it’ll be okay even if it won’t because at this moment it seems like only now will she ever believe me.

  Her fingers leave my hand and go over to the gears, cranking up the heat. “It’s fucking cold in here, you know?”