“Here,” he says, holding out his hand for my Groceries & Shit bag. “He needs a bottle.”
I hold Mo while Judah makes him a bottle. Two scoops of formula, a bottle of Aquafina, then he shakes it and holds out his arms. I place Mo is his lap, and Judah sticks the bottle in his mouth. As I watch Mo eat, I wonder how Judah knew how to do that. I would have struggled to read the instructions for fifteen minutes, and probably would have dropped the whole container of powder on the ground. While I watch them, I hear Lyndee’s screams. I smell the smoke. I feel her blood. I killed a woman. I planned it all out, and I killed a woman, and here I am at Wal-Mart the next day with my hot cripple friend and the neighbor’s baby. I don’t know which person is the imposter. I am either Margo of the Bone, or this new thing, this murderer. Or maybe I’ve always been her, this vile, wicked person; she was just there, simmering beneath the surface, waiting for me to act on my impulses.
“How did you know how to do that?” I ask.
“Work.”
“You work with babies?”
“I work with children of all ages.”
“Where do you work anyway?”
“Are we friends now?” he asks. “Officially?”
“I guess so,” I say. “We see a lot of each other. We’re either friends at this point or we’re married.”
“Margo Grant,” he teases. “You can be Miles Grant,” he tells Mo. Mo pauses for a minute in his sucking to smile at Judah, while I blush profusely.
“Don’t you buy into his charm,” I tell Mo. “He’s a big flirt.”
The sun heats our shoulders with little mercy. I am wishing I had sunscreen for the baby when Judah suddenly decides to answer my question.
“I work at Barden’s School for the Disabled,” he says. “It’s also where I went to school. My mom got me a scholarship, somehow convinced them to put me on their bus schedule even though they have to drive all the way out here to this evil corner of the universe. When I graduated, they offered me a part-time job working with the after school kids and as a teacher’s aide.”
I glance down at the top of his head, impressed. It seems exactly like the sort of thing he should be doing. I am just about to say so when he says…
“I hated going there. I already felt so different, then I was forced to go to a school where everyone was different. And all I wanted to do was experience some normalcy.”
I think about my high school experience—the kids with their guarded, worn eyes. Wanting someone to notice you all the while praying no one does. The urgency to find likeness in your peers and knowing you never will. The desperate and clumsy attempts to dress, and speak, act and tolerate what is deemed acceptable. It was the most humiliating, desperately lonely four years of my life. And yet, had Judah’s body been whole, his legs undamaged by the tumor that stole his ability to walk, he would have stood tall, probably played football on the school’s team. Handsome and popular, he never would have been the kind of boy to exchange words with me. How lucky did that tumor make me? How blessed? To get to know a man like Judah Grant without the social barriers dictating our roles.
“You didn’t miss out on anything,” I tell him. “People are mostly just assholes in high school.”
Judah laughs. “Don’t swear in front of the baby,” he says.
“Sorry, Mo,” I say dutifully.
“Miles,” he corrects.
“Sorry, Miles,” I say. “Mo Miles, Mo Miles…”
All three of us are smiling. So rare, I think. But I am happy. I feel it all the way to my toes, even though yesterday I killed someone.
JUDAH KNOWS SOMETHING. I realize this one day as I am hanging clothes on hangers, and arranging them around the store, the musty smell filling my nostrils and making me feel sick. He’s been different with me ever since that afternoon with Mo. At first I told myself it was in my head—the assessing looks, the silence, the strange questions, but they come too frequently. He’s on to me. He’s been spending more and more time with his father. I don’t like the look of him, or maybe I’m jealous. He comes to get Judah, patiently lifting him into the passenger seat before carefully loading his wheelchair into the back. I wonder how he and Delaney met, as I watch him climb into the driver’s seat, his russet hair lifting in the wind. He isn’t the type to shoot the breeze and smoke a joint on someone’s front porch. He is a serious man; you can tell by the way he hardly smiles, the pristine condition in which he keeps his truck. Even the care with which he handles Judah’s wheelchair says something of the way he lives. Judah is like him. It is strange to realize that the boy I feel most connected to doesn’t really belong here. His only tie being Delaney, probably the only reason he hadn’t left. My eyes follow the truck and the boy out of Wessex, until they burn from brine.
I wait for him to come back, checking out the window, looking for his dad’s car. But he doesn’t come home until three days later, and he looks different. When I see him after that, he is distant. He locks eyes with strangers more than he does me. He peels the skin off oranges, and does not eat them. He picks up a joint and does not light it. He smiles at Mo, and it does not reach his eyes. Where has Judah gone?
At first, I wonder if it’s because of how much I’ve changed. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds. I’m not the girl he met in either shape or mental form. Perhaps my ability to make this change bothers him. While he is stuck in his wheelchair, I am free to walk off my weight. But, no. That’s not Judah. The fortune of others does not turn him melancholy. He doesn’t wish for what he cannot have. That’s what drew me to him in the first place. So I move on. When did it start? I think. When did he start pulling away?