Jarrod made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t go back to the girl. He spent the whole next day on roofs, adjusting satellites for better reception. He explained to housewives and shut-ins and blank, unemployed men how warm weather affected the satellites. He told them how when roofs got hot, the pads that the satellites sat on got soft. How the satellites shifted on the shingles and quit working the way they were meant to work. He spent the day listening to himself talk to people who didn’t care what he said, while he heard, in a far corner of his mind, the girl, squeaking like a mouse. Every so often, Jarrod could smell the smell of fruit punch in his nose. He’d just be sitting on a roof, sweating and thinking of the girl’s cold, dark room when all of sudden it was cherries, everywhere. It happened enough that by the time Jarrod got off work at six he couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t think of anything to do other than what he had promised himself he wouldn’t.
“You been swimming?” the girl asked when he showed up on the stoop. Her feet were still filthy, but this time her toes were painted the color of the sky. She had on the same shorts, it seemed, but another thin tank top, this one striped, that put her small breasts in jail.
“Might as well been,” Jarrod said. “The roofs out there are hot.”
“I imagine,” the girl said like she wasn’t imagining it at all. “Well, come on in. I was about to give up on you.”
Jarrod followed the girl inside the house and, on cue, the big dog with the cloudy eyes got up with some struggle and came over to Jarrod and nosed his crotch and thumped his tail against the wall.
“Oreo likes you more than he likes my roommate,” the girl said, kicking more things out of the way with her filthy feet. “Dogs can smell liars, you know. And that’s what his owner is—a big fat one.”
Jarrod kept quiet and followed the girl down the narrow hall. When she opened her bedroom door and the darkness and coldness and smell of fruit punch washed over him like a wave, Jarrod felt relieved. There was some part of him that had been afraid it would be different than the day before, but it was like a tape rewound and played again—a song he was starting to know the words to. Inside, the girl clicked on the first lamp on the dresser and Jarrod saw the TV wrapped in foil and the sloppy pink walls.
“Still a mess,” the girl said without apology. “Always will be.” Then she clicked off the first lamp and took Jarrod by the hand and led him over to the mattress and down they went as they had before. In the cold dark, the girl made the same noises as before and Jarrod breathed like he was being chased and when it was all over, the girl clicked on the little horse lamp by the mattress and brought her knees to her chest and poked her two crooked front teeth out over her bottom lip. After some time, she spoke.
“I’m gonna tell you something I never told anyone before, but I didn’t drop the Robinsons’ baby on accident. I let go of her on purpose.”
Jarrod squeezed his eyes shut until the black behind his eyes turned to violet. In his mind, he saw the horse from the horse lamp. He saw himself and the girl on the shiny orange horse and the girl’s arms were wrapped around his waist. Behind his tight eyes, he and the girl were riding under a white sky across a desert of white sand. The girl was pregnant. A baby—their baby—grew inside her and pushed against Jarrod’s back.
“I was just out there waist-deep in the ocean with the baby and I was holding her under the armpits and dipping her down into the water. And every time I went and dipped her down in the cold water, the baby’s face got all big and scared.” The girl paused to make a sound, and Jarrod guessed she was imitating the baby’s expression. “The way that baby made her face look just did something to me. It made me not like her. She just had this perfect world lined up for herself with her perfect mother and her perfect father and that face of hers just made me feel like the worst thing she was ever gonna know was cold water.” The girl sighed. “I didn’t like that. I knew she would grow up to be no good to anybody if her only trouble was cold water. So, I let go of her for a minute to see what would happen and she got away from me fast. The wave came and I let go and then she was gone.”
The girl didn’t say anything for a while. In Jarrod’s mind, the horse galloped across the white sand noiselessly and without effort. The desert was neither hot nor cold and the more Jarrod rode the horse toward the horizon, it occurred to him that they weren’t in the desert at all. They were at the bottom of the ocean—a drained one.
“The worst was when I had to turn around from where I was at to face the baby’s parents back on the beach. I just turned and held up my empty hands and before long the helicopters came and the lifeguards came and everybody lined up on the beach waiting like the queen was coming in on a boat.” The girl let a little whistle escape through her crooked teeth. “The baby’s mother was something else. She turned into a monster right then and there in front of everyone. She crawled back and forth on the sand like a dog. She even foamed at the mouth.”
The orange horse slowed to a trot and Jarrod got off and the girl stayed on and Jarrod grabbed the horse’s reins and brought the horse to a walk. He led the horse to a long, white dune, and at the top of it Jarrod and the girl looked out over the seafloor. There were bleached white skeletal shipwrecks and biplanes, there were white arching temple bones of blue whales, there were giant white conch shells and lost white shipping containers, tipped on their sides to spill white, flaking rubbish. There were old fishing masts like fossilized spines and anchors made of talc and off to the side there was the baby—a white plaster garden cherub covered in barnacles. Jarrod pointed to it and the girl nodded and Jarrod walked the horse out to the baby. When Jarrod got to it, he touched it with his toe and the baby crumbled into a pile of powder that the breeze picked up and scattered like ashes.
“Thank you,” the girl whispered.
Jarrod put his head against the girl’s warm stomach. She put her hand on the back of his head and ran her fingers through his hair.
“I’ve missed a lot of sleep thinking about what happened to that baby,” the girl said. “I’ve had me some terrible dreams. That the baby’s in a fishing net somewhere getting slapped by big silver fish. Or that it’s just bobbing around like a plastic doll. Sometimes I stay in the tub too long and my feet wrinkle up all soft and white and I imagine the baby maybe just melted away. Like tissue paper left out in the rain.”
Jarrod opened his eyes. He turned to look at the girl.
“There it is!” she said with a sudden smile. “I felt it take inside! I think we made a baby!” She hugged her knees closer and Jarrod reached out gentle to her face. “You don’t have to come back no more. We did what we set out to do.”
Jarrod felt something in him give way just as the sand on the dune had as the horse descended. A whole shelf of something broke loose in him and he couldn’t gather it back up. “We better make sure,” he said. “I’ll come back again.”
The girl let her knees down and turned off the horse lamp. “That ain’t necessary,” she said. “Now I’m going to take a nap and let the baby cook.”
“What’s your name?” Jarrod asked in the cold dark.
“Marie,” the girl said.
Then Jarrod rose and dressed in the darkness. He stood for a while in the cold room and listened to the girl breathe. Then he let himself out of the house.
That night, the moonlight came through Jarrod’s window as bright as sunlight. He couldn’t sleep, so he got up and found a hammer and some nails and nailed up a quilt over his window. But still, the light came in around the corners, so Jarrod rose a second time and found a roll of duct tape, and he taped the quilt to the wall as best he could, but still, the light found a way in through the quilt’s stitching. Jarrod lay on his back and squeezed his eyes closed. He and the girl were on the orange horse, but the horse had turned from a real horse back into a ceramic one and he and the girl were sliding, sliding off its slick back.