The Stud Book

The Stud Book - By Monica Drake




Say you’re a night crawler in warm ground. Your body is a tube within a tube, soft as foreskin. You’re a hermaphroditic sex organ burrowing through dark earth, a reproductive decomposer.

Fully loaded with two sets of testicles, two testes sacs, ovaries, sperm, and eggs—seminal vesicles, seminal receptacles; the parts sound almost spiritual, nearly Catholic, really—and you have what it takes to build an army, a generation.

The heartbreak? You’re not an asexually reproductive creature, like a lonely sea sponge or a budding hydra. You can’t fertilize yourself.

You have needs.

Your job is to find another earthworm, a dew worm, an angler, to swap sperm, fertilize your eggs, and incubate them in a slime tube, a bellyband, a pale pink saddle you’ll wear briefly around your waist until you slip it off over your head like a silky nightgown. Charm your way into a biological destiny.

Blind hermaphrodites find each other in the dark. It happens all the time.

Sarah stepped over one pale banded worm on the damp asphalt walk of the Oregon Zoo. She saw the bellyband—the slime tube—and thought: Babies! So dear, even in a lowly worm. She carried a timer and a clipboard, pulled her coat closed against a fine rain, and leaned on the railing of the mandrill habitat.

Inside the enclosure the kingpin man-ape gave a flying leap. Leaves tumbled in his wake. He moved from his high perch to a low branch, and on the way flashed his penis, where his body was as red as a rash.

If that mandrill were Sarah’s baby, she’d powder his rash. Not with talc—talc is pure cancer. She’d dust sweet cornstarch on the flaming red genital area between that mandrill’s muscular, hairy thighs. Except his wasn’t really a rash and she knew it. Baby fantasy over. She was a professional. Mandrill penises are red; their scrotums are lilac. He’d be a grotesque infant, big and buried in hair.

The sky was blanketed with gray clouds as bright as aluminum, hiding a winter sun. Visitors moved in tight packs in the rain over the tended zoo grounds. Kids lurched ahead of their parents, with room to roam and no streets to cross. A sullen flock of teens clustered at a cement picnic table around a paper basket of French fries. They had a fat pink baby in a fat pink fleece jacket in a stroller nearby. Who was the mother? They were all kids themselves.

Sarah was twice their age and watched their parenting, or lack of parenting, as though the teenagers were her assigned animal behavior study.

If her first baby had survived, the child would be three years old, with sticky ice cream–coated fingers pressing against the glass in front of all the animals.

Her timer beeped. In the mandrill enclosure—and you don’t say “cage” in a modern zoo, but “enclosure”—a newborn named Lucy clung to the rich olive hair of her mother’s chest. The two huddled on a shelf against a back wall. The mother ate nits from Lucy’s coat. Sarah marked “Grooming” on her chart.

Sarah would eat bugs from her own baby’s hair if that was what motherhood required.

That baby mandrill was Sarah’s field study. The patriarch, though, with his strut and flash, was a steady distraction. The more color a mandrill shows in his red, white, and blue behind, the more testosterone is cruising through his system, and this one advertised his virility like a flag.

His ass was an ornament, in evolutionary terms.

On his branch, this head honcho tugged his golden beard. He clambered and waved his ornament like a second face there to say hello. On sunny days visitors snapped photos to post on the Internet. They took videos. What a crowd-pleaser! With an ornament like that, you’d think survival of the fittest was about drawing hits on YouTube.

The timer beeped again. Baby Lucy banged a stick in loose straw on the shelf where she perched. “Play behavior.”

One of the lone females followed the patriarch, walking close behind, like his flash ass was the ice-cream truck and she had change in her pocketbook. This was mandrill flirting.

Toward the back of the cage, another female sat with her legs tucked against her body. She was pregnant, the previous customer to chase that ice cream. Mandrills generally don’t show pregnancy the way humans do, but this wasn’t her first round. Her body had thickened, the muscles grown slack from carrying earlier offspring, and this time her pregnancy was pronounced.

A woman with a stroller pushed past, her baby under a clear plastic rain liner like a little biosphere—didn’t babies suffocate under plastic? It certainly wasn’t teaching good habits. But at the same time the plastic dome made the baby seem precious and revered, like a diamond in a case, or a doll tightened down inside its plastic box.

If Sarah’s second baby had survived, it’d be twenty-three months old by now, spitting out the names of animals from around the world.

Toward the zoo entrance, on the horizon, a white van edged its way over the top of a distant hill, KZTV NEWS written on the side.

The timer beeped. Lucy rested snug against her mother, mouth on a teat. The mother wrapped a protective hand around her child. Sarah marked “Nursing.”

The news van stopped where the paths grew narrow. Its sliding door opened, and a crew tumbled out. First came the reporter, a correspondent out in the field, identifiable by her markings: a helmet of blond hair, a large head, a tweed skirt-suit. Why was there a news van on zoo grounds?

One of the teen girls stood up from the picnic table, stretched, and showed a lump under her coat like a beer gut, another baby on the way, or maybe both.

Another baby?

Sarah bit the end of her pencil. The news crew approached on foot. The reporter, in heels, skittered along the curving path like Dorothy on her way to see the wizard, flanked by her loose-legged cameraman and a bearded guy in a headset. The cameraman balanced a shoulder cam over his puffy winter coat. A woman so young she was practically a girl carried a clipboard and led the way, their own little Toto.

They traveled toward Sarah. Her guess? They were hunting for a feel-good story on baby Lucy. She saw it coming: They’d want her expertise. She’d have to hold back. She didn’t work in PR, wasn’t authorized to answer press questions. Zoo publicity was a tricky business of walking a line between PETA protesters and wealthy donors. Portland is a city of vocalized opinions and insta-activism. Sarah’s job was strictly to compile data. The reporter would ask about the mandrills. She’d have to decline. She felt a conflict of interest creep closer with each step of the news crew on the rain-darkened asphalt trail.

She was proud to work for the zoo, in an amazing community of caring people. The air that greeted her daily inside the zoo walls was a particularly habitable atmosphere. Her role was small, but it was hers.

Breeding was a tightly planned eugenics exercise. Animal curators worked with the algorithms of the International Species Information System to determine who would breed and who, of the genetically redundant, was given birth control.

Every zoo manages a budget. They know how many animals they can support and have data to prove who brings in the income—Pandas! Elephants! Monkeys!—while the lazy sun bear and the Visayan warty pigs serve as chorus girls.

Each mandrill birth was recorded in an international studbook, an official intergenerational record of who has sex, who’s born, who lives fast and dies young. The studbook is like Mormon genealogy listings, all those famous begats in the Bible, or People magazine for caged animals singing the song of celebrity births. It’d be gossip if it weren’t seriously about bolstering the genetic makeup of dwindling animal populations.

Sarah collected one thin current of data that fed into behavioral documentation, noting which captive infant animals thrived and which failed.

The young woman with the news crew traipsed in white Keds that miraculously stayed white even in the rain. She seemed to grow younger as she came closer, and smiled, baring friendly teeth. Sarah hated to turn her down, sensing a kindred spirit—they both had clipboards!—but it was zoo policy.

The girl, the woman, reached out a hand as though to shake, to touch skin in a behavioral display of goodwill, and Sarah put her hand out, too, only then, instead of shaking, the girl tucked her clipboard under her arm and rolled her hand, calling the reporter in like reeling in a fish. The correspondent stepped in close, then closer, bringing along a cloud of hair spray.

This is how elephant cows assert dominance: They sway closer and closer, until one cow gives up ground.

Sarah was that cow. She gave up ground. The reporter stepped a sharp heel on the mother-father hermaphrodite worm where it inched along the asphalt, right on the bellyband. Her foot skidded. Babies! She caught herself as if it’d never happened.

The reporter’s hair blocked Sarah’s view of the mandrills. When the timer beeped, Sarah said, “Excuse me—”

The teenagers at the table watched them like they were on TV already. The human primate in the stroller sucked its pacifier while the man-ape flashed his best feature. Sarah bobbed her head to one side of the reporter’s hairdo then to the other, trying to do her job. It was important work! She was here for the zoo, for science, for the future of humanity! She’d definitely turn down their silly little media request, hoard her specialized information.

If her third baby had lived, it’d be six months old, in her arms. They wouldn’t crowd her this way if she were flanked by her children. She’d be a different person, hold a different place in the world. She’d have what Georgie—the old Georgie, Sarah’s child-free, academic drinking buddy, that denizen of the life of the mind—would have called, as though from a great intellectual distance, the “cultural legitimization conferred through motherhood.”

Was that ever such a bad thing?

But Georgie had changed. She had a baby, the legitimizing child.

The only infant in Sarah’s care was Lucy. She’d protect Lucy’s privacy.

The girl with the clipboard said, “Ma’am? Sorry. We need you out of the frame.”





Across the river Georgie wore the blood-marked abdominal smile of a fresh C-section and navigated the short hallway of her two-bedroom bungalow. She had a round of prescription pain meds and a baby, like a warm bundle of fresh laundry, wrapped in a blanket in her arms.

It was lovely to carry her own perfect girl-child. Out of nowhere—or really, specifically, out of Georgie’s body, out of her uterus, out of the slash cut in the middle of her gut—there was a baby! Right in their house. Once they’d let a stray cat in, and those were weird days. Suddenly she and her husband held cat energy in the house, an animal curling around their feet, asking for food and love. A baby was even more dreamy and surreal. She kept thinking about that cat now, how it had come and gone, leaving cat hair on an armchair, traces of itself. This baby was here to stay. Georgie reached for her drugs.

Oxycodone is a cute narcotic, delivered in small pills like toy medicine. You could feed those pills to a mouse, a rat, a teacup Chihuahua. She shook the pills in their plastic container and they put on a ragtime rattle of a show for her darling newborn daughter. With its fine rattle that bottle was practically a Waldorf learning tool, except instead of the requisite Waldorf wood it was made out of plastic and painkillers.

Georgie clambered across the broad expanse of their California king with the baby clutched tight to her chest and the pills in the other hand, her hand wrapped around the vial, her knuckles against the bed. C-section stitches tugged across her bikini line. “Oof!” She said it out loud, like a cartoon character, a plea for sympathy, even though she was alone.

She was alone except for her daughter, anyway. That was the whole thing about being a new mom—always alone and never alone. Always with the baby. Always with this new nonverbal companion.

Humble would come home soon.

The baby’s fingers lay outside her pink blanket like a little row of roots, white and thin. Until she held her own child, Georgie hadn’t known anything about mother-love. Now it crowded her body, clotted her heart, made her want to cry. Maybe it was the painkillers that made her want to cry. Either way, she was high and happy and sad and the whole thing closed like a hand around her throat.

She couldn’t hold that baby tight enough.

She had a blue triangle tattooed on her bicep—the “rhetorical triangle,” her favorite paradigm. She drew the triangle on the whiteboard each year, the first week of her freshman English classes, as an illustration of how all meaning is made.

The three points of the triangle? Author, audience, and text, as they say. An author puts a text in front of an audience, and meaning is conveyed. Change any one component—new audience, new author, new book—and the meaning changes, too. It could be a slight shift, or massive. In class it sounded clear. Across her other arm, in the rounded font of an old typewriter, a second tattoo asked ANY QUESTIONS?

The soft spot of her baby’s fontanel pulsed with each breath, making tufts of the girl’s dark hair dance up and down.

In the rhetoric of new life, Georgie was author and audience both. Bella was the text, that daughter she’d drawn into existence. The meaning of the world shifted from the life of the mind to the bloody, seeping, heartbeat center.

Parent/Baby/World: All meaning came from that juncture. Any mind-body split was blasted out of the water once her own body was nurturing a new mind.

She had a third tattoo on the small of her back, a tribute to French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It read THE SECOND SEX, after one of Beauvoir’s seminal titles.

Seminal—could you use that word with a woman’s writing?

Weird.

But yes, Georgie had a French feminist tramp stamp.

She’d dropped out of high school. Now she had a PhD, because every dropout has something to prove, and she proved she could handle school all the way through. She’d learned to speak the language of the academy. It spoke right back, too, which is to say the legitimizing pedagogical institutions had granted investment in the (re)-formation and reification of her gendered body.

Ha!

In other words, she was a woman, a mom, with a PhD.

Bella was three days old. Georgie’s underwear was a day newer than that. One of the first adjustments to motherhood was that she’d bought a six-pack of granny panties—the kind that came all the way up—because every pair of her bikini-cut version hit exactly where a row of fish line–style thread was stitched through her skin.

Doctors called it a “bikini-line incision.” Georgie never realized “bikini line” was a precise anatomical designation until she tried to put her own clothes on.

The el cheapo granny panties came in fuchsia, turquoise, and glaring white. Each color made her ass look larger than the pair before it, but they didn’t rub against the stitches. They wrapped over her skin like a comforting hand. She settled into her nest of blankets, books, and magazines, and reached for the remote, turned the TV on, but kept the sound down. How much TV is bad for a newborn? That’s what it means to be alone and never alone—to reconsider every urge.

What she really wanted was a full-bodied pinot noir, a gin and tonic, a pale pink raspberry martini. Doctors said alcohol would leach into her milk and dim her baby’s growing brain. They used to prescribe stout to bring the milk in, but she didn’t have those old-school doctors. So instead of a Guinness, Georgie had oxycodone and a big glass of water.

When she asked whether oxycodone in her bloodstream was okay for the baby, the nurse said, “You wouldn’t want your baby to have a mom in pain, would you?”

She didn’t want her baby to have a mama in granny panties, either, but there you go. Not everybody gets what they want.

She curled a hand over her daughter’s head, cradled and covered that constant pulse of the fontanel. “We’ll be okay.” She pushed the baby blanket away from Bella’s chin. The girl’s tiny red mouth was open, her eyes closed, long lashes resting over her pale skin. Her mouth was a little heart, with all the love in the world collected there.

Bella slept like her father. He could pass out anywhere. It was a way of trusting the universe. Georgie didn’t even trust herself.

She flipped channels until she saw the familiar curve of a pregnant belly. The warm enthusiasm of a trained woman newscaster came in as a voice-over. “The zoo will soon welcome a new resident!”

The flat color of local video scanned the pregnant monkey, hunched and fat. Georgie sat up straighter in bed to distinguish herself from that slope-shouldered simian. That was one difference between humans and other primates—we walk upright. Upright!

The vial of oxycodone was still in her hand. She moved her legs and the blankets shifted, books tipped and adjusted. The news camera cut to a baby mandrill, clinging to its mother.

The new infant would be born in December, born on the cusp of the schizophrenic season. Georgie had read all the books, the articles. She knew the threats: more schizophrenics were born in winter months, with numbers peaking in February, even bleeding into early March. Bella was born in November, just as that curve on the graph of probability started to climb. If she’d planned things better, Georgie would have given birth in August.

Could primates even be schizophrenic?

Any questions? Her tattoo was so cocky! With a new baby, she was all questions.

She reached both hands around her daughter to press and turn, to coax the childproof lid off the pill vial. The camera cut away from the mother and baby. For a moment there was Sarah, on TV. Huddled near a garbage can, near a pack of teenagers.

Sarah?

Sarah was pale. Her hair needed attention. It was soaked, and maybe that’s just how hair looks when a person works at the Oregon Zoo in the rain. Except Sarah was wild-eyed, too, and that made it all worse. She looked a little nuts. Guilt tapped at Georgie’s chest, a reminder: Sarah’s phone calls, those kind offers to come hold the baby. Georgie wasn’t ready to see anybody, to put on pants, or even a skirt.

Besides, Sarah could be kind of a downer.

The thing was, Georgie felt guilty for having a baby when Sarah had only miscarriages. She’d bought Sarah a satin bathrobe after the first one. She gave her a stack of novels and a bottle of pear brandy after the second. With the third, she’d stayed around for days, made dinners, washed Sarah and Ben’s dishes. What else could she do? She didn’t promise not to have her own.

She cupped a hand and shook the vial to tap a pill into her palm.

Sarah started backing out of the frame, then bent and picked a pale pink flower off the macadam of the zoo path. No, it wasn’t a flower; it was a pacifier, clutched in Sarah’s pale, reddened fingers. Georgie squinted and leaned closer. As she moved, the mess of meds fell forward like too much salt from a shaker. They fell into her hand, bounced over her fingers, and scattered on the bed, on the blankets. On the baby. White pills rained down on the small, sweet, open cavern of baby Bella’s red heart-shaped mouth.

“F*ck!” Georgie moved fast but couldn’t think. Were there pills in Bella’s mouth? That trusting, trusting, open mouth. She wanted to shake the baby, shake pills out, but you can’t shake a baby—people go to prison for that. Shaking a baby can cause brain damage and death. She held Bella closer and tried to see into the dark space between those little lips and toothless gums. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she chanted.

The fontanel’s pulse was an accusation.

Georgie lunged out of bed. Her foot caught in the sheet. Bella was in her arms. Stray pills bounced to the floor along with the flutter of magazines. Her stitches yanked against her gut as though to hold her back, like an invisible internal seat belt. She turned on the ceiling light and tipped the baby’s head toward it, to see better inside her tiny mouth. There it was, there it was! There was a glimpse of white, a pill on her baby’s tongue. She’d thrown a bull’s-eye, made a half-court basket, sunk the eight ball, except this round she didn’t want to hit the mark.

Georgie’s finger had never seemed so thick as it did when she tried to fish inside Bella’s mouth. She was afraid she’d force the pill down. Bella screwed up her face and pulled her hands out of the swaddling blanket. Georgie moved her finger into Bella’s mouth again. Bella tried to suckle.

Ah! Don’t! Georgie pulled her finger away and whispered the words, a prayer, “Don’t suck anything down.” She laid the baby on her side on the bed and tried again to press a finger over those sweet toothless gums. Bella screamed. Her face turned red. She was a good screamer. Her tongue was a bird’s tongue, narrow and strong. And there was the pill, stuck to the side of her tongue. Georgie reached in, tapped, flicked, touched the pill until she managed to knock it off the side of Bella’s tongue, out of Bella’s mouth. The tablet was soggy and eroded, but otherwise whole.

Thank God.

Georgie picked up her whole reason for living and let the girl shriek in her ear while she collected pills from the sheets, the blankets, the floor. She counted as she found them. She reached for the phone. Then she dropped the phone and went back to counting, and she grabbed for the phone again because with her baby in her arms she didn’t have enough hands and didn’t know which to do first. She needed backup—somebody at home besides the baby. Alone and never alone: If she were really alone, there’d be no problem, no baby’s mouth, and no pills.

But that wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.

She needed a team, a crew. Mostly, she needed her husband. Where was Hum? He’d taken five weeks off for paternity leave and still went out most of the day like he had somewhere to be. Georgie found two more pills on the floor. Bella yodeled in her ear. “Hush, hush, little peanut.”

Georgie’s milk let down, warmed her boobs, made them hard and high as implants until milk spilled out and soaked her nightshirt. Doctors said the leaking would stop when her body adjusted. She was a generous fountain.

She hoisted her shirt to let Bella latch on. Thin white milk ran in rivulets down Georgie’s stomach.

She stood hunched over and sliced open in the middle and stitched back up; her warm daughter nursed under the drenched and clinging nightshirt. Georgie dialed the pediatrician and scanned the floor for stray drugs. She stuck the phone between her ear and her shoulder.

There should be a book illustrating how to nurse, cradle a phone, panic, call 911, and count stray pills on a dusty floor.

She’d started with twelve pills. She’d taken three on Saturday and one at night, and then … after that? She had five left. Was that right? Five, and one was soggy. She put the soggy pill in her own mouth and drank water to wash it down. It stuck in her throat. Or something stuck in her throat. Maybe it was guilt.

How much of that soggy pill had seeped into Bella’s system?

There’d be oxycodone in Georgie’s milk. Could Bella overdose now through nursing?

She used a finger to pry the baby’s mouth off her nipple. Bella screamed louder than ever. The ringing phone tumbled from Georgie’s shoulder and knocked against Bella’s head on the way down. Shit. A red welt raised against the girl’s skin, near her hairline. Was that a problem? How protected was a baby’s brain? If anything happened to Bella, Georgie would kill herself. She’d have to. There were so many ways to fail. All she had was good intentions; the road to hell was paved with babies.

Giving birth was the original blood oath.

She could still hear the phone ringing on the other end, now a tiny sound, like one an insect would make. “Just wait, wait,” Georgie whispered, and bent to find the phone on the floor. She was on her knees. She could barely hear over Bella’s howl. Three days old and the girl was a boob-aholic. A recording came on: “If this call is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial …”

Georgie found the phone under the bed and pulled it out, covered in dust bunnies.

Was her call an emergency? That was half the question. Bella’s wail was strong. She hadn’t passed out, anyway—always a good sign. Georgie pressed zero for pediatric advice. “Shh, shh, shh … darling, darling, darling,” she crooned against the side of Bella’s head, into the welt, now a lump, against her silky hair. “My sweet girl.”

A receptionist came on. The woman asked the birth date of the patient, the patient’s name, and the patient’s doctor’s name. Then she asked, “What is the nature of the problem?”

“I have this prescription,” Georgie said. “The baby got into the prescription.” She ran a hand over the sheets as she talked, checking for more pills.

“The baby got into the prescription?” the receptionist repeated. “Tell me the child’s birth date again, please.”

The baby, Bella, was three days old. She couldn’t lift her own head. It was an accident if she found her mouth with her hand. “I mean, I spilled the pills, and the baby got ahold of them.”

“Got ahold of them?”

That baby was a precocious drug addict.

Georgie said, “I dropped an oxycodone in my daughter’s mouth. I got it out, I just don’t know anything. I don’t know what might’ve happened—”

“You’ve retrieved the medicine at this point?”

“It was pretty much whole.” Georgie was glad to say she’d done one thing right.

“Keep the pill to show doctors in case they request it.”

“Keep it?” Georgie said. “I took it.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then the receptionist said, “The advice nurse will call you back.”

Georgie heard caution and a controlled urgency in the woman’s voice. It dawned on her: They’d call child protective services. They might. Would they?

Shit.

The butter pecan walls went swimmy. She sat on the side of the bed and tried to breathe. “I’m new to this.” They couldn’t take her daughter away! It was her first child, her only darling. But really, they could. That was the thing.

The hospital had given her those pills. They’d sent her home with the baby. They’d set her up. She said, “This must happen all the time.” She tried to talk over Bella’s screams, and her voice came out high and thin and broken. Where did other people learn how to take drugs while holding a baby?

The woman said, “Do you need a referral for a counselor?”

“A counselor?” She was ready to cry but didn’t need a counselor. The baby was the question, the concern. Little red-faced Bella spit up on Georgie’s arm.

The woman said, “Some new mothers have difficulty adjusting—”

This woman would make her cry. Georgie hung up on the receptionist. The advice nurse could call back. They had her contact information.

She carried her howling daughter to the kitchen, sang the alphabet softly, and used a dish towel to wipe the white patch of spit off her arm. Maybe that spit-up solved the drug question, like a self-induced gastric lavage?

In the kitchen, on the counter, in a six-pack of bottles, there were six servings of formula sent home as free samples from the hospital. For all she could tell those formula samples were made by McDonald’s in a third world country using slave labor and antifreeze. They were the precursor to fast food and a slow waddle.

At least it wasn’t organic. Organic baby formula sweetened with rice syrup was full of arsenic half the time. She’d read the reports.

Bella started to wail again; Georgie’s milk was a drug deal that couldn’t happen. What was the advice for this?

She and her daughter waited together, alone. They waited for the phone to ring, for Humble or a nurse to call. Georgie cracked the lid off a bottle, and it came off with a pop. She screwed the artificial nipple in place and tipped the bottle to Bella’s blessed mouth.

Bella didn’t want it. Georgie started to pull it away, and a reflex kicked in—the girl latched on to the fake boob. Oxycodone, that opiate, eased its way into Georgie’s blood, and she started to feel lighter. The pain in her stitches backed off. She took a breath and relaxed against the counter.

The phone rang, and caller ID showed it was the hospital. It was either the advice nurse or the baby police calling to tell her she’d failed as a mom. The baby, her living dissertation, was perfect, yes, but Georgie wasn’t.

The phone rang again, singing its song.

The hospital knew where they lived. They had her address, her employer, her health insurance ID numbers.

Georgie needed to lie down. Bella was still breathing. Even the red welt on her head had already quieted.

“We’ll be okay,” she whispered, giving voice to what she most wanted to hear. She’d be her own advice nurse. Her voice was good enough. She was in her house, in this room, on her own with her daughter, alone and in it together. One more ring and the phone would go to voice messaging. This was her job: to raise her daughter.

The doorbell rang.

The doorbell? Hum wouldn’t ring, unless he’d lost his keys. It was a visitor, a stranger, maybe a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It might be cops. Paramedics. Child protective services. Could they have gotten there so quickly? Of course they could. Georgie’s soaked nightshirt clung to her boobs and postpartum stomach in a frump’s rendition of a wet T-shirt contest.

Oxycodone slowed her brain’s synapses, let the endorphins step in, and lifted her head in a clouded way. They offered the best advice in the room: Go back to bed. She moved away from the door and windows and carried Bella to the bedroom. The doorbell rang again. Georgie’s heart knocked in response. She took a breath. She was okay, as long as she didn’t open that door.

Then the phone started again, too.

The phone, the doorbell, the phone—Georgie slunk away from them both.

This is what separates humans from animals: free will.

She had TV. She had the comforting hand of granny panties and narcotics. Her daughter was fine—awake and nursing. Nobody looked high! Neither one was nodding off. Well, okay, Bella was nodding off, but that was normal for a newborn, right? Georgie tickled the girl’s foot and saw her eyes widen, evidence she was alert. Together the two of them climbed into the privacy of sheets that smelled like sweat, like their bodies, like milk and blood and piss and love. She climbed back into her nest of blankets and books.

Safe.

Where was Humble? She needed him to come home.

A hand slapped against the bedroom window from outside. It was a hard crack, like a bird breaking its own neck against the glass. It was a bad omen, and Georgie jumped at the noise. She sat up, looked, and saw that it wasn’t a bird. Worse: it was human. There was a palm, fingers, and a thumb, splayed, for a moment flattened against the pane.