her mother wouldn’t.
Or because it was what Jude and Johnny wanted. She looked at them, two pairs of blue eyes watching her as though she were an afterschool special.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded of them. “Don’t just sit there. I’m doing this for you.”
“What do you mean?” asked Di.
“She means,” said Johnny, standing up, “that I want this baby as much as she does.” He crossed the room, sneakers squeaking against the floor, and pressed a palm to Eliza’s belly. “Right?”
Her stomach fluttered. She could feel each of his fingertips through the layers of taffeta. No one but the ER doctor had touched her pregnant belly, and now, as if the baby had been awoken, she felt a tiny quiver again, like a goldfish swimming against the fishbowl of her belly.
But Johnny didn’t feel it. He was digging in his pocket for something, dropping to his knee, saying, “I’ve got a present for you, too.”
“Oh, mercy,” said her mother.
Annabel Lee was telling her something, but she didn’t know what it was.
“You can’t marry her. She’s sixteen years old! Not without parental consent.”
A tail-stroke, a wing-beat, a slither through the grass.
“I can in New Jersey,” said Johnny, opening the box.
The boyfriend’s boxer shorts were gone, his toothbrush, the glass pipe he kept cinched in a chamois sack at the bottom of the hamper, where he thought no one would look. His crossword puzzles were not in the basket in the master bath; his bottles of beer did not roll in the crisper. Whether these things had been fetched or discarded Neena did not know. She was not particularly sorry to see them go.
The morning after her birthday party, zipping an enormous cowhide suitcase on her bed, Eliza announced that she was leaving. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” her mother had instructed Neena before leaving the apartment herself an hour earlier, but when Eliza threw her arms, quite abruptly, around Neena’s neck, the woman did not feel she could hold her captive. Neena was not confident she could construct a sentence in English adequate to express her confusion, embarrassment, worry, and joy. With gratitude she had several times accepted the girl’s cocaine, which her son had traded a friend for a VCR, an interview suit, and a 1972 Dodge Coronet, but she did not know how to accept a good-bye hug.
Downtown Les was chasing a fly with a flyswatter when the buzzer buzzed. When he opened the door in his undershirt, Eliza was sitting on her suitcase, breathing heavily. “What are you doing, crazy woman? You carry that up the stairs?” Les dragged it through the kitchen and into the living room, where Eliza collapsed on the futon. Then he brought her a glass of water.
“Where’s Jude?” She gulped from her glass.
Les, standing, swatted at the drone that swept by his ear, his hangover indistinguishable from the insect that orbited his head. “Gone somewhere on his skateboard.” With his flyswatter, he indicated the suitcase. “What, are you moving in?”
“Not with you. I’m on my way to Johnny’s. I don’t think he’s home yet.” She placed her glass on the coffee table, lifted her necklace out of her collar, and gently bounced the charms in her hand. “I had to get out of there before my mom came back.”
Les turned the flyswatter on Eliza, fanning her. “Just so you know, it’s a terrible idea.”
“Moving in with Johnny?”
“Marrying him. Jude told me.”
A sticky strand of Eliza’s hair batted in the draft of the fan. “Papa, don’t preach,” she said. “You have any better ideas?”
“You can stay here with me. Sleep in the loft. Jude can sleep in the bathtub. When the baby’s born, we’ll sell it on the black market. I know a guy in Jersey City who can get ten thousand bucks for a white kid.”
“What if it’s not white?”
“Five,” said Les.
Eliza unzipped one side of the suitcase, slipped her hand in, and withdrew a chamois bag, which she tossed to Les. Les caught it against his chest. “She must have junked everything else last night. When I woke up this morning, she was gone.”
Les opened the drawstring and slid out the glass pipe. It was baby-shit brown marbled with streaks of green, squat as a mushroom and smooth as a stone. Not the prettiest thing, but she was reliable. Inside the bowl was an ancient bud, which he dug out like a booger and dropped on the carpet. “Harriet!” he said. “This old girl must be twenty-five years