A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe) (9 page)

Bernard’s on his hands and knees now, butt up in the air as he peers between the mattress and the bed frame. I’ve seen better sights. And even I can see from here that there is
absolutely
nothing
under that bed. I snuggle the still-squirming Olivia a little tighter to my chest, doing my best to channel my nonexistent calm to her, and tug up the front of my thermal a bit around her.

“Nah, man,” Bernard tells me, head still under the bed. “I’m no prisoner. I walked here of my own free will.”

“You
walked
here?” I squeak. At my chest, Olivia’s face twists into anger, and she starts screeching again. “
Shhhh
, baby,
shhhhhhh
,” I say. “It’s okay.”

Bernard finally pops up from the floor. “Yeah, it wasn’t really that big a deal to get here,” he says. He scans the room, absentmindedly rubbing the back of his right hand with his left palm. “All I had to do was bum a flight to Buenos Aires on a buddy’s prop jet, stow away on a tourist cruise to the coast here, then hike in from there. Only took thirteen days. It was a lovely journey. Majestic, and all that. I lost two toes to frostbite, but it was really invigorating.”

“Ummmm . . .”

“
There
it is!” Bernard cries suddenly, and he walks over to a shelf on the far wall. “Right where I left it. Who would’ve thunk?”

He reaches up and pulls a large, bound book off the shelf. “Oates is in the kitchen, you said?” he asks.

“Uh, yeah,” I say, still in a daze.

“Awesome.” And he heads to the door.

“So, wait, who
are
you?” I ask. “And what cause is Oates—”

I’m stopped by the pinch at my chest.
Shit
, I think. My thermal’s slipped down again, and this weird hippie has probably just gotten a full-on shot of my boobs.

But when I look down, the sight before me blots out everything else. Olivia has latched on. And she actually appears to be
eating
. All other thoughts fly right out of my head. Because, well, that should be impossible, shouldn’t it?

But, somehow, it’s not. I look down at my baby girl, feeding, and all at once, the anxiety drains right out of me. Watching her, knowing I’m doing something that billions of mothers have done before me, and feeling connected to my daughter for the first time in a real, primal way, I feel absolutely . . .

Calm.

Then I realize the dude is watching me. I’d be totally creeped out, but he’s wearing this goofy “circle-of-life” grin that has reduced the creep factor by, oh, at least fifteen percent.

“Motherhood, man,” he says. “What a trip.”

Yeah, I think, smiling to myself.

What a trip.

There are some things that suck no matter where you are. A consistency of suckitude, you might say. Washing dishes, for example, is a crap job no matter what hemisphere you’re in.

Except, of course, to the dumb butt who signed you up for the chore.

“Don’t worry, Elvs,” Cole tells me as he strolls into the kitchen, Olivia tucked under his arm like a football. I would be annoyed except that she’s actually
quiet
for a change. “This won’t take more than two seconds.” Cole tickles Olivia under the armpits, and she wriggles happily. “Will it, Wivvie? Tell Mommy that Daddy picked dishwashing for a weason.”

I bite my cheeks as I lift Livvie out of Cole’s arms, trying not to smile, but it’s no use. The two of them are just too cute together, and I’m a goner.

“Any trouble with the diaper change?” I ask. Last time Cole strapped the diaper on backward, which resulted in
some really unfortunate leakage on my only good shirt.

“Take a look and see for yourself,” he says, grinning. “O-Co and I made you something.”

I look at Cole curiously, and he reaches over to unbutton Olivia’s onesie. “Cole,” I say, suddenly not so smiley anymore. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

“You don’t like it?” Cole replies casually. “It took a long time to get it just right.” He hitches up Olivia’s onesie a little higher, so I can clearly see the message he has scrawled across her tummy in thick black marker.

I
♥
Momy!

“You’ve been
drawing on our child
?” I ask, sorta horrified, although, depressingly, I’m not all that surprised.

“Don’t worry, it’ll wash off,” Cole assures me. “The pen said ‘undoable ink.’ ”

I close my eyes.
“Cole,”
I breathe. “Do you mean ‘
indelible
ink’?”

“Maybe,” he says, tickling our baby under the armpits. She’s too young for giggles yet, but her eyes go wide with what can only be glee. “What’s the difference?”

“ ‘Indelible’ means ‘permanent,’ ” I tell him slowly. “And now our daughter’s messier than she was before.”

Cole pauses, as if to let the information sink in. But instead of sinking, it kind of slides off.

“Not to mention cuter,” he says. And he sticks his nose right up to Olivia’s. “Aren’t you, widdle Wivvie? Aren’t you so
cute
?”

“You spelled ‘mommy’ wrong,” is all I can muster.

Cole just shrugs. “It was the only way to fit the exclamation mark. Now, you ready to crack these dishes?”

“Sure,” I reply with a sigh. I resnap our daughter’s onesie, mentally adding “scour Olivia’s stomach” to my growing to-do list. It’s been two weeks since Alan and his cronies dumped us here in the Antarctic and then high-tailed it back to home base, so you’d think I’d’ve gotten used to these little Cole/Olivia hijinx by now—the poorly fastened diapers, the “spinning airplane” game that almost always results in Olivia barfing on
me
. . . . I’ve tried to impress upon Super Fun-Time Daddy that maybe
feeding
the baby would be slightly more helpful than making her puke, but so far this hasn’t seemed to click.

“Unless you wash dishes far better than you spell,” I tell Cole, tucking Olivia safely into her papoose at my chest, “we’re going to be here for
hours
.”

“Nah,” Cole argues. “I signed us up for dish duty on purpose.” He taps the side of his head like he’s extra proud of what’s inside, then straightens back up and turns to Clark, who has just walked in carrying a stack of dirty tin dishes half as tall as he is. “Where are the soap pods?” Cole asks.

Clark drops the dishes with a clatter into the sink and then hands Cole a seriously ripped-up blue sponge and points to a box of borax on the counter. Cole stares blankly at the sponge in his hands as if it were a dead rat he’s been told to brush his teeth with. “Welcome to the team, newbie,” Clark says good-heartedly, then pats Cole’s arm before turning and exiting the kitchen.

“Two seconds, huh?” I mutter, patting Olivia’s bottom. I run my eyes over the towering stack of dishes. Plates, mugs, forks. Not to mention the seriously grimy pots and pans still on the range.

Cole has the look of a man who just found out the Easter Bunny was guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs. “Are you kidding me?” he squeaks. “No soap pods? Whoever heard of washing dishes without soap pods?”

I reach over and flip on the faucet for him. “Water, good,” I say in my best Tarzan voice. I sprinkle some borax flakes into the sink. “Soap make bubbles. Scrub grease.”

From across the kitchen, Bernard lets out a low whistle. He and my father signed up this morning for lunch prep. That’s the thing about prison: the instant your crappy breakfast is over, it’s time to start making your crappy lunch. Right now the two of them are busy reconstituting dehydrated potato flakes and forming them into tots to be fried.

“You’re not in Kansas anymore, man,” Bernard calls over to Cole. He laughs into his bowl of tots, like this is the funniest thing a person has ever said.

Weirdly, my dad is giggling too. “Or Ardmore, for that matter,” he chimes in.

“Right on,” Bernard tells him. “If you ask me, we’ve got it made here.” He blows a wisp of his scraggly hair out of his face. “We’ve become slaves to technology, you know. Past time we broke free.
Be
the soap pod you want to see in the world, you know?” He and my dad exchange a meaningful nod, and then—I swear—they actually fist-bump.

Old people are so weird.

Yeah, Bernard and my dad have become something resembling friends in the last two weeks. They make for a weird duo—my father, the picture of control and reason, and Bernard, the scraggly, cardigan-wearing hippie. But I guess
it makes a strange sort of sense, since they’re the only two non-Almiri grown-ups here. My dad took an instant shine to Bernard, calling him “a walking reminder of an academia long since past.” (Personally, I’m more inclined to agree with Ducky’s description: “weird granola dude.”) But if Bernard offers my dad a pleasant distraction in the form of philosophical debates while they reconstitute their spuds, then who am I to complain?

The door swings open, and in marches Ducky, hauling a gray mop and a bucket of sudsy water. He grunts as he sloshes half the floor. “Careful if you go out there. It’s, like, wet.” He jerks his head back to indicate the scattered pools of water he’s left in his wake.

“Duck, I
told
you I’d help with that,” I say as he starts in on what appears to be a fairly lackluster mopping job. Since baby Olivia isn’t exactly the most useful shift buddy, there’s an odd number for chore partners, so Ducky is continually getting stuck scrubbing toilets and changing sheets by himself. I’ve been feeling more than a little guilty about always doing chores with Cole, so today I told Duck I’d give him a hand once I was free.

Ducky doesn’t look up, just continues to push murky water around with the mop. “You’ve got your hands full,” he tells me.

“Ducky, really, it’s not a problem, I don’t mind. Just give me ten—”

“I said I’ve
got
it,” he snaps.

I jerk my eyes to Cole, who’s so busy frowning at a mound of soap scum, he seems not to have noticed the tension in the room.

“Okay,” I say quietly. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Ducky replies.

I wonder what’s up
his
butt. All I tried to do was help. But, like Ducky said, I
do
have my hands full, and heaven knows I don’t need anything else to deal with.

“Hand me one of those sponges,” I tell Cole with a sigh. And we get to washing.

I guess you could say we’re settling into a sort of rhythm here at the bottom of the Earth, but it hasn’t been easy. The first couple days I found it very difficult to sleep—less because of the whole two-hours-of-darkness thing, and more because of the screaming-infant thing. Anyway, it’s mostly been wake up at 4:00 a.m.-ish, feed the baby, burp the baby, change the baby, fall back to sleep for thirty seconds, get woken up for breakfast, feed the baby while shoveling down my oatmeal, burp the baby, change the baby, chores, chores, baby poop, nap (not mine), more chores, more poop, and on and on until about 11:30 p.m., when I finally manage to zonk out. If I’m lucky, there’s, like, twenty minutes at the end of the day where I can just unwind. Good ole Cole has been doing his best to help . . . but, again, there are more helpful things he could be doing than dangling our baby upside down, despite his claims that “she’s into it.” I’m hopeful that someday one of his fatherly activities with Olivia will
not
result in spit-up, so that he can see for himself that such a thing is possible.

After an all-too-long bout of moping, Cole finally seems to have gotten into the swing of dishwashing. Turns out he’s not too bad at scrubbing when he puts his mind to it. He’s whipping out three clean plates to every one of mine. Maybe that’s
another advantage the Almiri have over us simple humans—exceptional scrubbing skills.

“Look at us,” Cole says, over the rush of the faucet. “Mom, dad, baby.” He nods at little Olivia, head tilted back in her carrier and her mouth open ever so slightly as she settles into a really good snooze. Cole kisses me on the neck as I scour a particularly stubborn bit of grease crusted onto one of the frying pans. “This is pretty great, huh?”

I know from firsthand experience that there are worse ways to spend a morning than cleaning breakfast dishes with a hot guy and the cutest baby girl who’s ever been created. Still, it’s not exactly the ideal situation, either.

“What are we going to do, Cole?” I ask softly.

“Do?” he repeats, as if the notion of doing anything besides living out our lives in the frozen tundra was completely foreign to him.

“Byron made it pretty clear that this was only a temporary stop for me and Olivia.” I keep my voice low, so as not to worry the others more than they probably already are. “And when they pull us out of here, who knows what . . .” I glance down at the sleeping creature on my chest. I can’t even bear to imagine
anything
happening to her. “And you,
you’re
here indefinitely, thanks to not being able to keep your junk in your pants. So, I say again, what are we gonna do about it?”

Slowly, Cole nods. “Yeah,” he agrees. “You’re right, we should have a plan.” He looks up at me and smiles. “You’re real smart, you know that, Elvs?”

“Well, ‘smart’ is a relative term,” I joke, trying to bring some lightness back into the conversation. “By the way, ‘relative’
means something that’s—hey!” I shriek, wiping the tiny bubbles off my lip. Cole laughs, hand tensed over the sudsy water like he’s going to splash me again. “Careful of the baby,” I warn him. “If you get suds in her eyes, I’m making
you
wash them out.”

“Eh.” Cole laughs, splashing me again. “O-Co could probably use a bath.”

“Dude,” I say. “I
told
you. O-Co is so not happening.” I’m almost regretting agreeing to give my little girl the middle name Colette in her daddy’s honor.

Splash!
“Okay, fine,” Cole says. He’s got suds on his eyebrow. “Liv-Lette, then.”

“That’s it,” I say, protecting Olivia’s face as I shoot her daddy with one seriously epic water bomb of my own. “I’m suing for sole custody.”