“Mel, it’s okay. Greg never hurt me. Not once. He never did a single thing that you would even call illegal.”
“What?” Mel asked, surprised. “I don’t understand.”
The girl got more comfortable in the seat, then looked at Mel for a long moment. “Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
Baby nodded, then said, “Well, then I suppose there’s no harm in telling you about him. Would you like to hear?”
Like to? No, not at all. Mel was full to the brim with hearing about the evils of the world. Did she need to? Yes.
“If you want to, but only if you want to. I don’t want to upset you or cause you harm.”
“No harm can come from Greg.” She paused, took a deep breath, then spoke. “Greg hated what he was. The first time I saw him, he was much younger than the picture and he was going to kill himself. I don’t know how he got referred to me, but I think I was his last hope. He never touched me like that. He didn’t need to. All he did was visit a few times a year and hold me, brush my hair, sometimes watch a movie. He just wanted to be close.”
Mel’s mouth twisted in disgust before she could stop herself. Baby noticed and said, “It sounds creepier than it was.”
“Okay.” It was all Mel could say.
“It healed him for a while. He could live. He told me it took away the veil that covered everything in the world and made all the children he saw into children again. I think that’s a good thing, don’t you?”
“No, no I don’t,” Mel responded, being honest.
Baby gave a short, quiet laugh that held no humor. “You would rather he killed himself.”
“If I’m honest, yes.”
“Well, unless I’m mistaken, he probably did. He was sad, but at his core, he was blue.”
Mel said nothing to that. It didn’t make sense. If he was sad, wasn’t that the same as blue?
Baby looked out at the dark world for a moment, her eyes roaming in thought. “Was it a few years ago? After a hurricane?”
Surprised, Mel said, “It was.”
“That makes sense.”
“Why?”
“Because of the hurricane. I know you don’t believe me, but I’ve been around a long time. I understand people, especially sad ones. I know I was booked with Greg during that trip, but normally, I didn’t travel with everyone. I was only transported for special clients, so I was supposed to meet up with them there for a day or two. No one risked me on a freeway. It got cancelled because of the hurricanes, but I never found out exactly why. Maybe it would have been too exposed or something. Either way, they never booked him again, so I figured.”
Aside from the horror of it all, the logistics also peaked Mel’s interest. “You were separate from the others? The ones in the RVs? But we found you with them.”
“Because I was scheduled for special clients. I met up with them the night before. Normally, I stayed in my house between clients. Well, I stayed in their house for me. It was kept secret, because sometimes clients get it into their heads they want to steal me. I requested to spend time at the RVs instead of a private accommodation. I told them I wanted to see other kids. They generally tried to make me happy.”
Mel was going to explode at some point. Either that or her blood would boil away into a misty steam.
“It doesn’t matter,” Baby said.
“It does matter, Baby. It matters a great deal. What happened to you was not your choice. It was not a public good. It was not some responsibility you owed. It was a crime. All of it, crimes of the worst sort. What he did was still terrible and not okay. Intention matters and you are not a sacrifice to the gods of impulse control. It matters. Baby, listen to me because this is important. You matter. You matter very, very much.”
Baby smiled at her, back to being the young girl she truly was. “You’re a good person, Mel. You really are.”
The porch light flashed on and off a few times on the group home. A moment later, a face appeared at the window. Baby sighed and said, “I think that means they want me to come in.”
No More Time for Dilly-Dally
“Oh my god! What are you eating?” Mel exclaimed, pressing a hand to her face against the smell. Instead of closing the door to the Captain’s office, she pumped the door back and forth to suck some of the smell out.
For his part, the Captain looked at the paper wrapped burger in his hands. “It’s from Harry’s. You love Harry’s burgers.”
Giving up on the door, Mel pinched her nose shut and said, “It smells like burnt hair and ass.”
Captain Mann and Paul exchanged a look over the desk, then a look of astonishment fell over Paul’s face and he blurted, “Mel, are you pregnant?”
That made the captain drop his burger onto his desk. His bushy eyebrows shot up so high they would have disappeared if he still possessed the hairline he’d once had. “Are you?” he asked, now equally astonished.
Mel was baffled. “What? No. Unless there’s a near-immaculate conception in the works, I’m not. Why would you ask that? Because he’s eating stinky food?”
Paul laughed. “Stinky? While we’ve been waiting for you, I’ve been sitting here drooling and watching him eat. I’m about to reach over and snatch it. It smells delicious. My sister got like that when she was pregnant, with everything smelling weird.” He pointed at her middle. “You sure you’re not?”
Mel crossed her arms, including her plastic cast, over her middle without thinking. “I’m sure. Good grief, you’re making me feel weird.”
Reluctantly, the Captain wrapped his burger and stuffed it into the bag. At Mel’s expression, he shoved the bag into a desk drawer and shut it firmly. “That
