Noah.
Beautiful Noah. Lost Noah. Blown out of her life by a roadside bomb, trapped in a burning Humvee. Gone before Rain had a chance to tell him that she was pregnant. His death had made it easier to let her mother talk Rain into giving up the baby. Giving it away like unwanted junk mail.
Rain turned away, not wanting to see the embroidery on the driver’s hat. Instead, she looked out at the storm as the car sliced down a side street, paused for a second at the corner, and then plunged into the crosscutting traffic of the avenue. Horns blared and tires squealed wetly, but the driver just poured on the gas and trailed twin streams of pale smoke from his nostrils. The smoke smelled of cinnamon and mint. Weird, but not bad.
“Safe,” murmured Rain aloud, and a moment later, her conscious mind realized she’d said it. She played back that word in her head and wondered what she meant, why she said it. Safe? The whole day had fallen off its hinges. No, it was worse than that—she’d blacked out and lost a day. Friday was gone. Completely gone, without even a smear of memory left behind. Even on her worst days using crack she hadn’t lost an entire day. Hours, sure; clarity and perspective, no doubt; but not a whole damn day. She was broke, and she was losing her mind. Hallucinating. Seeing people who weren’t there. The old Mexican lady, the little boy, and that creepy guy. No way seeing imaginary people equaled being safe.
So … safe? How was she safe?
She fished for a tissue, but everything in her purse was wet. In panic, she grabbed her phone and pushed a button; the screen came on, but there were still no bars.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but do you have any tissues?”
“Sure,” he said and handed back a small box of Scotties. She plucked several out, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and then used more to blot her phone dry. Then she remembered the glasses, and she wiped and dried them, too, and put them on. The inside of the car became much clearer. It was a very clean vehicle, despite the vape smells. The ID card on the back of the seat said that the driver was ALEXANDER STICKLEY. The photo looked old because the man who smiled from the picture looked much younger, his nose was straighter, and there were no visible burns. The face in the picture smiled at her. A safe smile, and again she mouthed that word.
Safe.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Despite everything—instincts, common sense, a life lived as a woman in New York, and every horrific news story she’d ever read—Rain fell asleep in the back of the car.
It was warm, the car’s suspension turned the potholes into a cradle-rock rhythm, and the song the driver hummed sounded more like a lullaby than old rock ’n’ roll. She closed her eyes for a moment and immediately sank down.
She fell through shadows into dreams, and into that part of the dreamscape where memories lived, untarnished or unvarnished by the years.
It was ten years ago and she was sixteen again. Heavily pregnant, waddling through Central Park. Her due date was the day after tomorrow, and she felt unbearably ugly. Everything hurt. None of the TV sweetness of pregnancy had any relevance to her experience. She did not glow. She was not looking forward to the big day. She was not buying baby clothes or decorating a room for the happy little bundle.
None of that.
All the paperwork was done except for her signature. Rain’s mother had seen to that. It was a process Mom had started on that awful, awful Thursday seven and a half months ago. A one-two-three punch that nearly killed Rain. Or maybe it had killed the parts of her that mattered. She could remember the whole timetable of the day she learned she was pregnant. It was the worst day of her life. Well, so far.
At 10:17 on that terrible morning, Dr. Sharon Bernstein had told Rain that she was pregnant. Six weeks at least. It was a punch to the head but not entirely unexpected. When the gynecologist asked if Rain could estimate the date of conception, the answer was right there. The night before Noah left to join his unit and ship out to the Middle East. The one and only time Rain had ever had sex. One time. The pill had helped her with bad cramps, but it hadn’t stopped one little bastard of a sperm from doing its job. She would be sixteen when she gave birth. A baby having a baby, as so many people later pointed out to her, starting with dear old Mom.
1:55 that afternoon. Rain had come home and hid in her room, composing a hundred different versions of an email to Noah. The messages were all over the place. Wildly passionate and joyful, but reading like the trash romance fiction they were. Straightforward and practical, lacking all emotion. Pleading, apologetic, desperate. She had managed to compose one that sounded pretty good, and then the phone rang.
3:05. It was a call from a woman Rain had never met. Noah’s older sister, Michelle, who lived in Queens. Telling Rain something. Words that stabbed her. Words that blinded her and stole the light and tore screams from her. Something about a land mine in Iraq. An IED. Improvised explosive device. Words about the truckful of soldiers. All dead except one. Not the right one. The rest of them had been burned. More words after that. About Noah. About them—whoever they were—sending the body home. Words about funeral arrangements. Closed coffin. Arlington, maybe. Words that spilled onto the floor.
3:20. Rain remembered falling but not landing. She didn’t remember them taking her to the hospital. Her brain rebooted itself when she was in the ER, and then all she could do was scream. Until they gave her some drugs.
The drugs helped. Diazepam. Very nice.
11:30 that same night. Mom and Dad sitting with her after they brought her home from the ER. Someone had given her parents a sheaf of pamphlets about grief counseling. As soon as she was alone, Rain tore them up.
Sitting on the couch in the living room. Dad on one side, saying almost nothing except meaningless little things that were supposed to be comforting, but weren’t. Mom holding her hand, but without warmth, without really touching her. It was like holding the hand of a mannequin at Macy’s. Cool and plastic. Mom talking without taking a break.
“—it’s for the good of everyone…”
“—it’s the best thing for the baby…”
“—you’re too young…”
“—why ruin your life?”
“—it’s not like he was going to come back and marry you…”
“—I’m not saying it’s God’s judgment, but what did he expect? Raping an underage girl…”
Dad had made one attempt to counter that point. He looked up statutory rape on the net and read, “In New York State, a person who is under age sixteen but older than thirteen years old can consent to sex with a person who is no more than four years older.” Rain had been fifteen when she slept with Noah, and he had been eighteen.
“Technically it was legal and—” he tried to say, but Mom had silenced him with a glare so ferocious that Dad said nothing else the rest of the evening.
Mom returned to her litany, telling Rain that she could not raise a baby. Not and stay in school. Not and have a life. Not and blah blah blah. On and on until Rain, still deeply in shock over the call from Michelle, nodded.
That was then. As she walked through Central Park, she reviewed the timetable, able to remember it all with a cruel clarity. They weren’t things she could forget.
Since then, it all proceeded with clockwork precision. Every detail had been arranged by Mom. The right doctors, the right hospital, the paperwork to give up the baby to the people at a reputable adoption agency. After the actual birth, Rain knew she would never see her baby again.
Nor did she want to.
Except when she did.
Although she was a minor, her signature on the last forms was required by law. Not even someone like Rain’s mother could force her to give up the baby, which is why she said, “It’s your choice, Lorraine. It’s your choice.” Over and over and over again, day in and day out.
That had been the worst day of her life.
Central Park was where she always went to think. Rain lumbered heavily along the winding footpaths in the park beneath a sky that was a startling blue. But, true t
o the depressing poetry of her life, there were gray storm clouds peering with bad intent over the eastern skyline.
A colored streamer caught her eye, and she turned to watch it flutter. It was one of several that unwound across the sky, twisting like dragon tails, painting the day in colors of saffron and red and white. Each stream was attached to a tall bamboo pole that swayed above the trees. Rain stopped and stood looking up at them. It was then that she heard a voice speaking or chanting in a low, almost inaudible mumble. A bass voice, and the sound of it rolled through the air and changed the texture of the moment. Rain recognized it as some kind of Buddhist chanting, like what she’d heard at school when they showed videos of world religions. She couldn’t understand any of the words, but the sound of them lulled her to the edge of a softness of mind. A nice place, especially when the world around her was so hard.
After a few moments, she began walking again, following the path under a small hill and around a line of shrubs to where it ran past a field. At least a hundred people sat cross-legged on colored mats. They were arranged in a half circle around a group of five monks in reddish-yellow robes. Four of the monks sat on a long red mat, and the fifth, older than the others by many years, sat in the middle of their line on a small stool. Everyone was chanting in harmony. Rain wasn’t sure if it was a song or a prayer, but she liked the sound of it. The gathered people were a mix of races and ages; some in loose yoga clothes, others in ordinary clothes. What unified them, though, was the tranquil lack of expressions on their faces. As if they were all asleep and dreaming the same dream.
Rain could feel the peaceful power of all of this pulling her. She even took a step toward them, but then the weight of everything else in her life planted her there, rooting her to the spot. Tomorrow or maybe the next day, she was going to have a baby. Have it and then give it up.
Noah’s baby.
The thought of it tore her apart, ripping her right down the middle, cleaving her heart. On one hand, this was part of Noah; it was the very last part of him she would ever have—could ever have—and giving it up would be like erasing him from her life. That was so horrible that it kept her awake all night, except on those nights when she cried herself into a kind of daze where she felt drunk with grief, and from there toppled over into sleep filled with nightmares. Doctor Nine lived in those dreams, and ever since that terrible Thursday, the monster had been in her dreams nearly every night. Waiting for her when she closed her eyes. Grinning at her with his wet teeth, hiding his truth from her behind his dark glasses.
Have your baby, he would whisper. Keep it and watch what I’ll do. Watch the child sicken, and coarsen, and become like you. Beautiful outside and spoiled inside, like a wormy piece of fruit. That’s what you are, sweet Lorraine. Filled with sickness and darkness and ugliness. Keep your child and together we will guide him through the kingdom of filth and rats.
It was grandiose, she knew, and half of his dialogue was probably cribbed from old horror movies and novels, but that did not change the fact that Rain believed everything Doctor Nine said. Keep the child and destroy him in doing so, whispered the doctor. Kindness is a knife, and I will teach you how to cut.
On the other hand, the counterargument was to give the baby up for adoption and let other, cleaner hands take it and raise it.
Raise him. Even though Rain had never asked about the sex of the baby, she knew it was going to be a boy. Somehow she knew. Just as she knew the boy, her little Dylan, would grow up to look like Noah. And that would kill her.
Give Dylan up to save the baby and save her own heart and soul. Keep him and ruin both lives. The choice seemed clear, though it broke her heart every time she worked through the calculus of cold logic. She was sixteen and a schoolgirl and nothing much of a student. Her parents had open contempt for the unborn baby. It was an inconvenience of mammoth proportions to their family. Not to mention an embarrassment. A century ago, Rain knew, she would have been sent away to a distant relative until the indiscreet birth, and then she would return, sans child, to resume her life as an affected maiden of the house. This was not that time, but the inbred addiction to social scandal was still there in her mother’s eyes. Less so in her father’s, but there was less of most everything else in him.
She thought these thoughts, rooted to the spot, but as she did so, her body swayed as if the prayer was a song. As if she were still a lithe girl who danced every day. Rain felt the pull of it. Not of music tempting her but of her own legs needing to find music, real, remembered, or imagined, so that she could dance. And in doing so, she would somehow be able to whirl and leap her way out of the bullshit of her life. Dance had always been her escape, and now, when she needed it most of all, it was taken from her by cramps, a swollen belly, ruined balance, dizziness, and everything else that came with pregnancy.
Still, despite all of that, she swayed, eyes closed, dancing in her mind.
Then, abruptly, the baby kicked inside her belly. It was hard, too. Real force. Almost as if the little boy wanted to dance, too.
That was a stab through the heart and, sick in soul and body, Rain spun away from the crowd and the monks, needing to leave right now.
And she bumped into another monk, who stood a few feet behind her.
The monk stepped back, bowing, smiling. “Pardon, miss,” he said.
“No,” she said quickly. “That’s all me.”
He shook his head but did not directly reply to that. Instead, he nodded to indicate her stomach. “Soon.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said.
The monk nodded, looking happy. Though whether it was because the meditation event seemed to be going well or because he liked babies, Rain couldn’t tell, and didn’t much care. She gave him an awkward smile and mumbled something about having to go as she moved to walk around him. The monk stepped into her path. It was a gentle move, a shift of his body, but it stopped her.
“Please,” he said and raised his hands, palms out as if to show her he was no threat.
“What?” she asked with enough New York attitude creeping into her voice that the monk’s smile flickered.
He gave another nod to her stomach and reached one hand a few inches forward. “Please?” he repeated, pitching it this time as a question.
Rain stiffened. Ever since she started to show, people had tried to touch her stomach. Women did it all the damn time, in stores, on the street, in freaking Starbucks. It was weird. Why did people think it was suddenly okay to touch someone just because they were pregnant? How did that happen? She was sixteen, so groping someone her age was kind of weird to begin with, but touching her stomach felt wrong. Besides, she didn’t want to hear anything that people wanted to say to her. All the good wishes and advice and personal stories about their own pregnancies. None of that.
Now there was a Buddhist monk wanting to touch her.
Rain wanted to tell him to go to the pond, fill his pockets—if he even had pockets—with rocks and jump in. A nasty comment rose to her lips.
And yet she nodded.
Rain had no plan to do that, no idea she was going to, until she did it. The monk searched her eyes with his. He had very dark brown eyes, but there were small flecks of gold in there. The eyes looked a lot older than the face they looked out of. The face was maybe forty, the eyes were so old she couldn’t even guess. They were deep and, despite his smile, there was a lot of sadness in them, as if they had looked too closely at the world and seen it for exactly what it was. How could he still smile? She wondered.
He returned her nod and touched her stomach with a flat palm, fingers wide. Those ancient eyes closed for a moment, and he held his head at an angle as if listening to something.
The baby kicked again. And again.
His smile flickered for a moment, and he opened his eyes and gave her a brief, doubtful look. He cut a look to where his fellow monks sat, and Rain saw that they were looking at him. Or maybe at her.
The baby kicked once more, and the monk withdrew his hand. There
was no trace of a smile on his face now, and he looked serious, even grave.
“This is a special one,” he said.
Rain just looked at him.
“He is important,” continued the monk. “He is not the flame, but he will strike the match. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Rain acidly, “he’s a baby. Who doesn’t love a baby?”
The monk’s smile tried to return, flickered, faded. “Listen to me, little sister,” he said. “You are his mother. You must do what is best for him.”
Rain wanted to punch him. She wanted to run.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” she demanded. She yelled it so loud the whole crowd of meditators jerked and twitched and looked at her. The chanting stopped. “Don’t you think I know what’s good for the damn kid? I’m not a complete idiot. I’m not actually cruel, you know.”
The monk was taken aback and tried to explain, but Rain turned away in anger and disgust.
“No,” she snarled. “I don’t want to hear it. Not from you and not from anyone. I know what I have to do.”
She walked away as fast as she could, nearly running, wheezing and crying and growling as she headed for the nearest exit. Rain looked over her shoulder to see if the monk was following, but the man stood there, looking shocked and horrified, one hand raised as if he were about to call after her. She quickened her pace because there was nothing else he could say. He’d already said enough.
Still looking backward, she suddenly collided with someone entering the park.
“Oooof!” she cried and lost her balance, turning, falling stomach-first toward the ground.
Powerful hands caught her in an awkward bear hug, one hand around her chest and accidentally cupping a breast, the other clamped around her belly.
“I got you,” gasped the man she’d run into.
He helped her upright, moved his hands from breast and belly and touched her arms, steadying her. Dizziness swirled inside her head like a dust storm. She gasped, gagged, and grabbed onto him for support.