someone with whom she could spend a lifetime. When Laura broke up with Daniel, she convinced herself she was doing both of them a favor. She did not mention the baby, although she had known all along she would keep it. Sometimes she'd find herself losing hours at a time, wondering if her child would have the same pale wolf-eyes as its father. She threw out her cigarettes and started wearing sweater sets again and driving with her seat belt fastened. She folded Daniel neatly away in her mind and pretended not to think about him.
A few months later, Laura came home to find Daniel waiting at her condo. He took one look at her maternity top and then, furious, grabbed her by her upper arms. “How could you not tell me about this?”
Laura panicked, wondering if she'd misinterpreted the jagged edge of his personality all along. What if he wasn't just wild, but truly dangerous? “I figured it was best if . . .”
“What were you going to tell the baby?” Daniel said. “About me?”
“I... hadn't gotten that far.”
Laura watched him carefully. Daniel had turned into someone she couldn't quite recognize. This wasn't just some Bad Boy out to kick the system - this was someone so deeply upset that he'd forgotten to cover the scars.
He sank down onto the front steps. “My mother told me that my dad died before I was born. But when I was eleven, the mail plane brought a letter addressed to me.” Daniel glanced up. “You don't get money from ghosts.”
Laura crouched down beside him.
“The postmarks were always different, but after that first letter he'd send cash every month. He never talked about why he wasn't here, with us. He'd talk about what the salt mountains looked like in Utah, or how cold the Mississippi River was when you stepped into it barefoot. He said that one day he'd take me to all those places, so I could see for myself,” Daniel said. “I waited for years, you know, and he never came to get me.” He turned to Laura. “My mother said she'd lied because she thought it would be easier to hear that my father was dead than to hear he hadn't wanted a family. I don't want our baby to have a father like that.”
“Daniel,” she confessed, “I'm not sure if I want our baby to have a father like you.”
He reared back, as if he'd been slapped. Slowly, he got to his feet and walked away.
Laura spent the next week crying. Then one morning, when she went out to get the newspaper, she found Daniel asleep on the front steps of her condo. He stood up, and she could not stop staring: His shoulder-length hair had been cut military-short; he was wearing khaki pants and a blue oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He held out a stub of paper. “It's the check I just deposited,” Daniel explained. “I got a job working at Atomic Comics. They gave me a week's salary in advance.” Laura listened, her resolve cracking wide open. What if she was not the only one who had been fascinated by a personality different from her own? What if all the time that she'd been absorbing Daniel's wildness, he'd been looking to her for redemption?
What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?
“I don't have enough cash yet,” Daniel continued, “but when I do, I'm going to take art courses at the community college.” He reached for Laura, so that their child was balanced between them.
“Please,” he whispered. “What if that baby's the best part of me?”
“You don't want to do this,” Laura said, even as she moved closer to him. “You'll hate me one day, for ruining your life.”
“My life was ruined a long time ago,” Daniel said. “And I'll never hate you.”
They got married at the city hall, and Daniel was completely true to his word. He quit smoking and drinking, cold turkey. He came to every OB appointment. Four months later, when Trixie was born, he doted over her as if she were made of sunlight. While Laura taught undergrads during the day, Daniel played with Trixie in the park an at the zoo. At night, he took classes and began doing freelance graphic art, before working for Marvel. He followed Laura from a teaching position in San Diego to one at Marquette to the current one in Maine. He had dinner waiting when she came home from lecturing; he stuffed caricatures of Trixie as SuperBaby in the pockets of her briefcase; he never forgot her birthday. He was, in fact, so perfect that she wondered if the wild in Daniel had only been an act to attract her. But then she would remember the strangest things out of the blue: a night when Daniel had bitten her so hard during sex he'd drawn blood; the sound of him fighting off imaginary enemies in the thick of a nightmare; the time he had tattooed Laura's body with Magic Markers - snakes and hydras down her arms, a demon in flight at the small of her back. A few years ago, wistful, she had gone so far as to bring one of his inking pens to bed. “You know how hard it is to get that stuff off your skin?” Daniel had said, and that was the end of that.
Laura knew she had no right to complain. There were women in this world whose husbands beat them, who cried themselves to sleep
because their spouses were alcoholics or gamblers. There were men in this world whose partners had said “I love you” fewer times in a lifetime than Daniel would in a week. Laura could shift
the blame any old way she liked, but the stiff wind of truth would
send it back to her: She hadn't ruined Daniel's life by asking him to
change. She had ruined her own.
* * *
Mike Bartholemew glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was still running.
“She was all over me,” Moss Minton said. “Putting her hands in my hair, lap dancing, that kind of stuff.”
The kid had come down willingly, at Mike's request, to talk. But less than five minutes into the conversation, it was clear that anything that came out of Moss's mouth was going to be unduly colored allegiance to Jason Underhill.
“I don't know how to say this without sounding like a total jerk,” Moss said, “but Trixie was asking for it.” Bartholemew leaned back in his chair. “You know this for a fact.”
“Well... yeah.”
“Did you have intercourse with Trixie that night?”
