Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  “I was just trying to—”

  “You was just trying to say my daughter don’t deserve to raise her own baby.”

  The service officer stared blankly at Marla and then looked back down at the form. When she looked up again, a smile fluttered but disappeared. “It looks like I’ve got everything I need. Is your cell phone the best way to reach you?”

  “Yes,” Marla hissed.

  The service officer stood. “Someone will contact you within the next week.”

  Carli made to stand, but Marla grabbed her arm, yanked her back into her chair.

  “Why so long?”

  The service officer looked to the door and then at her watch. “We’ll assign a detective. He or she will need to coordinate with the Elmhurst jurisdiction and gather information from the adoption agency before they determine next steps.”

  “Next steps? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means the detective will determine what’s appropriate based upon what he or she discovers,” she said, her voice clipped.

  “It means you ain’t gonna do shit.”

  “We’re busy. And to be honest, it’s not real clear to me that a crime was even committed.” She opened the door. “If you’ll excuse me, there are other people waiting.”

  Marla glowered at the service officer as she stalked past. When they got to the truck, Carli climbed in and stared through the windshield. She waited for the onslaught, waited to hear how stupid she was for starting this whole fiasco, but Marla just glared at her for a long moment, before she pulled her phone from her pocket and punched out a number.

  “Hey, Larry. It’s Marla. It’s payback time. I need you to do something. Tonight.”

  Jon

  All the hotels in Tomah, Wisconsin, required identification and a credit card. So did the first two motels. Finally, out by EZE Storage, they found a motel that looked like a strong wind could bring it down. The man behind the desk was protected by bulletproof glass but took cash and asked no questions. The room’s brown shag carpet and the bedspread with geese flying across a marsh looked like they were stolen from the set of a Nicolas Cage movie. Febreze tried but failed to mask the odor of mouse shit. Jon threw the bedspread into the corner and made a mental note to buy their own sheets the next time they saw a Walmart. He cranked the heater under the window, and it clattered to life. Spring hadn’t quite arrived in Tomah.

  The stink made Jon think about his mom. More precisely, it made him think of Aqua Bay. Those fourteen days in the Ozarks were the last that he’d ever spend with her, but it was a while before he’d realize that. A month after Aunt Carol rescued him from that crack between the bed and the wall, he asked her when he’d be going back to the trailer.

  Aunt Carol said, “Let’s just see how it goes.”

  After a while, the other kids at school began to talk to him, because it seemed like he might stick around. A few even played with him at recess. He got used to the idea of three meals a day, and he soon realized that he didn’t have to cook any of them—much less walk to the 7-Eleven to buy groceries. He stopped wearing the same pants two days in a row, and he liked that he didn’t have to wash them in the shower with dish soap, because at Aunt Carol’s, the laundry was in the basement. Still, he continued to ask when he would go home.

  It took a while to get used to the consistency. Every weekday, Uncle Mark went to work at the same time, and he went to the same job. Aunt Carol quit her job at the library so that she could be at the house every day when Jon got home, with snacks and questions about school. Aunt Carol helped him every night with his homework, and Uncle Mark helped him learn guitar every weekend. Nobody ever slept during the day. They ate dinner together every night. They hugged him before he went to bed and always said I love you. All of this disoriented him at first, but over time, he learned to expect it. As the months passed, he asked about his mom less often, and Aunt Carol’s answers became more and more vague. He was expected to clean his room and load the dishwasher after dinner and say please and thank you and I love you, too. In short, Aunt Carol and Uncle Mark expected him to be a child and nothing more.

  Jon never learned all the levers Aunt Carol had to pull in order to terminate his mom’s parental rights and formally adopt him. His mom lived just three miles away, but she never visited. When he got his driver’s license, he would drive toward the trailer park where she lived about once every month, but then veer in another direction before he got there. The summer after his senior year, he finally parked Aunt Carol’s Saturn in the gravel next to the trailer. He didn’t know what to expect when he knocked on the door, but he had learned a lot in the last decade. He had learned what it meant to be loved. He had learned what it meant to be part of a family. He had learned to recognize a parent, a mother. He had learned that the woman who shuffled around inside while the pit bull next door strained against its chain and barked, was not his mother anymore.

  * * *

  Gail fed Maya, read Goodnight Moon, and then settled her into the Pack ’n Play. Jon found the bag from Sally Beauty Supply in his duffel and pulled out the clippers.

  “We need to take photos for the passports.”

  Gail touched her hair. “You want me to cut it?”

  Jon smiled and tossed her the dye kit. “Clippers are for me.”

  They crowded into the tiny bathroom, and Jon sheared himself down to a military-grade bristle. His ears loomed enormous. Gail bleached and then colored her hair and eyebrows a dirty blond. After they snapped photos of each other against the white shower curtain, Jon settled into the chair to set up the new computer. He slotted his earbuds and played the Smashing Pumpkins loud so that he could focus. He configured the mobile data card so that the IP address couldn’t be traced. He scanned the frantic emails from Paige. He moved their money from their checking account and savings account. He cashed out their 401(k). It took him just thirty minutes to convert their life savings to Bitcoin.

  He checked his watch again. He might be able to figure out the rest himself, but it would take all night, and he didn’t have the energy. Stuart could be trusted. Stuart could at least be trusted to be Stuart. He picked up one of the burners and dialed Stuart’s number. Almost one in the morning, but he would probably answer. He ran the security practice, so he did things that others didn’t do. He knew things that others didn’t know. He answered calls that came in late at night from numbers that he didn’t recognize. Above all else, Stuart kept his mouth shut.

  After six rings, Stuart finally answered. “Who is this?” he asked, no hostility in his voice, just curiosity, efficiency.

  “Jon Durbin.”

  “Hey, Jon. How’s the baby?”

  “The baby’s good. Real good. Listen. I need a favor.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I need to get on the darknet.”

  Stuart went quiet for a moment. “Let me call you back.”

  A few minutes later, Stuart rang from a different number. Jon could hear traffic in the background.

  “This isn’t your cell number,” Stuart said.

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Not that it’s any of my business, but… why the darknet?”

  “I’ve got an uncle in Missouri with colon cancer. No medical weed there. I told him that I’d set him up.”

  Another pause. Jon watched Gail. She sat on the bed against the wall, bent over blank pages that she had torn from the back of the Gideons Bible. Her hair hung wet against her face while she scribbled.

  “We both know that there are easier solutions to that problem than the darknet,” Stuart said. Jon let the silence settle. He knew that Stuart wouldn’t believe him, but he didn’t think it would matter. “So, I assume that you already downloaded TOR?”

  “I did,” Jon said.

  “You need a VPN, too. I would use IPVanish.”

  “OK.”

  “DeepDotWeb has the best reviews of marketplaces. It depends on what you’re really after, but I’d probably try Tochka. You can trust
their suppliers as much as anyone’s.”

  In about twenty minutes, Stuart helped Jon configure all the security protocols, got him logged in.

  “Tochka’s good,” Stuart said. “But there’s a lot of scammers up there.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Stuart was quiet again. Jon heard a siren in the background. “Whatever it is you’re really after, be careful.”

  “Thank you,” Jon said, and hung up. Be careful. It was too late for that.

  It took another hour and several false starts to find someone who seemed legit and responded when Jon pinged them. The negotiation was brief, and Jon sent half the price in Bitcoin. He uploaded their photos and his new name, and a new name for Maya. He sent a Winnipeg address that he’d found on Zillow and the address for the UPS store in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

  “I need your name,” he said.

  Gail looked up from her lists and blinked. She looked different, and it wasn’t just the new shade of hair. It was the tentative way she moved, the look of uncertainty on her face. She had been so quiet all day. After she had said those five words, after she asked that question, she hadn’t said much else, as if she was still unsure of the answer herself. In the long moment before she replied, he felt certain that she would suggest that they go home. He wondered what he would do if she did.

  “Kimberly,” she finally said.

  “Kimberly. I like that.”

  * * *

  Jon took a long shower, trying to clear his head. The lights were off when he came out of the bathroom. He climbed into bed, rolled toward the center, and found Gail there. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tight. Gail’s breath slowed toward sleep, and her head grew heavy on Jon’s arm. He closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep himself. He tried to convince himself that Gail was ready for this, that she knew what she was headed toward. What if we take her? Jon had never felt more certain about an answer. The same memories that terrified him a week ago now drove that certainty. Carli would struggle—maybe not in the same way that his mom had—but she would struggle, and Maya would be the one to suffer. As Jon drifted toward sleep, the smell of Milk Duds mingled with the smell of mouse shit, and his certainty hardened into something else altogether.

  Marla

  Marla and Helen packed without speaking. They pointedly avoided eye contact. The towering shelves of product seemed to push inward, pressurizing their silence. The bruises on Helen’s chin and next to her eye were already beginning to yellow around the edges. Kurt had gone easy on her.

  The morning moved slowly. Only three pickers. Marla kept one eye on the time clock over by the receiving dock. She figured that Larry would be late, but she knew that he would come. And she knew that he’d do what she asked him. She had lent him bail money when he had that scrape with those Albanians up in Lockport a while back. For all his faults, Larry paid his debts.

  At half past nine, Larry clocked in carrying a plastic Jewel bag. He wore a cutoff Budweiser T-shirt that showed the rash of tattoos on his arms. He headed to the break room to get his morning Mountain Dew, and he returned a few minutes later without the bag. He grabbed an order, and after studying it, he handed a wadded Post-it to Marla as he walked off into the maze of shelves. Marla glanced at Helen, but she didn’t seem to have noticed. When Helen carried a box to a skid, Marla opened the note and read it. Meet me at the paper in five minutes.

  Marla packed one more order and then headed around the shelves toward the bathroom. When she neared the binder aisle, though, she turned left instead of right and walked to the far end of the warehouse, to the paper aisle. Copy paper, printer paper, legal pads, fax paper, wide-ruled, yellow, recycled—all of it stacked on skids and perched on shelves. Larry sat on a case of all-purpose bright white copy paper smoking a cigarette, the Jewel bag at his feet. His beer gut strained against the Budweiser logo.

  “You were right,” he said. “They gone.”

  “How you know for sure?”

  “Baby’s room was tore up. All the drawers on the floor. Their bedroom was a shitshow, like they packed real fast. I checked the trash cans like you said. Nothing but Kleenex and junk mail.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  He pulled a laptop computer out of the bag and laid it on the top of a skid of paper. “They left this sitting right on the desk. Seems like a weird thing to leave behind. I tried to start it up, but you need a password. Not sure what the hell you’ll do with that.”

  Marla had no idea about computers. “What else?”

  Larry pulled a leather notebook from the bag—the one Gail Durbin was scribbling on at the hospital. Marla plucked it from his hands, paged through it, and found list after list in neat print. Ointments and Creams, Summer Clothes, Children’s Books About Diversity, Schedule for Fire Alarm Testing. Most of the items on each list had a single straight line through them. Marla chuckled when she saw the list Perfectly Good Reasons Why Carli Hasn’t Called Back. What a nutjob.

  “Check out the last page she wrote in.”

  Marla flipped from the back of the notebook. The last list wasn’t titled. The writing was by the same person, but it was messy, written in a hurry. Nothing was crossed out. Hair clippers, cash, laptop, hair dye, Grand Forks, cell phones, 401K, Winnipeg.

  Gail

  Gail watched the trees slide by, the exits, the mile markers. North of Minneapolis, the maples and the oaks gave way to tall, straight pines. She felt the cold through the glass. Spring was another month away this far north. They would need heavier coats. They would need an apartment and a pediatrician for Maya and a job for Jon, and she had to learn to sign her new name. Kimberly. Or Kim. While Jon worked at the computer the night before, Gail had made lists on the pages she tore out of the motel Bible. She ached for her notebook, but she knew that scribbling on stolen Bible pages wouldn’t be the biggest adjustment she’d have to make. She tried to organize her mind around everything that they would need when they got to Winnipeg. Lists of clothes and toiletries and furniture and cleaning supplies. Thinking about those lists helped to settle her, center her. They helped her lean into their future. They kept her mind away from Carli.

  Gail looked at the clock on the dash—10:45. She wondered if her dad was at work. The rasp of metal on stone bothered some people, but it calmed her dad. Did he hear that soothing racket right now, or was he at home, dealing with her mom, worrying? Would he guess what had happened, that they had run with the baby, or would his mind slip to something worse?

  Jon was quiet. She wondered what he was thinking, wondered how he could stay so calm. After she had said those five words, everything seemed to shift in him, and he started to move with a settled certainty. He seemed to be slipping from their old life so easily, like he was changing a sweater or switching the channel. And he didn’t seem to give Carli a second thought.

  Gail’s mind drifted to the thick calluses on her dad’s hands and to the calluses that she had earned each of those three summers that she spent in the shop. During the winter, her hands would go soft, and the first week back was always bad. The inevitable contact with the stone sent her home with raw fingers, and she’d take Tylenol every four hours. That first summer, she coated her hands with moisturizer, until her dad told her to put the lotion away. He said that softness wasn’t the answer, that she had to trust that the hardness would come. And it did. The second week, the calluses began to form, the result of the abrasion, but a shield against it, too. By the end of the summer, when her hands brushed the spinning stone, she didn’t even feel it.

  Maya’s nose already looked so much like Carli’s that thoughts of Carli would be impossible to avoid. And as Maya grew, there was no telling how much she would come to resemble her birth mother. Maybe it was best to let her mind drift toward Carli, let it chafe against what they had done to her. Maybe Gail should trust that if she let it tear at her a little bit at a time, that calluses would form, to shield her from that nose.

  So she leaned her head against the window and used
the mile markers to find her rhythm. As they passed each green sign, she thought about a doctor’s visit, or a lunch at Panera, or that terrifying first meeting in the diner. When they passed an exit, she let herself think about the pain and confusion and rage that Carli must have been feeling even as they sped north. It hurt, but she had to trust that the pain would prove worth it in the end.

  * * *

  Two hours north of Minneapolis, the engine belched and then resumed its hum.

  “You have gas?” Gail asked.

  Jon checked the gauge. “Almost half a tank.”

  The engine spluttered again, a buzzer blared from the dashboard, and then the motor stopped altogether. Jon forced the car onto the shoulder, gravel pelted the wheel wells, and Maya woke, her cries competing with the buzzing. Jon put the car in park, turned the key off and back on. The buzzer blared. He turned it off and leaned back against the headrest.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s broken,” he said.

  “No shit.”

  He turned the key again. The buzzer wailed. He turned it off. Gail’s dad would get the bag of tools from the trunk, lift the hood, take a few things apart, and as likely as not get it running again. But Jon could only troubleshoot computers—Gail knew there would be no hood lifting. He turned on the hazards and reached into the back seat for his backpack. Gail had forgotten that Maya was crying, had tuned it out, until Jon said, “Why don’t you try holding her?”

  Gail climbed out and into the back seat. A semi rushed by, and the wind pulled at the door as she struggled to close it. Maya’s face bloomed red, her eyes squeezed shut, and her mouth stretched wide with the crying. Gail took Maya from the car seat and hugged her tiny body to her chest and whispered in her ear, but she only cried louder. Gail fumbled to fill a bottle with water from the thermos. She fed Maya as Jon called for a tow truck. Maya sucked, only surrendering the nipple to breathe and to cry a bit more. As the bottle emptied, Maya stilled, and Gail focused on her nose, let it tear at her a little. But she also smelled those pears that told her that she was holding her baby. Maya’s eyes creased open just a tiny bit. The gray of her pupils distracted Gail from the blue and red of the lights, until Jon cursed. Gail finally tore her eyes away from Maya’s and looked out the back window at the squad car.