DON’T HURT MY BABY

by Zoey Parker

  Jake and I had gone to school together but he’d dropped out after his own father died. He couldn’t afford tuition anymore so he’d come home and gotten a job. Lionel had taken pity on him and paid for the rest of his schooling. I couldn’t ever admit it, but part of me always resented Jake for that. My papa seemed to love him more than he loved his own flesh and blood. Jake was a good guy, but sometimes I had doubts about him. Sometimes I wondered whether or not he was going to try to take over. The way Lionel favored him, well, it wouldn’t exactly have come as a shock.

  Jake had been my best friend, but now I wondered if he was trying to become my enemy. And now, part of me couldn’t help but wonder if he was trying to fuck me on this coke deal. It would have been easy for Jake to lie. For Jake to get the coke from his Russian buddies, then to stash it and wait for me to be ousted by my own father. Then Jake could go up to my old man and say he had the stash, just say the word. I shook my head. I knew it was useless thinking like this, but I couldn’t help it. This whole situation had put me in one hell of a rut.

  My father’s house was a grand Colonial-style. It would have been a real classy place aside from the lawn furniture that was scattered across the front lawn. An almost-naked brunette girl was stretched out on a chaise lounge with a pink drink in her tan hand.

  “Hey, boy,” she called. “It’s been a while, Zane!”

  “Hi, Terry,” I said.

  The brunette girl rolled her eyes. “It’s Theresa,” she said pointedly. “No one calls me Terry anymore.” She flashed me a bright-white smile and rolled over on her belly, squeezing her tits together with her arms. “You wanna have a drink with me?” Her skin was so brown that she almost looked native.

  I rolled my eyes. Ignoring her, I stepped into the house. “Pa?” I called loudly. “You in here?”

  “I’m upstairs,” Lionel roared back. “Come up here, Zane.”

  I let the glass partition door slam to a close behind me and took the steps up two at a time.

  “Hi, Pops,” I said as I slid into his bedroom. “How ya feeling today?”

  Lionel coughed. When my eyes focused on him in the semidarkness, I could barely restrain myself from gasping. Lionel looked horrible. He was both emaciated and shrunken, with his skin in loose flaps all over his body. He’d been dark like me, but in his old age, he was looking increasingly pale. He was almost bald, except for a few greasy black strands that were clinging to his scalp. I shuddered as the smell of old person hit me — like mothballs that had been stored in a closet. He smelled like he was rotting from the inside out.

  “Not good,” Lionel said. “Sit down, boy. Talk.”

  I flopped into a chair at the foot of the bed and tried to keep my face neutral as I stared at the skeleton that had once been my father. “Jake still doesn’t have any intel,” I said carefully. “I checked again today and he said he ain’t heard nothin’.”

  Lionel shook his head. He opened his mouth to reply but a loud cough came out instead. I waited patiently for his fit to subside. When he looked at me again, he was red in the face from the effort of his illness.

  “I was worried you’d say that,” Lionel said drily. “He doesn’t have any idea when those Russians are going to come through?”

  I shook my head. “It could be a week; it could be another month,” I said with a sigh. “I’m going to start looking for another source. I know a few dealers in the area who might like to step up to the challenge.”

  Lionel shook his head. “I want this done through the Russians. They’re the most professional out of everyone. You know it’ll be done clean. We have the funds, right? What’s the hold up?”

  A man never felt powerless like he did when he told his father that he didn’t know. “No idea,” I admitted. “I know it’s not what you wanna hear, Pops.”

  “You’re damn right it’s not what I want to hear,” Lionel grumbled. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel comfortable leaving the family business to you when you can’t even pull off a simple deal like this one. Men in my day used to get things done. We didn’t sit around on our asses and fuck women all day instead.”

  An insult about Theresa was on the tip of my tongue but I didn’t say anything. Theresa and I had gone to high school together; she was a year or so younger than me. And now she was my dad’s newest plaything, a sort of live-in girlfriend who could cook and clean for him. She looked like she was having fun but I never asked her how it really felt to take care of such an ailing geezer. Lionel was a temperamental old man. I couldn’t imagine they’d sit around playing bingo or some shit like that. And judging from her antics on the lawn, I had a feeling she was probably pretty fucking bored.

  “Pops, I do the best I can,” I snapped. “I’ll get this fixed. Trust me.”

  Lionel eyed me with surprising intelligence for someone who was so clearly ailing. “I’ll trust you when I see the stuff. You plan on showing that to me soon?”

  “Soon as I get it,” I said. I could feel my blood pressure rising by the second. “I got another meeting with Jake tonight. If he doesn’t say shit, I’m going to the Russians myself.” I paused. It was a bold statement. “I’ll make something happen, Pops. Just you wait.”

  “I been waiting a month now,” Lionel snapped. “And good. You handle it yourself if you want to make sure it gets done. I told you that years ago, boy. You never listen to me.”

  “I got to go, Pops,” I said, stepping forward and leaning down to kiss Lionel’s cheek. He smelled like bathroom cleaner and mold. “Have a good day, you hear? Be good to Terry.”

  “She’s getting old,” Lionel said in a distasteful voice. “Can’t you find me another girl? A good cook this time. She burns everything. I have to tell her I want the damn food raw for her to cook it good!”

  “All right, Pops, I’ll tell her to stop,” I said.

  Lionel looked away and I knew that was my cue to leave.

  “Wait, Zane,” Lionel said. He let out a heavy breath. “There’s one more thing. Come sit.” He patted the bed next to him. I walked over and sat down. “I have some news.”

  “Yeah?” I looked at him. “What is it, Pops?”

  “Gianni has a daughter,” Lionel said shortly. “A grown daughter. Probably close to your age. And we gotta find her.”

  I frowned. “What the fuck. He had a kid? I never fuckin’ knew that. That old dog!”

  Lionel actually laughed. “He had a wife, too. Can you believe that shit? Kept it a secret for so fuckin’ long. And we thought he was a homo!” He started laughing again until tears were running down his dry, wrinkled face. “Poor Gianni, rest in peace, you bastard.”

  I blinked. “So…her last name would be Bianchi,” I offered.

  Lionel nodded. “Right, somethin’ like that. I don’t know what happened to his wife. I never bothered to ask. But I found out about the daughter today. Gianni must have loved her — he left her everything. And someone’s gonna come sniffing around for her now that the news is out.”

  I shifted uncomfortably on the bed. Suddenly everything from that night started to make sense. Why Isabella said she hadn’t grown up with her father. How she and her mother had always been poor. Why she had that great last name and she was still working as a waitress. “I think I found her,” I said. “Her name is Isabella.”

  “Good,” Lionel said. He didn’t even seem remotely surprised. “Gianni always wore this.” He dipped his hand into the night table and came back with part of a gold necklace. “If it’s her, she’ll have the other half.”

  He handed me the locket and suddenly a heavy memory from the night with Isabella came rushing back to me, flooding my senses. I shuddered. It was like she was in the room with me.

  “I got it, Pops,” I said to Lionel. “I’ll find her.”

  Lionel nodded. “Soon, boy,” he added. “She’s in danger, and it’s growing every day.”

  Chapter 7

  Isabella

  I spent the rest of the night in a daze. Ricardo let me go
home — Tammy ran to him and told him I barfed. He was at the door of the ladies’ before I could even step outside.

  “Isabella, go home,” Ricardo said in disgust. “You’re too sick to be at work. What did I fuckin’ tell you?”

  I blushed a bright hot red. “I’m sorry, Ricardo. I wasn’t feeling this poorly when I left the house.”

  I was afraid to be alone with myself. When I got out of work, I called Janice.

  “Hey, are you busy?”

  “Never too busy for you,” Janice said ironically. “What can I do you for?”

  “I need help,” I mumbled into the phone. “I’m coming over. Are you home?”

  “Yeah,” Janice said. She covered the receiver and I heard her yell something to someone. “Sorry, the kid’s being a brat,” she said mildly. “Come on over. We’re having macaroni and cheese for dinner. Can you bring a vegetable?”

  The sound of both mac and cheese and vegetables filled me with the urge to vomit again, but I didn’t want to tell her I was pregnant. I didn’t want to say the words aloud. I didn’t want them to be true. If they were true…well, if they were true, then I’d decide what to do when I knew for sure. But right now, I didn’t want to jinx myself. That was like asking for trouble.

  I dreaded the idea of telling Zane. I didn’t know whether or not I should say anything. After our night together, even though it was magnificent, he’d made it pretty fucking clear he didn’t want a relationship with me. And if I told him I was pregnant, I wasn’t even sure if he’d believe me. After all, women did things like that sometimes. Kyle had told me that was why he’d married his wife. Then a few months after the wedding, she had a “miscarriage.” When Kyle had first told me the story, I’d been horrified. But now I could sort of see the point of view: if a woman thought a man was going to walk no matter what, why not try to trap him into staying?

  Obviously, that wasn’t what I’d done at all.

  When I left work, I drove to a drugstore. The arsenal of pregnancy tests — a bunch of pink and blue boxes — confronted me as I stared at them. They almost seemed to taunt me, like they knew what the result was going to be. Finally, I grabbed a handful of different brands and carried them to the counter. The clerk was indifferent. I might as well have been buying hemorrhoid ointment or a package of bacon. When I’d paid and the tests were in a bag, I rushed over to the grocery store. The first vegetable I saw that didn’t make me feel even more nauseous was some corn. I grabbed a few ears and paid for them, then dashed out of the store and hopped back in the car. I had to pee in an urgent way that I hadn’t felt a few minutes ago. I wondered if it was the pregnancy tests, subconsciously messing with me.

  “Hi,” I said a few breathless minutes later. “Can I use your bathroom?”

  Janice was juggling a toddler on her hip and a baby in her arms. “Sure,” she said. She looked older and more tired than she had the last time I’d seen her.

  I thrust the bag of corn at her feet and leapt past her, down the hallway to the messy bathroom with the pink-tiled floor I remembered so well.

  Janice had bought her parents’ house and they’d used the money to buy a retirement condo in Florida. Even though our mothers had been best friends, I hadn’t seen Janice’s mom since I was in high school. I remembered the house well, though. I had memories of being hungover in this very bathroom, puking until I thought my guts were going to fall out. I remember I’d fallen asleep on the grimy pink tiles. Janice had brought me a box of soda crackers and some ginger ale and stayed up with me all night. Back when we were good friends. Back when I wasn’t such a shitty person to her.

  I dumped the bag on the floor and the pregnancy tests scattered everywhere. Grabbing a pink box, I ripped the cardboard flaps open and squatted on the toilet with the plastic stick held between my legs. Even though I really had to pee, I had to close my eyes and relax before the stream started coming. Warm urine gushed over my hand and I jerked back, sending droplets across the already messy bathroom.

  With a deep sigh, I set a timer for three minutes on my phone. I grabbed another pregnancy test box. Couldn’t hurt, right? The worst it could do was lie to me.

  “Isabella, are you all right in there?” Janice rapped on the door. I heard the toddler wailing to be put down and Janice’s subsequent fussy replies. “Do you need any help?”

  “I’m fine,” I called through gritted teeth. “Just feeling kind of sick.”

  “You look like hell,” Janice said casually. “You know, if you let yourself go, that guy isn’t going to come back and ask you out.”

  I could have slapped her. “I’ll be right out!” I called in a fake-cheery voice. “Okay? Just leave me alone for a couple of minutes.”

  “Fine, you don’t have to be so touchy,” Janice replied. I let out a sigh of relief when I heard her heavy footsteps down the hallway. “I was only trying to help.”

  The timer on my phone dinged. I shut my eyes and reached out the stick that I’d first used. With trembling fingers, I brought it close to me. There was a plus sign on the test. I let out a loud wail and threw the stick against the wall. It clattered to the floor just as I felt the tears well up in my eyes.

  ***

  “You still look like hell,” Janice said after I’d plopped down at the kitchen table and told her everything. “So, you’re pregnant, huh?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said with a grimace. Janice frowned. “I mean, I didn’t mean it like that,” I explained. “I just…it was a one-night stand! I don’t want a baby from a one-night stand!”

  “So, get an abortion,” Janice said. She lit a cigarette and exhaled gracefully over her shoulder. “You’re already going to hell anyway.” She winked at me and I felt myself relax just a tenth of an inch.

  “I can’t get an abortion,” I said. “I couldn’t do that to my baby.” Even though I wasn’t sure how I felt about what was growing inside of me, I didn’t think I could just get rid of it. After all, having an abortion just because it wouldn’t be a convenient time for me to have the baby would be heartless. I couldn’t do something like that.

  Janice rolled her eyes. “That’s what I said, too,” she replied. “But trust me, that is a baby,” she said, pointing towards the wailing infant in his crib on the other side of the room. “What’s inside of you ain’t a baby. That’s just a bunch of cells together, sweetheart. You gotta do what’s best for you, you know?”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t seem right,” I said. Janice glared at me. “But I’ll think about it, okay?”

  “Good girl,” Janice said. She ashed her cigarette in an empty can of Pepsi. “I wish I’d been smarter about having these rugrats around. I shoulda known Derrick was a deadbeat.”

  Derrick was the man who’d fathered Janice’s two children. They were still married, legally, but he’d been gone for over six months now with no word. She claimed she didn’t know what had happened to him, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if Janice had been the one to tell him to go. She liked to do things her own way. I could see her kicking him out just for leaving the toilet seat up.

  “I just don’t know what to do,” I moaned, putting my head in my hands on the table. “I don’t think he wants anything to do with me. He made it pretty fucking clear he doesn’t want a relationship with me.”

  Janice shrugged. “Some guys come around when their little swimmers have done God’s work,” she said sarcastically. “You think he’d jump on the daddy train?”

  I laughed bitterly. “He is not father material,” I said. “His mansion is a glorified bachelor pad. I couldn’t see a kid crawling around there.”

  Janice shrugged. “So then he might give you some money,” she said. “You ever thought of that? I only have to work two days a week. Derrick’s parents take care of me.”

  I looked around her messy house. I don’t think taken care of is the right word for you, I thought. But I knew with Zane it would probably be different. His leather furniture had spoken of wealth, not to mention that incredible ca
r he drove around. Maybe he would pay me once he found out I was pregnant. Maybe he’d want to be involved, maybe not. But maybe, just maybe, there was a chance I wouldn’t have to do this alone.

  “You’re not alone,” Janice said, as if reading my mind. “A hundred thousand women have all been there before, you know that. It ain’t just you, sweetheart. Men are scum.”