first one foot and then the other to her father, holding on to her socks while he pulled off her boots. Inside, he unwrapped her from her layers while she craned round, staring at me. She clambered up onto the window seat and settled herself into a nest of soft toys, pulling a rubbery-looking giraffe onto her lap, and the end of its tail into her mouth. The wall above her head was covered with pictures in crayon, some wild, colored scribbles that had torn the paper, and some done by an adult for a child, of cats and houses, flowers and boats and birds. She kept watching me, no less suspiciously. She was beautifully and magically the image of her father: the same curly, slaty, blue-black hair, the intense gaze from strikingly clear blue eyes, long, fragile hands. The man, nursing his wrist, nodded to me to sit down, and as I took the place beside her, she raised her eyes and smiled at me. I looked away. She made me nervous, more nervous than he did. Her beauty was close to overwhelming, but it wasn’t so much her beauty as her physical, breathing existence that moved me. I was sitting close enough to reach and touch her hair, and a few hours ago I had been almost ready to rob myself of even that small gesture toward my own child.
“Hello,” I said, turning to her. “And what’s your name?”
“No names,” the man said. We both looked at him. “Better we have no names, okay?” he said, a little more gently.
The child poked one finger at her chest and said, “Anna.” She beamed at me and then pointed at her father. “Papa!”
There was a pause, and then Anna declared her name again, and then the man laughed and he shook his head. Anna and I laughed, too. I hesitated, and then I said, “And what’s Papa’s name?”
I saw at once I had made a mistake. There was another pause, tighter than before; the man looked suddenly terrified and angry enough to hit me. Then Anna stretched out her giraffe toward me and said carefully, “
He took the giraffe and waggled it at her, then thrust its head at her and cuddled it into her neck so it tickled. She tried to grab it, giggling and squealing.
“Okay, okay, Anna,” he said, letting it go and looking at her, and then at me. “Okay, so what? I’m Stefan.”
Whatever it was that had caused him to be so tense, his daughter released him from it as if she had let go of a bird trapped in her hands. She was sucking again on the fronded tail of the giraffe and staring at her father. She already knew something about adoration, but she didn’t have an inkling of her power. She didn’t understand that just the sight of her fingers flexing and pointing at a stranger’s face and her voice experimenting with a stranger’s name could do this. She made him believe that nothing else mattered, that he could handle anything. He sank down on the seat on the other side of the trailer, leaning gingerly on the table.
“You hurt your arm,” I said. “Let me see.”
When I asked him to make a circle with his wrist, he hissed with pain.
“Can you move your fingers?” I asked. “Can you bend your elbow?” He could, but when he tried to turn his forearm, the pain shot up and down between elbow and wrist. The redness of his hands had got worse since we came inside the trailer, and they were now mottled with blue, and he was shivering. He might have been quite ill; at the very least he was frozen, and probably shocked by the fall.
“You need a hot drink,” I said.
He wiped his uninjured hand across his face and didn’t reply. I got up and moved to one end of the trailer where there was a double gas burner. I filled a small saucepan with water from a plastic canister, lit the burner using a box of matches on a shelf, and set the pan on it. I opened cupboards and found grassy-smelling herbal tea bags of some kind. I decided that he needed sugar but there didn’t seem to be any, so when the water was poured, I stirred in some honey. As he drank, the trailer filled with balmy, hay-scented steam, like when the sun warms leaves and wildflowers after rain. The fumes reminded me of the kind of summer day almost impossible to imagine looking at his sore, pinched hands while, a few feet away outside the trailer, the air splintered with cold and the river ran past swollen by the wintery, dark flow of melted ice.
He saw me glance past him through the window. As if remembering what I was there for, he pushed his cup aside and looked at his watch.
He said, “There isn’t much time. Come outside. Anna, stay here a minute and be a good girl.”
He stepped down from the trailer; I followed. He was in a hurry now, but Anna scrambled after us to the door and wailed to be lifted down and kept near him. He got her boots on again and buttoned her into her coat.
We walked all around the car. He kicked at the tires and peered in the windows, and he tried all the doors and inspected the trunk. When he asked to see the engine, we had to fish out the manual and look up how to release the catch under the hood. I could tell he knew no more about car engines than I did.
When he’d finished looking, he said, quietly and without surprise, “Rental car. You steal it? You come to sell me a car that’s not yours?”
“I need some money, that’s all. You said no questions.” I turned away, pretending to cough, so he wouldn’t know that my voice trembled and my eyes were filling with tears.
“Okay, you didn’t steal it. You rent it. And this-” he tapped with his foot on the license plate-“this is the real number?”
“Yes.”
He blew out his cheeks. “Okay,” he said. “So. If you sell, you have to tell them car was stolen. Because you are a thief.”
“No. Yes. I know.”
“So if I buy, I need to change the plates, maybe change the color. So I pay less for car.”
“I need three thousand,” I said, without thinking. I was guessing; it sounded like enough to ask, enough to change Col’s mind.
“Maybe. Maybe not so much. It drives good? I need to drive it. If it drives good, I pay. No receipt, no documents.”
“How much?” I asked. “How do I know you’ve even got any money?”
He glanced at Anna, who was absorbed, digging a pebble out of the tread of one of the tires. Turning from her, he produced an envelope from inside his jacket. He drew out just enough for me to see the top edge of a wad of banknotes.
“I got money.” He stood watching my face as I tried to control another wave of tears. I had begun to tremble. I was horrified at myself, bartering a car that wasn’t mine for money to keep a baby. How flimsy it was proving to be, the border between the kind of person I was before this, whose life had never strayed off the path of the conventionally law-abiding, and the kind of person I was turning into; it was terrifying to learn how irresistible, how effortless was my descent. Could I have offered in mitigation of my wrongdoing the plea that I had no choice? Of course I had a choice. Having taken it upon myself to judge that the legal destruction of my baby was the greater and truly unacceptable wrong, I was choosing to break the law. But I was not acting out of principle in pursuit of a finer moral good. My reasons, circumstantial, quite possibly hormonal, were a clumsy, misshapen clump of love, need, fear, and in the end, self-interest. I was going about getting what I wanted.
“Okay, listen. You’re selling me rental car, you need money that bad. I need a car. For my wife. For a surprise, big surprise for her, big difference for her life.” He gave me a hard grin. “So, smart lady? You need the money, you owe it somebody?”
“I just need it. No questions.”
“Okay, right. No questions. We go now to drive car around. If car okay, we agree price, I pay.”
I shivered. “Okay.”
He went back inside the trailer and brought out a heap of bedding. He arranged it in a mound on the backseat, then lifted Anna on top of it and began to fiddle with the seat belt.
“That’s not very safe,” I said. “Small children are supposed to have those proper car seats when they go in cars.”
He clicked the seat belt in place and straightened. “Do I ask you for help? What can I do about it right now? You keep your mouth shut!”
Anna started to flail. “Jee-raff! Papa, Jee-raff!” she said and burst into tears. Stefan returned to the trailer and brought back her giraffe.
“You will get her a car seat, won’t you?” I didn’t care that I was making him angry. “You’ve got to get her a car seat so she’ll be safe.”
