[The Forever 01.0] Forever Innocent

by Deanna Roy

  We lurched forward, and I screamed in Gavin’s ear. I could feel his laughter in his ribs, even though the motor drowned out the sound. When we paused at the exit to the complex, he turned his head. “You’ll be fine.”

  Maybe. So far we’d only been going five miles per hour. I wasn’t sure I could hang on at sixty.

  We jetted onto the street, and I screamed again. I felt like I might rocket off the bike at any moment.

  Thankfully, we hit a red light almost immediately. “I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

  “Sure you can. Just relax into it. Sink into me a little rather than being so stiff.”

  He took off more carefully this time. I tried to be like Jell-O, and fitting loosely against Gavin seemed to help. I could sense when he was about to lean one direction or the other and could move with him. The ride became less bumpy.

  We swung onto the highway, and I tried to stay relaxed as we merged into traffic and really got going fast. I could see so much, every direction, unlike the fragmented view through windowpanes in a car. I could smell the ocean as we rode along the harbor. The air was exhilarating, flowing around my neck and tossing my ponytail. Okay, I was getting it. I could see the appeal.

  We exited to go east on I-8 toward the mountains. The drive would take a half-hour just to clear civilization. Gavin had packed some sandwiches. It would be a good evening, even if we never got around to the assignment.

  As the minutes passed, random body parts began to get tired of their position, and I would adjust. First my neck, then my foot, vibrating on the rest. Eventually I found the right place to fit, and I could just hang on, my head against Gavin’s back, and watch the landscape change from city to suburbs to open road.

  We slowed down past Alpine, and he turned off the freeway onto a dirt trail.

  “I don’t think this is a real road!” I said.

  “I know!” he yelled. “That makes it better!”

  We followed the path for another mile through scrub brush and dirt, until we were in the foothills. The going got slower, as the road was bumpy. I thought my guts were going to get jarred right out of my body.

  Finally Gavin turned onto another path. Cars couldn’t come here. We hadn’t seen anyone for miles and I didn’t expect we would.

  Gavin revved up a hillside until the path broke down into nothing but rocks and dirt. When he killed the engine, I realized my ears were ringing.

  “We can walk it from here,” he said. “Just make sure we have the flashlight for getting back.”

  I tried to lift my leg from the bike, but it wouldn’t quite go, stiff and locked into position. Gavin laughed and slid his hand beneath my thigh to give me a boost. I managed to swing back over, my muscles protesting. “I hope you didn’t have any wild ideas for that flat up there, because I can barely move.”

  “We’ll start with a full body massage,” Gavin said. He tugged off his helmet and hung it on the handlebars. “We should have a good view here.”

  “I’ll say.” I handed him my bowling-ball helmet. “I can’t even imagine how far it is to electricity, much less lights that would interfere with the stars.”

  Gavin unpacked the leather satchel with water and sandwiches and the folder with our assignment. He handed these to me and untied a blanket from the other side.

  “Flashlight?” I asked.

  “Right.” He dug around in a little box attached behind the seat. “Got it.”

  We tramped across the parched earth that crunched with dried grass punctuated with tumbleweeds. “Looks like a good place to leave a body,” I said.

  He laughed. “You might want to learn to ride the bike before you bump me off in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Point taken.”

  We scrambled up an embankment to a plateau, which was only a few yards wide but plenty big enough to spread a blanket and our meager things. The wind whipped in random bursts. I tucked the folder beneath the edge of the blanket to keep it safe and laid the food on a corner. “Now we just wait for dark?”

  “Time for that body massage,” Gavin said and sat next to me, pulling me between his legs.

  His hands worked the muscles of my shoulders, and I relaxed into him. The sun burned yellow on the horizon, just taking its first tentative dip behind a set of hills to the west. The ocean was long gone from our view, but the rolling landscape, barren and edged in scrubby trees and rock, offered a different brand of beautiful.

  “We should have brought a camera,” I said.

  “I can snap a shot with my phone,” Gavin said. “Crappy though it is.”

  “Mine won’t take decent pictures at all. It’s too old,” I said.

  He tugged his phone from a pocket. “First the sunset,” he said, snapping an image of the sun’s rays just starting to striate over the hills. Then he flipped the phone around. “And now us.” He laid his head against mine and took the shot.

  Gavin turned the phone around. The picture was only of our chins and chests. “Fail!” I said, laughing.

  “One more.” He held the phone out, angling it up a bit more. “I’m not practiced at selfies.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “I’m not even on any of those social-media sites.”

  “I know. I looked,” Gavin said.

  I swallowed. I hadn’t wanted to be found, not by Gavin or anybody from my past. But now life was settling in again, back on track. Gavin snapped the shot, our happy faces backed by mountain and sky. It was the sort of thing you would post to your friends, but I didn’t do that. I couldn’t afford to be discovered, to be shared, to leave a trail. I had to live solely in the here and now.

  Chapter 33: Gavin

  I stared at the picture of Corabelle and me for a minute, trying to remember the last time we had an image together. We’d missed prom. I’d skipped graduation. It must have been some random shot. I didn’t have much of anything from those days, not even a snapshot of us. Just the picture of Finn from the funeral.

  “So we’re on a plateau, right?” Corabelle asked.

  “Well, that would be a compliment to this little chink in the mountains.” I stretched out on the blanket, hands beneath my head. A few stars were already emerging in the twilight.

  “So, Mr. Geology Major, tell me what it is then. A mesa?”

  “Not really big enough to qualify for that either.”

  Corabelle settled next to me. “So what created this little flat space?”

  “Same as the mountains, tectonic shifts in the mantle. Pushed the ground upward.”

  “But what makes it flat?”

  I swiveled my head to take in the landscape around us. “Probably wind and erosion. We’re in the path of a natural tunnel, so it wore down faster than the hills around us. Although it could have been formed this way from the start, when the ground goes straight up while being pushed. Sedimentary rock tends to split.”

  “Huh.” She laid her head on my shoulder, and I wanted to hold on to the moment forever.

  “So, Gavin?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “What are you going to do with a degree in geology?”

  I chuckled. “You mean if I ever manage to finish?”

  “How many hours do you have?”

  “About sixty.”

  She sat up. “That’s all? Four years to get sixty hours?”

  “I work full-time. I couldn’t take a full load.”

  Corabelle settled back down. “Wow. You’ll be in San Diego for another four years easy, at that rate.”

  I didn’t know what she was thinking, but it sounded like she was making plans around me. “I can transfer, if you want to go somewhere else.”

  She got very still, and I wondered if I assumed too much. Only a week had passed — a very good week, and with crazy moments. I smiled to myself remembering the race down the library stairwell yesterday. We were good together. I couldn’t help but think we were back to our old plan. “Corabelle, you tell me what you want.”

  Her face pressed into my s
hirt. I reached for her ponytail and twirled it in my fingers.

  “I want to go back in time,” she said.

  “And do what? Figure out which night got us Finn and not do it?”

  She didn’t answer, so I stared up at the sky, growing darker to reveal more of the stars. I wouldn’t mind a trip to the past, at least to the funeral. “I wouldn’t go away,” I said.

  She lifted her head. “What?”

  “The funeral. If I could go back in time, I’d stay. I would be there for you.” And not go to Mexico, I added to myself. That was worse.

  “I don’t know what all I would change,” Corabelle said. “There are so many things.”

  “Like what?”

  She got still again, so I waited. The North Star was visible among the others, bright and almost twinkling.

  “I can’t say I wouldn’t want Finn. That wouldn’t be right,” she said. “He had his little life.”

  Until I signed it away. My whole body tensed, but I forced it to relax again. No point going there.

  She wanted to talk about him. I could do that, for her. “I was so panicked when you told me your water broke. But you did great.”

  “I wasn’t screaming like the lady in the next room.”

  “Man, she had some lungs.”

  Corabelle turned onto her back. “You got to see him first.”

  “I was closer to that end.”

  She punched me in the ribs. “I didn’t want you to look.”

  “My kid was going to come out. It’s not like I hadn’t seen those parts before!”

  “But they were all gooey and bloody.”

  “True. I wasn’t thinking of licking them or anything.”

  She smacked me again. “Gavin!”

  “He slid out pretty easy, really.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Well, it looked easy. His little head started to pop out, then everything sort of stopped for a second. I was a little confused, because he was all white.”

  “It’s called vernix.”

  “It was not what I expected. I almost dropped the camera. He looked like a snow baby.”

  “I didn’t really get to see that.”

  “They cleaned him off pretty quick, got the worst of it.”

  “They took him away so fast.”

  Because he was sick, I thought, but didn’t say it. Corabelle turned in to me again, her head on my chest, rising and falling with my every breath.

  I knew the doctors were tense about it. They were supposed to let Corabelle hold the baby, but instead they got him cleaned up and into a plastic bed right away. We only got a few minutes with him before they rolled him down to the NICU.

  I stayed with her a little while, so she wouldn’t feel deserted, but when her parents came in, I took off down the hall to see when we would get him back. I didn’t know how anything worked. We hadn’t even finished birthing classes when she went into labor. The doctor on call wasn’t ours and said we should probably go to a bigger hospital, but then the baby just started coming.

  At first the nurse at the window didn’t want to let me into the NICU. They didn’t know who I was and Finn had Corabelle’s last name taped to his bed. Apparently I was supposed to have some wristband.

  Finally one of the nurses recognized me and let me through. I wanted to go over to him right away, but she made me stand at a sink and scrub my hands and arms and even use a little pick under my fingernails before I could go into the area where the beds were.

  I couldn’t even see him. He was surrounded by doctors and nurses. When I finally got a glimpse, I could only see his little hat, a stretchy thing with white and blue stripes. He hadn’t cried, I realized. Babies were supposed to cry when they were born.

  The nurse who let me in made a space for me in the circle around the plastic crib and tried to explain what they were doing as they attached disks and put something down his throat. But I couldn’t follow her, and I couldn’t stay calm. Finn looked terrible, things stuck to his head and a giant tube taped to his mouth. The sounds of the machine were awful, like a helicopter flying.

  The nurse gave me a card with his weight and measurements to take back to Corabelle. Despite my horror at everything, I didn’t want to leave. The NICU was strewn with rocking chairs between the plastic incubators. This row was completely empty, so I sat in one to wait.

  I heard a lot of words I didn’t know. I could tell they were worried about oxygen levels and his heart. When several of the doctors moved away and I could see Finn again, terror washed over me. He wasn’t pink like before. He was gray. Was he dying right there?

  I jumped up and grabbed one of the nurses in pink scrubs. “This is my son. What is happening to him?”

  Another woman, this one with a doctor badge, took my shoulder and pulled me out of the way. Another team arrived and began working frenetically, packing up the machines like they were going to move him. “We’ll have a meeting with you and the baby’s mother shortly.”

  “But I’m standing here now!”

  She barely even looked at me, checking things off some damn piece of paper. “We are taking him to do some more tests, mainly pictures of his heart and lungs. I can’t give you a conclusive answer to what the baby is facing right now, but I promise you, we will come down and talk to you as soon as we can.”

  I wanted to snatch the folder from her. “Finn! His name is Finn! Why are you putting tubes on him?”

  “His first Apgar scores were low, at four, and now Finn has dropped to a three.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a measure of the health of a newborn baby. Ten is the highest.” She glanced over at the team, who were now moving the bed out of the room. “Was anything wrong at any of the sonograms?”

  I ran my hands through my hair, panic rising fast. “No, he was always healthy, always fine. Until he came early.”

  She nodded and flipped through the chart again. “Go see to the mother. We’ll be there soon.” She gave me a smile, like that would be reassuring, and said, “Try not to worry.” Then she tugged her phone out of her pocket, clicked on something, and walked away.

  “Her name is Corabelle,” I tried to say, but the doctor was already gone.

  I stood rooted to the floor, unable to move. On the other aisle, a few women sat by more plastic beds. One of them looked at me sympathetically, and I couldn’t stand it.

  The pink-scrubs nurse came back in. “Mr. Mays? Let’s go back to your room. There isn’t anything you can do for Finn here.”

  “How long will he be gone?”

  “Probably a while.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  She led me back to the sliding doors. “We’re going to do everything we can.”

  I was kicked out. The hallway morphed into a horrifying wall of mirrors, every room decorated with pink or blue ribbons announcing the birth of happy, healthy babies. Mine could be fighting for his life right now, dying, or dead, and I wouldn’t even know.

  I gripped the front of my shirt, so overwhelmed with fear that I thought I was having a heart attack. My chest was tight and I could barely breathe. I leaned against the wall. Corabelle was probably all snug in her bed, happy and waiting for them to bring Finn back. What would I tell her?

  My lungs sucked in air and I forced myself to be calm. She was going to need me, and I couldn’t let her down.

  Corabelle had known the minute I walked back into her room that something was wrong. “Where’s Finn?”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “They’ve taken him for some tests.”

  “What kind of tests?” Corabelle’s dad asked.

  “Pictures of his heart and lungs. He’s having some trouble with his oxygen levels, I think.”

  “I’m going to go see what is going on,” he said.

  “You need some sort of wristband to get into the NICU.” I held up my empty arm.

  “I’ll get that taken care of.” He strode from the room.

  Maybe they w
ould take him more seriously than a teenage boy. Corabelle was sobbing in a way I’d never seen her do, great heaving gulps.

  “Oh, baby,” her mom said, “it’s the hormones. After I had you I cried for hours a day. It’ll get better.”

  I wasn’t so sure. The sides of the bed kept me from crawling in next to her like I wanted, so I just perched on the end, my hand on her ankle. “They asked about the sonogram. There wasn’t anything wrong, was there? I don’t remember it.”

  “We just had two,” Corabelle said, clutching the tissue her mom handed her. “They didn’t say anything about a problem. They said he was fine.”

  The wait was excruciating. Corabelle cried herself to sleep. I moved to a chair in the corner. Her mother sat on the foam sofa that converted to a bed. Her father returned after a while, shaking his head. “I couldn’t get anything out of anybody, other than I can’t see him right now.” He glanced over at me. “I had to tell them you two were married. Otherwise Gavin doesn’t have any part in this. I didn’t know that.”

  I swallowed and glanced at Corabelle. She hadn’t been wearing her ring when we left for the hospital, so she didn’t have it now.

  Her father sat on the sofa. “We just have to wait.”

  Corabelle’s mother buried her face against his shoulder. “I should have been in here when he was born,” she said. “We should have gotten here faster.”

  “That wouldn’t have made a difference,” her father said.

  “But I would have gotten to see him!” She brought a handkerchief to her nose. “What if something happens?”

  “You’ll get to see him.” He put his arm around her, and I envied his ability to pull her close. Corabelle seemed so far away.

  A nurse came in and Corabelle’s dad and I both stood up.

  “I’m here to check on Mom,” she said.

  “What about the baby?” I asked.