Pretty (29 page)

Underneath it stands a line of five cops with their guns drawn at me. Gathered in the doorway leading to the front room, I see Susan Schmidt and the social worker for the guys' side of Serenity talking to some plainclothes-looking guys. Behind them wait the paramedics.

One of the uniformed cops shouts at me, “Drop your weapon.” Then, “Put your hands where we can see them.” And all the rest of that shit.

I put Jake's gun on the ground and give it a little kick toward them with one bare toe.

Jake doesn't even put up a fight. Two large men carry him out through the aisle, limp-legged and sedated.

I follow them out and everyone files onto the sidewalk around me. Buck stands on one side of me and Violet stands on the other. Buck holds me gently by the elbow, as if to say fall and I'll catch you.

We watch as they load him into the back of the ambulance and drive off down the street. They don't turn on the lights. They don't turn on the sirens. They should have at least given him the lights.

I stand there watching until the red and white block of the ambulance is absorbed into the traffic on Brand Boulevard and I can't see it anymore. Everyone stands there with me and no one says anything until I turn around. I get this feeling that the baby is okay. And I'm okay. I haven't reached the edge of the continent with nowhere else to go.

Susan steps up and for some reason I don't want to punch her in the face.

“Would you like to come home now, Bebe?”

“Yes. I'd like to come home.”

Wispy pink clouds stretch across the fading blue of the twilight. How many more weeks do we have to wait before the days get longer? It's spring already, isn't it? I guess not, because it's still March. But almost. It's almost spring.

W
e drive over
the Golden Gate Bridge, with its red arches soaring over you making you dizzy, and up into the tortuous roads that wind through the impossible majesty of the Marin Headlands. If you know secret things then you know there's a turnoff where you can hike down a stairway cut into a red cliffside. The hike leads to a beach with black sand that looks like ground pepper and is so warm it makes your towel feel like an electric blanket. And you don't have to wear a thread of clothing if you don't want to and most people don't want to, it being San Francisco and all.

It's a glaring bright Indian summer. I stand at the edge of the ocean with only my feet in the cold, cold water, watching the rippling forever sky mirror. An ocean liner is a hazy toy floating in the distance. Gulls shift in circles overhead like flecks of white glass in a kaleidoscope. You can see a corner of the city across the bay like a fuzzy watercolor.

I imagine Jake plunging wildly through the waves, one after the other, shaking his head like a wet dog when he emerges, drops of water flying through the air and catching the light with tiny rainbows. I talk to him regularly and he's back at Serenity. He's doing better. He's managing.

Violet lies on a blanket in a long white dress, with a parasol, of course, to shade her pale skin from the sun. Buck runs in boxers and a tank top along the shore, chasing our mutt, Moses, throwing him a slimy tennis ball. Moses was hanging out around back our Mission flat one day underneath where the stairs are and Violet invited him to stay.

Me, I'm in a bikini and I'm round as a beach ball, every part of me stretched and swollen to its limit. I wear my legs bare mostly now, when it's that kind of day. People rarely even notice.

I tilt my face to the sun and run my scarred palms over the slope of my belly, which looks exactly like the hills rising behind the cliffs all around us. People smile at my belly all along the beach. People want to touch her all day long, this baby.

I think about sharks and starfish and how there's no ocean in Toledo. No ocean at all. I wonder how people live like that, trapped by all that land. I wade farther into the water, breathing faster with the cold, and then I fall backward and float for a moment and I'm weightless. I'm light.

My Jesus refrain is different now, transformed without my even thinking about it.