“Hel-lo,” I said.
The gym bag was empty. He hadn’t brought the rest of the suit, but it didn’t matter. The pieces he had worked fine with the gray shirt and the dark jeans, kind of like I’d run into Batman on casual Friday.
“Let’s talk about this kid.” No stutter. Not even a hint of one.
“Damn,” I said, and I realized I was grinning back at him, hugely, dorkishly. I shut it down, embarrassed. I gestured at his cowl, his cape. “That works?”
“Always.” He shrugged. “Even when I was a kid, running around the house in Dark Knight Underoos and a black pillowcase with home-cut eyeholes.”
“Do you wear it to your job?” I asked him, fascinated.
I almost wished he did. I personally would love to be rolled back for surgery to find that my twilight sleep would be managed by one of the Super Friends. It might be a little disconcerting for non-nerds, though.
“I don’t stutter much at my job,” he said, soft like always, but I could hear him fine in the quiet room. “Or with my friends. Not since I was a kid. It only gets bad when I try to talk to pretty women. Or when I find out I accidentally made a baby. Or when I’m alone with one of my favorite artists. I’m three for three today.”
“That’s a total player line,” I said, taking one step closer. The dreadful art monster in me wanted to know who his other favorite artists were and where my stuff came in the ranking, but I shoved that aside for later.
He shrugged, unabashed. “You’re pretty. You’re pregnant. And you’re Leia freakin’ Birch. You know how many times I’ve read Violence in Violet? Plus, I’ve got every series that you’ve drawn for in sleeves.”
“Every series?” I said. “Not my Hellboy one-shot.” It was a limited-release thing I’d done with a writer I liked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That sequence, when Hell Boy’s running through the tunnels and the fire rolls over him? His face? So good.”
I found myself touching my hair, flattered. I’d been grossly proud of the way I’d caught Hell Boy’s pleasure and his shame as the flames engulfed him. I made my treacherous girly-flirt hands go back down by my sides.
“Nerd Test,” I said, changing the subject. “DC or Marvel?”
“Uh, DC?” he said like this was a no-brainer.
Wonder Woman was DC, and he was wearing half a Batsuit, so it actually was. It was a place to start where I felt sure we would agree.
“Fantastic Four or Doom Patrol?” he asked back, which was bolder. Riskier.
“Doom Patrol,” I said. “Especially Grant Morrison’s run.”
“Yeah, damn. Richard Case,” he said in full agreement, and now he came a step toward me. “I didn’t come straight here. I went to Macon first, to my parents’ house.” It was as if our successful round of Nerd Testing had made it okay to talk about scarier things. “It was four a.m., but I had to go talk to my dad.”
“You guys are close?” I said, and drifted closer, as if saying the word out loud made my body act it out. I already knew they were tight. It was obvious in the picture of the Star Wars Christmas tree.
“He’s my best friend,” Batman said. “Does that sound dorky?”
“Absolutely.” I smiled when I said it. “I like dorks, though. Hell, I am dorks.”
“Okay, then. I told him. About the baby. You. FanCon. He gave me some good advice, but it didn’t matter. I knew I was coming straight here to see you. I knew when he opened the door. It was so early I’d woken him up. His face was grumpy, but he saw me, and before he thought to be worried, he lit up.” He was very serious now, his low voice intense. “I don’t want my kid to grow up twelve hours away. I have nieces and nephews, and I love them, but I only see them three or four times a year. Every time they’ve grown into different people. I don’t want to know my own kid like that. In snapshots. I want to be the kind of father that I have.”
Now my hands were in front of me, twisting together in a tangled bother. Here was everything that I wanted for Digby, offered freely, as his birthright. I wasn’t sure how to grasp it, though. I was too much of a pragmatist.
“I love what you’re saying, but how would it work? It’s not like you’re going to pack up all your crap and move to Norfolk tomorrow.” I said it the same way I might say, It’s not like you’re going to take up flying Douglas Adams style, just throw your body at the ground and hope to miss.
“Of course not,” he said, but then he added, “Not tomorrow anyway. I’ve never been to Norfolk. I might hate it, who knows? But you’re growing my kid there. I sure as hell want to take a look at the place.” Now I was the one who couldn’t speak. Whatever smart-ass answer I might have had jammed up in my mouth and left me silent. “I want you to come and see Atlanta, too. You might fall in love. There’s a lot more to my town than FanCon.”
I swallowed. Jesus, this was high-stakes stuff. “What if I hate it?”
“Come and see,” he said. “What if you don’t?”
“What if you hate Norfolk and I hate Atlanta?” I said, and I sounded panicky. “What then?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. We look at Wilmington. We look at Asheville. Why not? You work freelance, and I’m a CNRA, which means I can get a job almost anywhere. If we hate Wilmington and Asheville, we go visit Myrtle Beach and Greensboro. We’ll pick a place together, same way we pick his name.” As he spoke, we had both moved even closer to each other. We were near the middle of the room, and now I could see the deeps of his eyes inside the mask. His pupils had expanded, so that the iris was a slim, near-jet ring.
He made it sound so doable, and maybe it was. I hoped so, because inside me Digby was awake and spinning, small and certain, absolutely on the way. I wished then, hard, that I were an optimist. Rachel was. Once, irritated with my dark-siding, she’d said, “Is the glass never half full for you?” and I’d snapped back. “Sure it is. Half full of bees.”
She’d laughed and said, “Half full of poison. Half full of deadly radiation, but always half empty when it’s sugar or sunshine.” She had a point. My mind never went jumping to the rosiest conclusions. Look how I ended V in V.
“What if we argue, and hate each other so much we can’t live in the same town, and screw our kid up, and ruin our lives, and then we die?” I said, mostly joking. But not joking.
He considered my dire scenario for a few seconds, and then he said, “Nerd Test: Preacher? Or Pretty Deadly?”
That one I had to think about.
“Pretty Deadly,” I said. “But only by a hair.”
“You see? It’s going to be fine,” he said, fronting like he was cocksure.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Oh, smooth sailing,” I said. “Here on out.”