big scandal.”
“Yes.”
“But we got married, so hey, everything was cool. But I still didn’t tell anybody, because frankly, I was thinking about getting rid of it. I mean, I’m just too young to have a baby. Right?”
“Yes.”
“And the idea of Craig as a daddy, well, that just didn’t feel right. But I wasn’t throwing up or anything, felt great, so I just decided to wait a while and see how I felt. A baby might be kind of neat. They love you, right?”
A tear flowed down my other cheek.
“So, anyway, I began showing. Craig and Rory thought that was just amazing. Feeling the baby move. But I still thought about getting rid of it. Then the Granberrys showed up one night and told us they’d been thinking.”
“And?”
“Well, they said they really really wanted a baby and they couldn’t have one, and they had noticed I was gonna have one, and they wondered since we were kind of strapped for money, if we would consider letting them adopt the kid? That seemed like a great idea the more we thought about it, Rory and Craig and me, so I told them, sure. They paid for me to go to the midwife, one in the next county so no one from Corinth would see me, and they asked me not to go to town, because they didn’t want anyone telling the baby where he’d come from until they decided it was time. That seemed right to me, too, so I just hung out at the farm. It was boring, let me tell you!”
“I’m sure,” I murmured, feeling the hair on either side of my face grow damp as the tears flowed. The basement was lined with shelves and crowded with odds and ends. I saw that Regina had made a sort of nest for herself in one corner. There was an ancient easy chair, a lamp, and a board across two cement blocks that served as a table beside the chair. It was piled high with magazines. A mattress topped with a sleeping bag was pushed against the wall. There was a cubicle that I suspected hid a toilet and maybe a shower, close to the base of the stairs.
“Have you tried to escape yet?” I asked, interrupting Regina’s account of the onset of her labor. She sounded exactly like she was the only woman in the world who’d ever had a baby.
Regina gaped at me. “Are you kidding?” she asked incredulously. “As soon as Craig and Rory show up with the baby, Margaret’ll let me go. I’m just, like, a hostage! If I tried to escape, they might hurt me!”
Ah-oh. She didn’t know. If I could have felt worse, I would have. “What do you think happened in Lawrenceton?”
“See, I had the baby,” Regina said, and I sighed. She was not going to edit her adventures. “And when I saw him, I just thought I couldn’t give him up. And Craig got put in jail, so he couldn’t make me. I told Margaret and Luke I had to breastfeed for the first few days, that the midwife had told me so, but really I’d had the shot to dry my boobs up. I just said that so I could take him home with me. But I knew the Granberrys were dying for me to give him up; they’d been pestering me from the hour I had him.”
“So you ran?”
“Yeah, man, I just took off. I didn’t think that Craig and Rory would figure out where I’d gone. And I never thought they’d get out so quick. I mean, I missed them, Craig especially. But I couldn’t make up my mind. And I had really thought the Granberrys would be great for the baby, but then I began thinking Margaret was a little weird, and she could make Luke do anything. So maybe she wouldn’t be a good mother. And,” Regina’s voice lost its bounce, “I really loved the baby. I kind of wanted to keep him, even if we really needed the money. So one day when I knew the Granberrys had gone into the city for some art thing, I lit out.”
“The Granberrys had already paid you some?”
“Oh, yeah, they gave us half the cash when he was born. They were gonna give us the other half when we turned him over. I hid the money, except for some I took out for the trip.”
She’d hidden it in the crib mattress. Where Rory had found it.
“What about the legal part of it?”
“Margaret said she and Luke’d move as soon as the baby was old enough. She figured wherever she lived, no one would ask questions. She read a couple of books on how to get a birth certificate for him. You know you can get books that tell you how to do that? She was gonna change his name to Lucas. I just called him Hayden for my great-uncle on my father’s side. He was my favorite when I was a little girl.”
I thought about all this. Finally, I told Regina I was thirsty, and she jumped up to bring me some water in a plastic cup. There was a sink on the wall, stained and ugly and old, but functional. Regina slid a hand under my head so I could raise it enough to sip from the cup.
“What’s wrong with my head?” I asked, staving off the inevitable. Besides, I did want to know.
“I guess Luke hit you with the stock of his rifle. Margaret says you jumped him! That was kind of crazy, Aunt Roe.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Anyway, you have this big bruise and swollen place on your forehead, it goes up into your hair, and a little blood dried on your face. So, have you seen Craig? When’s he coming to get me? Did Rory get sick in Lawrenceton? He sure was acting awful funny.”
“What do you remember about that night?” Hard to believe it had only been five days.
Regina looked down at me doubtfully. She was sitting on the floor beside me now, the cup still in her hand. I became aware I was lying on yet another sleeping bag, and she was crouched on the cold concrete. Her black hair was a mass of tangles and her eyes were puffy.
“After you guys left to go to that dinner, I was in your house fixing up some supper, one of those Healthy Choice microwave meals you had in the freezer.”
I would have nodded if my neck wouldnt’ve snapped.
“Then I heard a car pull up, and I knew it wasn’t you because you guys were gonna be gone longer. So I look out, and it was a black kid. He was real polite, said a friend had brought him out to get his dad’s truck. I thought I saw something fall out of the back of the trailer as he was turning it around, but I didn’t tell him. I figured I’d go pick it up later. After he’d driven the truck out of your backyard, and the guy who’d given him a ride had followed him out of the driveway, Craig and Rory turned in. They came into the house with me, and we started fighting almost right away. I was mad. I’d left because I needed time to think, and here he was right on my tail.
“I began to get a little nervous, alone with the guys, them being so mad at me. Course Craig would never hurt me, but he was really furious, it was the worst fight we’d ever had.” Regina’s face softened. “He’s usually so sweet,” she said almost tenderly. “It was one reason I almost kept the baby.”
I had my serious doubts that Craig had been the baby’s father. In my secret brain compartment where I keep a lot of thoughts I want to hide from myself, I’d stored the idea that the baby looked much more like Rory. Rory’s baby picture, framed in his sister’s house, had been the spitting image of Hayden. “So Rory began feeling bad?” I asked weakly.
“Yeah, he was acting really strange. He said he was so sleepy he couldn’t stand up, and I told him to go lie on the couch. He said some blonde-haired woman, some older gal in a fancy car, had asked them to help her in the liquor store parking lot, and she gave them a couple of beers to say thank you, I think her car had gotten stuck in a dip or something, and they’d helped her rock it out. Rory thought there’d been something in the beer; he said when he got through there were some speckles in the bottom of the bottle.”
“So you went over to the garage apartment?”
“Yeah, actually, Craig and I…” And here Regina turned coy. In between quarrels, they’d wanted a passionate reunion, apparently.
“You took Hayden?”
“Yeah, sure, we couldn’t leave him in the house over there, with Rory out of it! On the way over, Craig picked up something from the yard. It was a hatchet, from the back of the guy’s pickup, and he put it on the steps so the guy would see it if he missed it and come back.”
That was where the hatchet had come from. One small question explained.
“So you took the baby over to the apartment.”
Regina turned a dull, unbecoming red. “He was asleep,” she said defensively. “We didn’t have time to put up that crib thing, so I laid him in his infant seat in the recline position.”
“Then?”
“Well, before things got… serious, you know… we heard
