On the table at Peck’s front door was a package from her father. Inside, an oversized black leather book with Traynor embossed in decaying silver leaf that sprinkled over her hands. Devils Creek snow in the late days of a Manhattan August. She paged through old pictures of her father’s siblings, their childhood faces not hinting at the angular people they would become. His parents and grandparents had a foot-planted firmness, though they stood tall and narrow on a dirt path, Traynor land rolling behind them. She had never met her father’s family. They had all been buried deep in Peck’s hometown, sepulchral limestone marking where they rest, sayings that summed them up, before her father married her mother. She wondered why her father had sent this album to her now, tied in somehow with the baby’s birthday, but what it meant, what she was supposed to take from it, she did not know.
On the last page of the album, Peck looked at a photograph of her parents kissing, a courtship kiss given and received when life looked like clear sailing, which it mostly was for them. A small envelope was tucked behind their picture, her name dashed across the front in her father’s hand, the flaps of his envelope taped down, his words jailed within.
In her outlaw past, Peck acted without thought, but these days, she bided her time, heard words unsaid in shivering silence, sensed what was empty in a choked heart. She could not read her father’s words today, words that would remind her of what he wanted her to know: that she ought to try again, find the right man, have another child, remember from whence she came, no matter the name she tossed away, what she left behind, the daughter raised by others.
The clock on the stove read just past four. She plunged her home into darkness and got down to her skin. By the light of the fridge, she poured herself wine, then stood at the windows and stared out at the sky. Despite the unholy hour, the moon was still invested and lively.
She fit herself into the couch’s furrow and tipped the wine into her mouth. She heard a ting when the glass rocked on the wood floor, then settled. Down six stories, out on the avenue, the traffic whooshed like the river back home when it was close to cresting its banks.
In the dark, Peck inspected her bared body, the moon’s marbling sliding over her breasts and thighs. She imagined her home dark and convoluted again, the absent walls back in place, her nakedness hidden, the moon far away.
One day she would read her father’s letter, as a message from the grave or a fortune freed from the cookie. She knew when she did, his hopes for her would no longer matter, his dreams like the walls she had once brought down, that she always would have chosen an outlaw life, would never regret the baby given away.
When I finished the story, Christina had been sleeping for a long time, despite the streetlamp throwing an orange glow through the uncovered window. She lay next to me, but gone was the young shark, replaced by the child Christina must once have been, curled into herself, her sharp knees looking tender and scraped, tucked against her full bouncy chest. I thought how it is only in sleep that our innocent selves are preserved. I felt myself old then, flat on my back, still as a corpse, on the familiar brink of the deep trench filled up with my old childhood anger at Ashby. When I saw I was still clutching the book, I threw it hard against the wall, heard it thud and fall to the floor. Christina did not even turn over.
I don’t know how much time passed before I fully unraveled the story, realized that Peck Traynor was Ashby’s fictional standin, that this was Ashby debating the pros and cons of motherhood, written years before I was born, written before my mother met my father.
When I was little, my mother said I had chosen her, and I had liked that notion, that somehow, even as a fetus, I already held all the power I would need in my life. And I had grown up being told how much my father wanted me. But right then, I realized never once had my mother said that she had wanted me, had waited impatiently for my arrival. And I thought, Why the fuck did I select a mother whose achievements yanked the dream I had been born with—to be a writer—out of my hands?
I looked at the facts: I was not the longed-for first child I had always imagined. I had ruptured Ashby’s life, yoked her, prevented her from forging ahead with her own destiny, free of husband, of children, of chains that bound her to the earth. I was the curvature in her spine that spoke of tragedy, the way I had turned her days outward, the fullness of me stagnating her glorious imagination, crud on still water, mucking things up, blanketing that fire in her, goodbye to her work, to her serious future. And those Rare Baby stories of hers that she had read to me, now they made sense. She had written about unparented, unusual creatures because I had not been wanted, had not been rare, was just an average baby then, an average man now.
Still, I understood that she learned to love me, and I did feel that love, and she was good to me, encouraging what I had been born with: a love of reading and writing. She talked to me about the books I read, read my squirrel stories aloud. Our happiest times took place in that world we both preferred—of stories and writing, and long, long novels—a world where our being mother and son was irrelevant. It was never the umbilical cord that connected us, but our love of words, that’s what we shared during all my growing-up years.
One could say, but you were young, Daniel, give the writing another go, and I did, in college, a million times. I still sometimes fool around here and there. I’ve got tons of crappy first and second and third paragraphs, some stories I even managed to write all the way through. But every time I try, begin to write something new, remember the power I felt when I was engaged that way as a child, I think of Ashby, of who she is, and my own pursuit seems insipid, fruitless, a tilting at windmills, and I scratch it all out, or hit Delete, Delete, Delete.
Christina exhaled a small snore and turned over, and I faced three truths—my mother had not wanted me; she had, unwittingly I’ll admit, destroyed my faith in myself when it came to writing fiction; and I would never soar to the grand heights my mother, father, and brother had.
I watched the sky lighten, saw the sun sidle up, and the thought that came to me was a surprise. “An Outlaw Life” was setting me free, giving me the power to make my own fate, to follow, in some way, the tenets Peck Traynor subscribed to, what Ashby herself believed. I could simply discard entirely this useless version of myself.
I rose then and dressed, and even my clothes felt different on my body, seemed meant to be worn by someone else entirely. I said goodbye to Christina, to Carlos Wong, left behind my cardboard furniture, left a resignation note on the desk of a partner to whom I supposedly reported, but had never met, collected my thesaurus and novels, the spare suit, shirt, tie, socks, and underwear folded into a file drawer in my cubicle for deals that required I work through the night. I had banked nine months of substantial pay, pay for the birthing of my own new self. I hopped a plane with two vows in my fist: I would do whatever it took to make a name for myself, and never again would I read another Ashby story.